To Go Through the Raskolnikov Process
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Muscle Man, Jordan Castro, Catapult, 2025, 272 pages, £19.78
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Jordan Castro, author of Muscle Man, is a distinguished survivor of probably the last avant-garde grouping in US letters. The formal quality which defined ‘alt-lit’, a movement that – despite basically dissolving itself in a flood of sexual misconduct allegations against its leading male figures in the mid 2010s – haunts a lot of contemporary writing, was a commitment that resembled, and often actually was, incompetence. The commitment was to its characters’ generally numb, dumb perspectives, presented in such a way that you could never quite see the daylight of authorial irony between the zombified interiority of the novel’s (usually autobiographical) characters and the novel itself. I don’t mean this to sound like a bad thing, exactly.
In a way it’s brave, not to try to dress yourself up, to neither solicit sympathy or hide behind irony, to not put your thumb on the scale. It results, in the few successful products, in a genuine high-wire act that does make you feel like the writer has been honest to what it feels like to live their own numbskull truth. Say what you like about Tao Lin or Marie Calloway, you do have to respect their refusal to break character, their commitment to the bit.
The result is beyond his competence as a writer, but it is nevertheless an interesting attempt to channel alt-lit’s commitment in new directions.
Castro, in the last few years, has achieved something like mainstream respectability without ever abandoning this commitment to the flat, take it or leave it voice. It’s not that there’s no irony, for example, in these sentences from Muscle Man, his second novel: ‘All throughout human history, people were getting pumps. They were fighting wars or picking food or chopping wood and getting pumps. Now, people were devoid of the pump. People were pump-devoid.’ But there is also a kind of unsettling sincerity as he describes the feeling of exercise swelling the muscles of the body (‘pumps’). Some sentences even echo Castro’s own magazine pronouncements. I genuinely can’t tell how seriously to take lines such as: ‘The body had its own words. Harold was beginning to learn the language of his body.’ The flatness is deadpan enough to catch you off guard.
In Muscle Man, Castro tries to use this mode in a range of ambitious ways, to tell a large story about modern society and resentment, one that departs from the affectless anomie of his predecessors. The result is beyond his competence as a writer, but it is nevertheless an interesting attempt to channel alt-lit’s commitment in new directions. As the novel concerns gym culture and lifting in an almost spiritual sense, we might borrow a phrase from that space and say that Muscle Man is impressive precisely in its author’s willingness to go ‘to failure’.
Muscle Man tracks the thoughts and ‘thought talk’ of Harold, professor of literature at a small southern US liberal arts college, in a kind of monologue at a third-person distance. After years of dedication to the life of the mind, Harold is now an evangelist for the life of the body. He has gained significant mass, and feels disconnected from his previous, implicitly feminised pursuit of academic distinction. He is too big for academia now, caring only about lifting and his even more ‘swole’ colleague Casey. We see Harold as he readies himself to attend a departmental meeting; attends the meeting; works out; and then commits an act of cowardice. Also, for no particular reason, he steals a backpack.
The campus of Harold’s Shepherd College, a former slave plantation, is rendered as a kind of post-modern Escher painting, a site of constant temporal and aesthetic confusion, full, for this reason, of the potential for violence. Castro wastes no time in using this violence to mock the way contemporary institutions adopt various social justice talking points, ‘in light of events’. Even stabbings are seen as ‘opportunities to get inspired to consider new ways of thinking about how we might better relate to and understand one another’.
We are then within what Castro sees as an absurd structure, modern liberalism, and his reactionary critique of it never lets up. The architecture is ugly, postmodern, etc. Academia is not a place in which to seek truth largely because of the weak, the cucked and the soy. The heavy-handedness of some of this stuff is clear in the single-sentence paragraph that concludes the introductory passage. Harold, recoiling at the ugliness of his college, notices that ‘The light became brighter the farther he got from his classroom’. There’s that alt-lit plain style, concussed minimalism.
Castro’s old-school alt-lit commitment to his character’s unvarnished truth gives the novel a certain grace.
What plot there is in the novel hinges on this campus’s hysterical policing of ‘problematic’ speech. Unfortunately, this isn’t done very effectively because Castro is unwilling to commit to actually showing us any problematic speech. By the end, the novel becomes a clunking exemplification of the theorist Rene Girard’s ideas of ‘mimetic desire’ and scapegoats, a set of ideas popular on the intellectual right, about desiring what other people desire and then growing to despise the model of one’s desiring. The Nietzschean vitalism (strength! health! beauty! etc!) that Harold wants to marshal against his colleagues, and his colleagues’ own scolding liberalism are trapped in a cycle of imitation; all of his seething opinions are reactions to theirs. His own love of lifting and right-wing vitalism is copied from Casey, who ends up being scapegoated for nonspecific thoughtcrime, with Harold’s willing complicity. Harold, we see, is weak, notwithstanding his ability to bench 225lbs.
Despite this clunking stuff, and despite him being an ungainly writer on the sentence level – at his worst when being poetic (‘He lived in the dark night of nothingness until his whole being became blood…’, etc) – Castro’s old-school alt-lit commitment to his character’s unvarnished truth nevertheless gives the novel a certain grace. He foregrounds the classic alt-lit question of whether this guy we are reading about is meant to be seen as in some way sympathetic because the writer is a total moron or whether it is only the character who is a moron. And, I think deliberately, he uses this question to give the novel dramatic stakes that don’t depend on your acquiescence to Castro’s politics.
That is because Castro genuinely does commit to Harold. Harold, we are told, writes about male ressentiment in fiction, about the suppression of masculine greatness, but his work is mistaken for critique. The same is true when he publishes a novel:
Finally, Harold thought, when it began generating some buzz, my blackened flowers. But the flowers he received were bright and normal. Reviewers called him a “master satirist”; the novel was a “comic portrayal of the reactionary right”; it was even a “novel about the myth of the exceptional man against society.” In short, Harold had been totally misunderstood. He’d begun to wonder if he’d subconsciously meant for the novel to come across this way…
It seems clear to me that the undecidability here is Castro nodding to the affordance of the alt-lit style – its non-judgmental flatness allows people to project their judgments on to it. This question of projection is what gives the novel what power it has. Castro wants to pick up the heavy weights of conventional irony, to stand next to the big boys. He wants to offer polyvocal insights into the nature of life, literature and political society. Most of this feels ersatz. And yet Harold and his portrayal does strike me as authentic. Because, really, it doesn’t matter the kind of wrong life Harold lives, his inability to be a genuine Ubermensch or Christian traditionalist or whatever; what matters is that Castro commits to presenting it, commits to inhabiting it, and to inhabiting his cowardice and unwillingness to submit himself to moral judgment. While, at the climax of the novel, Harold disavows Casey, Castro never disavows Harold.
In the hands of another writer, perhaps even a better one, less prone to writing things like ‘Ggg, he thought’, ‘Fffggg, he thought’, Harold would be a contemptible creature. But he is not. We might even forgive Castro phrases such as ‘Harold’s thoughts felt simultaneously thick and thin; airy, but coated in sludge. Harold’s thoughts lived in the top of his head’. They seem, in their badness, affectionate, unwilling to condescend to their thinker. Harold’s habit, for example, of ranting about politics by imagining he is speaking ‘for a nonexistent podcast’ could be a gesture of total contempt. But Castro doesn’t play it that way. He does not distance himself from the podcast idiot. Maybe this lack of condescension matters more than fine prose.
I admire Castro’s commitment to his character, to letting him be, touchingly, too weak to lift it.
There is a bravura set piece where Harold drops his phone while listening to some culture war slop on YouTube in the sauna, and it starts playing out loud. Harold is terrified of being seen as a freak, to the point where he misses the opportunity to make a genuine connection with the other men, who are surprisingly interested in the content. The dialogue here nicely embodies Harold’s weakness:
“What were you watching?” Kevin said, directly addressing Harold now.
“I don’t know,” Harold said sheepishly. “I kind of just let the algorithm take me…”
I found this weirdly touching, a man confessing his weakness to another man. The tenderness here transcends the political, genuinely, rather than in the ideological (Christian conservative) way the book mostly seems to want to transcend it.
At one point, Harold speaks of the beauty of literature, of the way it is, like lifting, a kind of embodied knowledge. One does not learn the moral lesson of Crime and Punishment, rather one has ‘to go through the Raskolnikov process’. And here Castro has clearly gone through the Harold process. He is honest enough to be merciless about Harold’s weakness, and honest enough to pity him.
Perhaps the real theme of the novel is forgiveness. What Harold fears is being found out. Being judged. What Castro does is refuse to judge him. This is consonant with the Christian worldview built into the book and reinforced by the tedious Girardian stuff. And with the Dostoyevskian ambition. It makes sense too, that someone coming out of alt-lit, a movement almost ‘lost’ to ‘cancel culture’, would spend so much time presenting the fear of being cancelled. It seems to me, however, that Castro never quite blends these two kinds of justice and mercy, ‘cancel culture’ and Christianity, together. Why not try for a depiction of forgiveness with real spiritual or moral stakes? There are things one ought to feel bad about. Show us some of those. His unwillingness to defend or criticise specific acts, other than betrayal, strikes me as empty, not embodied in the way that Raskolnikov was, or Jesus, for that matter. The politics, the ideology which claims to disavow itself, all the clunking stage machinery, overburdens the novel. But I admire Castro’s commitment to his character, to letting him be, touchingly, too weak to lift it.
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Hugh Foley’s poetry and criticism have appeared in Poetry Review, The White Review, Poetry London, PN Review and The Rialto, among other places. He is the author of a pamphlet, Recent Poems (The Fair Organ press), an academic work on American poetry and several study guides for children. He writes a Substack newsletter, Useless Concentration.
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