Lifting Weights

Jordan Castro’s new novel ‘Muscle Man’ offers a wry and meme-literate vision of blokey intellectualism.

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A review of Muscle Man by Jordan Castro, 272 pages, Catapult Books (September 2025)

Jordan Castro made his name in the US “alt lit” scene with The Novelist, a cult debut that follows an aspiring writer over the course of a distracted morning. Castro’s signature knack is in creating a realistic and funny rhythm of compulsivity, which his new novel, Muscle Man, transposes onto Harold: a non-tenured English professor who’d rather lift weights than give lectures. Castro wears his Dostoevsky influence on his sleeve: both The Novelist and Muscle Man unfold over a single autumn or winter’s day, circling petty rivalries, refused invitations, and characters bent out of shape by bureaucracy and ego. Harold is at odds with his university’s “glassy-eyed” administrators, zombified students, and liberal colleagues.

In a knight’s move, Castro has also made Harold resentful of being mistaken for a Dostoevsky scholar. Despite his insecure contract, passionless work, and stuffy environment, Harold has no interest in the lives of the over-educated, underpaid, and morally constrained. He studies—and sees himself within—the tradition of masculine vitalism. Harold’s lodestar is Nietzsche, and like Raskolnikov, he thinks he’s Napoleon. He imagines himself as “a Greek or Roman statue,” battling the amorphous powers that be.

Harold is, of course, delusional, which makes him quintessentially Dostoevskian. He associates backpacks with peasants, and “hunched” postures with the “masses,” but he has spent so long bowing to bureaucrats that he’s “practically supine.” Nevertheless, Harold is delusional in a very modern and understandable kind of way. He began his academic career hoping to “enter into communion with the great thinkers of history,” but when we encounter him, he’s already a checked-out lecturer with a penchant for individualist philosophies, smart enough to resent university life as a “strange kind of imprisonment” but too lacking in agency to do anything about it.

Once Harold gains tenure, he imagines he’ll unfurl himself. Which is where Casey comes in. Though largely absent, Casey is a constant presence in Harold’s thoughts and the jacked fatherly soul of this novel. Casey is a mixture of Tyler Durden, Bronze-Age Pervert, and Joe Rogan: a philosopher-bodybuilder with tenure, big muscles, and quasi-religious aphorisms about embodiment, literature, and lifting weights. Harold looks up to Casey (“everyone did,” we are told), despite (or more likely because) Casey’s campaign to ban “every discipline with ‘studies’ in the name” has put him at war with the English department.

Casey seems to be Harold’s idealised Self, and his presence in the novel emerges as a consequence of Harold’s neurotic personality. If Harold’s resentful detachment isolates him from his peers, then Casey stands lovingly above them. Casey’s demeanour is kingly; his intelligence is inviting. Unlike the rest of the department, he seeks to simplify and edify rather than complicate and undermine. He finally emerges as a sort of a Christ figure. His caricatured humility, innocence, and self-sacrifice mean that his individuality is not contaminated by pride like Harold’s. Instead, as James Williams writes of Christ-figures in literature, Casey “gathers others around in loving community.”

Harold, on the other hand, is more like his “bug” peers with “bodies like words,” than his buff bro, Casey, who rejects tenure as fools’ gold. Once Casey achieved tenure, he “became an academic”—which, in the novel’s moral economy, is antithetical to muscles and to life itself. Academia is “separate from life,” and “what could be separate from life besides death?” Harold asks. Even so, tenure represents an opportunity for Harold to achieve distinction from his peers, which he has otherwise failed to do. So he wants tenure only insofar as he wants approval. This makes tenure a mimetic desire, in pursuit of which Harold undermines himself, betrays friends, and elevates the peers he scorns to the level of idols, whose good opinion he relies upon for his own self-esteem.

The rejection of the atomised self as a stable source of authority is a recurring theme in Castro’s fiction. Or as Castro writes in The Novelist, “Did people in ancient civilizations, or pre-civilization, seek mainly to be liked? They sought to be liked by God.” While the sentences in Muscle Man and The Novelist mimic the rhythm of a neurotic consciousness to mesmerising effect, for all its internet-native navel-gazing, Castro’s work maintains an ironic distance from therapy-speak, which makes it a self-aware and funny read, and it is subtly distinguished by a religious temperament, which makes it a serious one.

It is worth mentioning that Castro is a recovering heroin addict who has undergone a conversion to Orthodox Christianity. He is also the deputy director of a Catholic think tank, the Cluny Institute, and his writing and social-media posts frequently reference Kierkegaard’s essay The Present Age, which speaks of “the death of rebellion” as a corollary of the death of reverence and obedience. Kierkegaard believed that when society replaced God with the self, it produced widespread anxiety about how to be an individual. Without a transcendental light in the existential darkness, we looked to the person next to us to make sure we were going in the right direction. So, paradoxically, more individualism meant more conformity.

In Muscle Man, social interactions are smothered by a blanket of polite separation. Bureaucrats talk in vague language to avoid direct conflict, and academics abstain from condemning knife crime by asking about the “systemic cause” after a student is “stabbed twenty-three times in the back.” This is, of course, an eerily topical critique of progressive judicial policy. More fundamentally, it is a critique of the kind of value-agnosticism that works against social cohesion. But like all good novelists, Castro’s work is layered enough to resist categorical interpretation. The book can be read as a critique of the homogenising effect of too much individualism, and as a critique of the kind of person who rebels against it.

Often the book’s insights are twisted by irony and exaggeration. “There are no major figures in the academy of the twenty-first century with muscles,” Casey quips. Or, in Harold’s mind, academics have no “skin in the game.” Harold, by contrast, “had skin and a brain,” and—most importantly—“he had muscles.” Behind the tongue-in-cheek there’s a thumb on the scale. As Castro notes more soberly in a companion essay for Harper’s, “the body in the world has certain limitations,” while disembodied “thoughts inside a head,” typical of spineless academics, lack the “guardrails” that contact with reality provides.

In the end, Muscle Man offers a wry and meme-literate vision of blokey intellectualism and distills an ethos of lifting weights and reading literature. The gym allows complete immersion in a particular activity, which enables Harold—as an Everyman for the distracted modern self—to act with purpose, rather than sinking into an infinite doomscroll. Yet Castro is clear-eyed about the gym’s limits: “[T]he steel is not a savior … it is not and cannot be an ultimate end,” he writes in the Harper’s essay, and Muscle Man is equally alive to how fitness culture can become a bland monoculture of late-modern consumer types.

With the kind of irony that masks sincerity, Castro declares, “I am the new Dostoevsky.” It’s a bold claim and he’s characteristically self-aware of this fact. What Muscle Man demonstrates, however, is that Castro has found a Dostoevskian mode of his own. It is this tension, handled with mischief and seriousness in equal measure, that makes him worth reading.