Cuck-Coded Zarathustra

Muscle Man by Jordan Castro. Catapult Books, 272 pages. 2025.

Cracking open Muscle Man, the sophomore novel by Jordan Castro, it is hard not to recall a passage in his debut, The Novelist, in which his narrator remarks, after opening a draft of his own book on his laptop, “I read the first few sentences while sipping coffee. They were completely fucking terrible. The sentences didn’t follow one another, they didn’t sound good, and they weren’t interesting.” The reader’s first impression is of an overwritten not-quite-rightness: a staircase seems to swing “as if suspended from the ceiling by thick chains”; at the same time, it is “monstrously rooted in the floor.” Halls unfurl like tentacles—can something rectilinear unfurl? A long description of furniture fails to quite gel: it is of “many different kinds” and “from many different time periods and many different parts of the world,” but most of it is “created by a single company,” and being ten years old, it is somehow an “old-new simulacrum of something even older.”

The space is a hall called Lawes at a university called Shepherd College, where an English professor, Harold, is hungry. It is early March, and he is at the end of his bulking phase, weighing 195 pounds, “abs still somewhat visible,” up from 173 in the fall, when he was “shredded, around 7 or 8 percent bodyfat.” Harold has a meeting. He hates meetings. He hates waiting for meetings. He hates his colleagues. He hates his job. He hates more or less everything, as he will detail in a long sequence of unfunny and semi-coherent rants, except weightlifting, looking at weightlifting memes on his phone, and a fellow professor named Casey, who turned him on to weightlifting.

Castro is a beneficiary of what one might call normal privilege, as someone who does things millions of others do in a literary milieu where they are deemed exotic. Like 62 percent of Americans and one third of the world’s inhabitants, he is a Christian, as few articles on him fail to note, treating this humdrum detail as a striking rarity. He lifts weights, which sufficed to land him an article in Harper’s—much of it recycled from or recycled into Muscle Man—that treats the subject with alternating come-down-from-the-mountain solemnity and a high school P.E. teacher’s parochialism:

I will stick to “lifting” to describe what is in reality several types of exercise, each with its own distinct methods and goals, but with enough in common to be comfortably grouped together. Each involves moving one’s body against some kind of resistance (weights, exercise bands, bars, the floor), with the intention of changing one’s body (usually to become stronger, leaner, or both).

It’s not his fault that this is what others home in on, but it’s not not his fault, either. His ratio of performance to production is quite high, with the articles, interviews, profiles, and podcast appearances lying heavier in the scale than the writing itself, and in all of them, he consciously sculpts the Jordan Castro persona: ex-junkie from Ohio, friend and protégé of author Tao Lin (“Tao is like Gucci Mane, and I’m Waka Flocka Flame,” he told the Wall Street Journal), friend and protégé of deceased independent publisher Giancarlo DiTrapano, lover of Jesus, husband of novelist Nicolette Polek, guy who can quarter-squat four plates, and so on . . .

None of this would have the least relevance if the work itself were good, but both Muscle Man and its predecessor have the awkwardness of extended improvisations in the wrong key. In the bravura passage in The Novelist, the unnamed narrator takes a shit while playing with his phone. Moving from “I farted, which startled me” to “To my delight, I had finished pooping,” it crests with the ecstatic and longed-for moment of the immaculate wipe, on which he has meditated extensively in earlier pages: “The toilet paper was clean!” Muscle Man, in the meanwhile, bounces between minute descriptions of irrelevant events, vituperative screeds against university colleagues that fall flat because we don’t know enough about them to care, essayoid digressions modeled on Thomas Bernhard, and onomatopoetic exclamations (“Ffffff,” “Rrr”), part sound, part fury, but signifying nothing.

The initial—let us not say drama, but the wedge placed where drama should be—is provided by a student’s black backpack, which Harold picks up because he sees something gleaming in the front pocket. We know it’s a knife right away, when Harold imagines himself as a hero, stabbed to death while saving a crowd of students, yet Castro maintains for a hundred pages the pretense that Harold isn’t sure what the object is, wants to know, but can’t be bothered to look. Throughout, the word backpack appears dozens of times, as Harold looks at it, fondles it, taps it with his foot. No reason is given for his wanting it—indeed, he fulminates about his hatred of backpacks, which are “unseemly,” “unmanly,” and “frankly obscene”—but Castro can find no better pretext for Harold’s paranoia, and we are stuck with it to the bitter end.

Quite early, there are grunts of opposition to campus progressivism. Crimes have occurred on school grounds—pranks, “violent outbursts,” a student masturbating on a bench—but the administration refuses to describe them as such, preferring to speak of “opportunities to get inspired to consider new ways of thinking about how we might better relate to and understand one another.” When Harold examines a poster for a “FAITH GROUP FOR MARGINALIZED IDENTITIES,” he asks himself, “Marginalized identities . . . Like ‘lifter’?” His fellow professors give their students permission to skip a lecture by a writer whose recent interview was “not sufficiently disapproving of the president.” A member of a student group, Equity For All, which argues that new security measures will “disproportionately affect people of color,” asks a Mexican technician installing a camera would she “find white underneath” if he were to peel off his skin.

Harold is tense as he awaits the appearance of his colleague Dolly, who he fears might ask him about the backpack. Dolly has already been mentioned contemptuously in tandem with another professor, Vance, in a passage exemplary of Castro’s propensity for saying nothing in as many words possible:

Harold usually said “Vance” while talking to Vance, and “Dolly” while talking to Dolly, but he could, he thought twitchily, just as easily say “Vance” when talking to Dolly, or “Dolly” when talking to Vance, and no one would notice. In fact, Harold had, on occasion, yelled “Vance” in order to get Dolly’s attention or “Dolly” to get Vance’s attention, and in every single instance they had turned around. In conversations with other colleagues, Harold would sometimes say “Vance” to mean Dolly, or “Dolly” to mean Vance, and his colleagues’ eyes would not so much as blink.

Dolly is from the South, and she and Harold don’t quite get along. A misunderstanding over a question about the weather has trapped Harold in “a perpetual, strategic conversation-dance to which he did not know the moves.” After denouncing Dolly as an “identity performer” playing the part of the Southerner, Harold imagines himself on a podcast giving his own opinions about the American South. TL;DR: the South dealt with the loss of the Civil War by clinging to outdated traditions, and would always be evil to the North because it had defended slavery; the Southern character is a mixture of pride and guilt, but the Southern landscape is beautiful, and at least the South doesn’t hate tradition like the North. Harold’s “thought-talk,” as he calls it, feeds his disdain for Dolly, who boasts of growing up in the South and loving it, though she “has none of the same beliefs as the people she grew up with, none of the same ideas or respect for tradition . . . she did not vote for their president and she does not worship their god.”

Harold’s thinking is the same Rorschach-blob diminution of Nietzsche that animates influencers like Bronze Age Pervert and Curtis Yarvin and thrives among the entitled inceldom online. He has written a dissertation about the resentment of the mediocre masses, and how it tears down those men who “dared to envision new possibilities, to go out and take what was theirs.” He’s even published a novel “about the myth of the exceptional man against society.” To his dismay, critics praise it as a satire of the reactionary right, and he castigates himself for possibly relishing “the approval of the bugs he told himself he wanted to squish beneath his boot.”

The day gets worse and worse, and more and more stuffing goes into the text—in one excruciating, multipage caper, Harold investigates the origin of a buzzing sound in a hallway, eventually concluding that it is the screams of the college’s “victims” absorbed by the walls themselves. At last, he drives to the gym. Once there, he peeks into the backpack, stuffs its contents under the passenger seat, toys with a so-called “damask paper knife” he finds inside, and refills it with his gym clothes. (What readers are meant to take from this I cannot say, but as it is one of the few persistent motifs in the book, I note it here for those more perspicuous than I.) There is some bad lifting advice, an appreciation of another man’s glutes, a bit of carping about how his fellow professors wouldn’t even know where to put the dumbbells in the rack. The specifics of the workout take up a bare few sentences; most of the section recaps fitness memes and videos Harold watches on his phone in the sauna. He corrects (for whose benefit?) the “pernicious misconception” that jacked dudes are arrogant and vain: “men with stacked and succulent muscles and a low body fat percentage were the most humble people in the world.” Lifters are also holders of “superior knowledge,” choosing a pain that yields growth, opting for the “propagation and enhancement of life.”

I sort of hoped at this point for a trans-women-in-ladies’-bathrooms screed, or something about why it is that white guys can’t say the n-word. But the best we get is Harold’s discomfort around a series of viral videos in which women accuse often innocent men of gawking at them at the gym. Online commenters have mostly taken the men’s side, but Harold knows, if he were caught on camera, his colleagues and students wouldn’t stand up for him. It’s sad Castro doesn’t go full reactionary: it would have made for a more believable book, and probably a funnier one. If Muscle Man was never going to be all things to all people, it might as well have been something to someone; instead, it thumbs its nose at wokeness while giving the right-curious too little to chew on, and spurns character development, the objective correlative, and anything else that might have made of it a novel with proper heft.

As the book draws toward its conclusion, the backpack’s importance fades and Casey’s gains prominence: Harold looks around for Casey, awaits a text from Casey, envisions Casey dead and mangled, imagines himself as Casey, wonders why he can’t be like Casey. He has described Casey as his intellectual peer, the one person at the school who understands him; when he gets a call asking him to head back to campus for another meeting, which he fears will be because he’s been seen on camera stealing the backpack, he is relieved to learn that Casey has been accused of “causing harm” to students by assigning certain unnamed texts. Harold turns on him; no wherefore is presented, but Castro seems to have thought this would be interesting, and it’s true that ten pages from the end, it is time for something of import to happen. Harold recognizes that “he hated Casey,” that Casey’s advice to him was bad, and already we can hear the needle drop into the groove for one last nugatory tirade:

Casey had been a corrupting influence not just on Harold, but on everyone . . . He had convinced everyone that he was worthy of their esteem, when in reality he was worthy only of their contempt. Casey had said that he wanted to ban “every discipline with ‘studies’ in the name”, and that he “loved Knut Hamsun,” and had all along been driving Harold to this meeting… This was why everyone loved him—he had tricked them. It was Casey’s fault. Casey had darkened Harold’s vision. It was Casey’s fault entirely.

An administrator hands Harold a form on which to list Casey’s perfidies, which he does “against his will, or so in line with his will that he could do it unthinkingly.” Once he’s done, a calm suffuses him “that couldn’t be totally attributed to lifting.” He meets David, whom he’s slagged off but now decides he likes, because David has been doing kettlebell swings and wants Harold to help him “take it to the next level” by teaching him to deadlift. I’ve just realized, as I finished this, that Casey is meant to be the Girardian scapegoat—René Girard being a thinker Castro cites often—but since the scapegoat idea is piffle and too tortuous to go into, I’ll leave this tidbit here for the googling pleasure of readers with too much free time.

Having betrayed Casey, Harold immediately warms to him again. “Despite everything, Casey was highly intelligent, profoundly caring, and wise.” Harold tries to text him to meet at the gym, but his number is disconnected, his office is empty, he has vanished to the benefit of his colleagues, the students, and Harold. He begins to wonder whether Casey is not “a kind of savior,” sacrificing himself for all their sake, because that’s a thing people totally do, you know, and all he can feel is gratitude. Harold will thrive now without Casey; even his relationship with Dolly improves. Feeling reborn, he recognizes that “life was not a book but a symphony; all one had to do was relax and enjoy it.”

To the person who takes a book like Muscle Man seriously, and objects to it because it is unserious, the stock response, since Ben Lerner—whose shadow overlies most American autofiction of the past decade—has been that it is irony, and it’s your fault if you don’t get the cascades of meta-ness that sustain it. There is a problem, though. Just as landscape requires foreground and background to create the illusion of dimension, so irony requires some shade of seriousness to indicate what it is distorting and why. In its absence, the reader must manufacture out of thin air a higher aesthetic purpose for the work in question, and why? This question is doubly acute in the case of Castro, whose earnest expressions of his philosophy and opinions, say in his word salad denunciation of cynicism in the online journal Praxis (“a home for the brave, who strive for virtue and wisdom”), are nearly identical to the kvetching, pontificating, and bluster that crowd his novels. Castro himself affirmed that The Novelist was “unironically” written in the “lineage” of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, so I suspect there is no recondite mirror-play here, and this is actually what he thinks good writing is.

Lifting and prayer, he told an interview, have given him a “chadded disposition,” which I suppose will elude Harold until he turns himself over to the Lord. We must await, then, the liturgical turn in Castro’s next autofictional foray. Hopefully he’ll have put away his phone by then, and the Christ he presents will be the contemplative one who dwelt poetically on the lilies of the fields and the fowls of the air, and not swole Jesus breaking the beams of his cross on r/dankchristianmemes.