Haven’t you heard? Everyone is lifting now. Men have traded their gaming setups for home gyms; they’re working on their delts and their pecs; they’re bulk ordering protein bars and beetroot powder; they’re setting new PRs in the weight room every single day. Some of them are even listening to podcasts about Marcus Aurelius and Julius Caesar, men who understood the importance of making yourself strong in a world of weaklings.
This is necessary, according to some male influencers, because modern life makes people weak. Harold, an English professor and the protagonist of Jordan Castro’s new novel, Muscle Man, would certainly agree. He’s felt off ever since he arrived at Shepherd, the liberal-arts college where he works—and which he finds eerily oppressive. His co-workers’ ideas are as flabby to him as their bodies; the students cling to their safe spaces and marginalized identities; the academic buildings inspire dread. Working out offers proactive health care for Harold. During a good lift, “the blood pumping through his muscles created a kind of inner motion that protected him from the usual stagnant, cyclical sensations the college unusually instilled.”
Without the gym, he’d be a mess. Well, more of a mess. Harold’s muscles are growing, but he is mentally fragile—a classic neurotic. In one representative sequence from Muscle Man, he spends nearly 14 pages preparing for an interaction with an approaching colleague by running through all of the reasons they don’t get along, only for her to veer off into a different room. Neurosis is Castro’s specialty: His debut novel, The Novelist, closely tracked an aspiring author as he went through his writing routine (but ended up, as sometimes happens, wasting a bunch of time on Twitter). Neither of Castro’s novels has much in the way of a plot; the narrative propulsion comes instead from his protagonists’ relentless internal chronicling.
Although Harold is not literary fiction’s first obsessive ruminator, what makes Muscle Man feel so plugged into the moment is how common the predicament feels. Many people seem to dwell in politically siloed subcultures (red states, blue cities, suburban group chats, neighborhood-watch forums) that drive them to misanthropy, doomscrolling, and, yes, neurosis. Castro’s talent lies in meticulously creating a realistic—and entertaining—portrait of one man’s compulsions, bringing individual texture to a curious social phenomenon.
His books are satirical, poking light fun at the narrators and their beliefs, but also firmly empathetic. Harold is strange: not good with small talk, persistently paranoid, maybe even a little reactionary. But he’s also earnest, and intelligent, and searching for authentic connection; his preoccupations have developed in reaction to a milieu that has flattened his natural personality. The paranoid crank is not necessarily a hateful person, in Castro’s rendering—just someone who’s been set adrift from the world around him and who latches onto whatever might make him feel whole.
Harold belongs to a recognizable genre of social skeptic who has popped up in the past few years. He’s worried about how seed oils are changing his DNA; he uses cuck unironically to describe other men; he’s contemptuous of identity politics; he’s fixated on the idea that world-historical great men are stifled by the mediocre. Although the book is set in an unnamed year, Harold easily tracks as the type of male voter who has recently drifted toward the political right, animated by suspicions that modern liberalism has forgotten about people like him. Two of the book’s most common phrases are he thought and Harold thought, as Castro illustrates the character’s many, many grievances about how people are today and what the country is becoming. Sometimes, Harold even thinks in the form of a podcast that he imagines hosting, lecturing to a grateful and credulous, if invisible, audience.
These observations and beliefs aren’t fueled by pure ideology or radicalized online spaces, nor do his conclusions flow exclusively from clear, considered principles. Instead, Harold’s complaints, as Castro lays them out, are more directly inspired by Shepherd: the students who clog up the hallways, the department heads who send too many emails, the building layouts that make no sense. Muscle Man goes even further by showing how Harold is really irritated by just a few specific people—and in those specific people, he finds enough fault to project onto society as a whole.
Consider the colleague whom he dreads encountering in a meeting room: Dolly, a born-and-raised southerner. The first time they met, Harold made a remark that Dolly interpreted as an insult. Since then, she’s treated him coolly, even as he’s attempted to befriend her in good faith. From this one bad relationship with a co-worker, Harold generalizes the notion that people no longer know how to connect with one another (“In our disparate and degraded culture,” he thinks, pretentiously). People such as Dolly, he concludes, perform their identity “so thinly and obnoxiously” that they inspire more bigotry, because they’re so personally unlikeable. He starts to think that all southerners are secretly ashamed of their identity; that some southerners, such as Dolly, actively want to destroy southern culture; that the American dream is changing and possibly dead. All of this because one person gave him the cold shoulder. “Harold was now grateful for Dolly’s imminent appearance—he felt productive,” Castro writes in the middle of his protagonist’s rant. “This was the most important work he’d done all week.”
The choice of setting is crucial. Much has been made, in the past few years, of how American universities are a breeding ground of stuffy, liberal catechisms, and some critics have come to believe that everyone and everything is so “woke” that the Trump administration has no choice but to bring these institutions to heel. What Castro depicts, in pointillist satire, is the way someone on the inside might come to agree. The English department at a small liberal-arts school is far from a perfect microcosm of society, yet Harold is convinced that he understands the ways of the world just because of how he does—and doesn’t—fit into Shepherd. Within this context, Harold, in desperate need of a friend, falls under the sway of Casey, a colleague who introduces him to the weight-lifting lifestyle and, eventually, a reactionary mindset. Much of Muscle Man really is plotless—Harold steals a student’s backpack, goes to a department meeting, then fits in a workout—but Casey is a common thread, as Harold often obsesses about securing his approval.
Muscle Man is a lot of fun, though, and not just a political parable, because of Castro’s granular depiction of consciousness. As Castro layers thoughts and reactions into a mesmerizing rhythm, Harold is made real. He is so often paralyzed by his surroundings that he falls into a wordless stupor, and instead of producing an eloquent response to a situation, the most he can muster is a dopey “Ffff.” At one point, his inner monologue nearly induces him to reach out to pet a co-worker, David, in the middle of their conversation. Harold is so clearly not a great man that his pretenses feel more like cries for help. He spends much of the book fantasizing about confrontation, but what he really needs is a hug.
You get it, though. Harold remembers arriving at Shepherd as an idealistic young man, ready to shape developing minds and make grand intellectual contributions. “Academia promised a glimmering future, one in which worldly concerns were secondary to the pursuit of what he then viewed as higher ambitions,” Castro writes. Instead, those ambitions have been stifled—partly because the university is a fussy place and partly because Harold is just too weird to fit in. People such as Dolly and David are more well adjusted in that they understand how to navigate a place like Shepherd, whereas Harold is the odd man out.
In this, Castro not only gestures at the social crisis that’s driving so many men toward radical ideas but also helps explain its causes and repercussions. When developments in the plot pull Harold back toward the institutional center, Castro suggests this is a sell-out move. The reader might infer that Harold doesn’t really need the validation of his peers, and should instead hold his ground. Sometimes, the narration slyly mimics Harold’s own “thought-talking” by giving over to an uninterrupted spiel about how literature works or how men interact with one another. Perhaps this is Castro putting his thumb on the scale and more directly inserting his own perspective for the reader’s benefit, transforming Harold from an object of satire into the author’s own Haroldian vision: a generalized projection of specific neuroses.
Trying to pin down what a novelist actually believes is a sure way to get trapped in a labyrinth of misreadings and fallacies. Nevertheless, I should note that Castro is the deputy director of the Cluny Institute, a Catholic think tank whose mission statement critiques the “nihilistic, materialistic, consumeristic, and ultimately sterile foundations” of modern society and advocates for “the primacy of the spiritual.” Also, he is devoted to working out. Early in the novel, Harold points out that authors are constantly looking for ways to bury their true beliefs in their text, rather than state them outright. In this scenario, the reader might be Harold, and Castro might be Casey. I didn’t finish Muscle Man and conclude that the university system needs an overhaul, or that the “woke mind virus” must be defeated at the ballot box. But I admit that I was perhaps a little more curious about the rejuvenating effects of lifting, and amenable to the idea that becoming strong is a way to repel the banal degradations of life. If nothing else, at least I’d be jacked.
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