I recently spoke with novelist Jordan Castro about his new book Muscle Man from Catapult/Penguin. Castro's 2022 debut The Novelist (which I haven’t read, so I’m relying on quotes from elsewhere to do the work here) established him as "a brutally funny observer of literary ambition and daily tedium." It also occasioned some capital-D Discourse, which (as with all of the Discourse) I vibed and felt rather than read. But I did read Muscle Man, because it was as if the novel had been written exactly for an ex-academic like me (it wasn’t, but isn’t it pretty to think so?), and now must tell the rest of you that it’s excellent.
Read on (or listen) to learn more!
From Rants to Novel
Castro started Muscle Man before The Novelist even came out, with the book emerging from years of typing angry observations into his notes app. "The novel has a lot of sort of tangents and rants about academia and about other things," he said. "I was just typing in these sorts of rants."
The book's genesis traces back to a Gothic novel class Castro took as an adult returning to undergrad. Given the choice between a paper or creative project for the final, he wrote what became Muscle Man's opening. He then spent four years wrestling with the manuscript, often beating his head against the wall for six or seven hours at a time.
A Single Afternoon's Paranoia
The novel follows Harold, an untenured literature professor, through one claustrophobic day at Shepherd College. He steals a student's backpack, attends a department meeting about "white supremacy culture," lifts weights at Hill's Health World (where he fantasizes about launching a YouTube channel that would be called "English Lifterature"), then returns to campus where he learns he's not in trouble for the theft of the backpack. Instead, administrators want him to denounce his friend and colleague Casey for causing "harm" in the classroom.
The reading experience was similar to Nicholson Baker's equally-compressed The Mezzanine, though the content differs completely. "The editing and the writing of the novel, that's what I was mainly concerned with," Castro explained. "Thinking about the rhythm of the sentences, thinking about the way that the novel is structured, but then also trying to make it hit as if it is a thriller."
The backpack theft happens without clear motive. Harold just sees something glinting and takes it. "People do weird shit like this all the time, and they can't explain it," I pointed out, mentioning a friend in Canada who shoplifts for the love of the game. Castro agreed: "This is the great misunderstanding about crime. It's that people do it for logical, needs-based reasons. A lot of the time, you do stuff to hurt others, or to take from others, because you get some sort of sick pleasure from it."
The Academic Meat Grinder
Castro hasn't spent vast amounts of time in academia himself. No advanced degrees, never worked in a university until recently when he joined Luke Burgis at the Cluny Institute. But the book nails academic culture with uncanny precision.
When I mentioned how the ending shocked me with its realism, Castro was game to discuss spoilers: "It's already weird enough to talk about a book that people presumably haven't read."
The climax sees Harold helping administrators build a case against Casey, the colleague who brought him to the gym and serves as his only real friend. Harold enters the meeting paranoid about the stolen backpack but discovers they instead want to discuss Casey's teaching. His loyalty to Casey evaporates instantly. "His animosity toward [the administrators] faded, replaced by unexpected resentment toward Casey," Castro writes.
I told Castro about serving on a hiring committee and watching something similar happen to a job candidate in 2013. One of the most qualified legal historians of his generation got rejected and whisper-campaigned against for saying a few off-putting things and remains an adjunct twelve years later.
"That's exactly the right thing for all those people that got him to have done," I said. "Not the right thing, like, you and I would dislike them. That's a crummy thing to do, but if you are an academic, the denunciation is the point."
Too Many Writers, Not Enough Judgment
At a University of Chicago conference about literary criticism's future, Castro asked academics to guess how many English literature master's degrees were awarded in 2022. Some prominent guessed 400. The actual number: roughly 10,000 MAs, 3,000 creative writing degrees, and 1,500 PhDs.
"There's probably only going to be a handful of actually good writers," Castro said. "Where do you put those people? You try and plop them into a classroom somewhere."
This connects to what Castro's friend Michael Clune argues in A Defense of Judgment. "Your average humanities professor today would be uncomfortable saying reading Henry James is better than watching The Apprentice," Castro explained.
The refusal to make aesthetic judgments hasn't eliminated judgment entirely. "They're still making moral judgments," Castro said. "But the problem is that they're not uniquely qualified to make moral judgments. In fact, if you know anything about literature professors or history professors, they're among the least qualified in matters of morality."
Barnes & Noble's Revenge
We veered into bookstore talk. Castro described walking into an indie bookstore in DC: "First of all, you encounter immediately a shelf of just witch stuff. Then you go a little further on, and then it's socks that say 'me want pizza' and 'girl pussy.'"1
Meanwhile Barnes & Noble redesigned their stores to look like indie bookstores but laden with actual books. "They don't have any of those socks," Castro said. "It looks like McNally Jackson, to be honest."
The indie bookstores created their own obsolescence by all converging on the same pastel-covered, marketing-category-checkbox inventory. Barnes & Noble studied what they were doing and built a better version.
The Work Itself
Castro doesn't buy into writerly entitlement. He saw a post recently claiming writers fail because people won't pay them, expecting free content. "There's this weird attitude of entitlement among writers," he said. "I don't think anyone owes me anything."
He believes that when you "really lock in and try and make the best thing," readers respond. In the past week alone, he'd talked to multiple people with rich readings of Muscle Man. "If you give people something to grapple with and actually contend with and think about, they're happy to do it."
This cuts against the all-too-prevalent Substacker discourse about falling numbers and declining subscriptions. "If you don't want to go crazy, and you want to be happy with what you do, you should be doing what you like," I suggested. "Writing versus preparing to write, or the writing politics, or tracking advances."
Castro grew up in Ohio, removed from neurotic literary circles. "I've always kind of been one foot in, one foot out of these zones, and I think I've been protected from a lot of those excesses because of that."
Is College Worth $200 Per Lecture?
I broke down for Castro what college actually costs students per class session at a state university: about $200. Would you pay that to see Elton John tickle the ivories? Sure. But to watch an adjunct mumble through a worksheet?
"These kids are getting robbed," Castro said. Between 1984 and 2012, American universities added vast legions of administrators. The poor adjunct teaching the class might make $3,000 for the whole semester while students pay thousands per seat.
One professor Castro knew would quiver when saying words like "hegemonic" and "Walter Benjamin." "We called him the 'cummer,'" Castro said. The gap between universities' self-conception as institutions of knowledge and their granular daily reality produces endless absurdist material.
The Muscle Man Title
"When it came to me, I knew it was a banger," Castro said about the title. People always smiled when he mentioned it. Some readers will expect 800 pages on American fitness culture and get a compressed campus thriller instead.
The book launches September 11th ("I know, an important date"). Castro's doing events through November, uncertain how the public will respond to the plot or what they'll make of Harold's final betrayal.
"I really have zero sense of how this thing is gonna work," he admitted.
Follow Jordan Castro on Twitter and preorder Muscle Man from Penguin.
Of late, I’ve seen "bussy fever," "smol bean," and "fur mother." Whatever sells into the marketplace of ideas, am I right?
