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.