The Novelist: A Novel by Jordan Castro

A maddeningly bad novel

Recently,

Ross Barkan

published an interview with Tony Tulathimutte, a contemporary author I’ve also seen mentioned by

ARX-Han

as worthy of consideration. Barkan ended the interview with a question about the disappearing perspective of “masculinity (toxicity, warts, and all)” in contemporary American fiction.

Here’s Tulathimutte’s response.

I don’t think it's disappearing at all. Plenty of recent books and stories are centrally about heterosexual masculinity in one form or another. Just off the top of my head there’s Teddy Wayne’s The Winner and Loner, Andrew Martin's Early Work, Jackie Ess's Darryl, Ben Nugent’s Fraternity, Jamel Brinkley's A Lucky Man, Kristen Roupenian's “The Good Guy,” Isle McElroy's The Atmospherians, Beth Morgan's A Touch of Jen, Julius Taranto's How I Won a Nobel Prize, Paolo Iacovelli's The King of Video Poker, Hansen Shi's The Expat, Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life, Adelle Waldman's The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P, every Ben Lerner novel, most Michel Houellebecq novels, and on and on. If anything’s changed it’s maybe that the theme of masculinity is treated more ambivalently and critically, but that’s just a reflection of broader attitudes toward it. As for why young men read less fiction than young women, I think that's probably of less concern than the overall decline of serious reading, and the dwindling venues for publication.

Obviously, from the first sentence, the answer is wrong to someone like me and probably any of the very few people who will read this review. Because I’ve given up on mainstream fiction, I’ve read very few of these authors. I did read much of Kristen Roupinean’s short story “The Good Guy,” which reinforced my initial perception, but I’ve also read Houellebecq and–much to my dissatisfaction–Ben Lerner. In theory, I’m open to the possibility that within this list of other books, there is an author who treats masculinity with serious attention from the perspective of a person who inhabits it, but why waste the time exploring this historically barren terrain when the self-published landscape is so filled with great work? Further, even Houellebecq, who writes about perverts and freaks, is in no way a writer of sane masculinity. But worst of all, he includes Ben Lerner, the author I last read before giving up entirely on mainstream American fiction sometime in 2016.

Tulathimutte is very different from me in a number of ways, possibly even diametrically opposed politically. I am a Trump supporter, a church-going Catholic, a married father, a combat arms veteran, a bodybuilder, and so on. I’m optimistic and I think realistic about modernity, but sometimes shocked by how pathetic literary–elite and popular–culture can appear, in part driven by sex-obsessed authors like Tulathimutte and Houellebecq. Still, I want to be fair to him here. Barkan should narrow the parameters of his question: “masculinity” is too open to interpretation. Tulathimutte is free to respond with his glib, false answer and still feel like he has technically told the truth: there are stories “centrally about heterosexual masculinity in one form or another.” They are just written by men like Michel Houellebecq and Ben Lerner.

Before I begin my review of Castro’s book, I want to be as specific as I can about what I–and I think others–mean when we lament the lack of a masculine perspective in literature so that people like Tulathimutte can understand it. Being a “traditionally” masculine man does have a strong social dimension, which likely cooperates with the analytic tendencies of Judith Butler and others. Much of masculinity is a social construct. That said, from our perspective it’s a construct that is (a.) worth maintaining, (b.) in many ways spectacular and cool, and (c.) grounded in reason, which flows from the creator of the universe. 

In my view, at the apex of the masculine hierarchy is Christ, who is the ultimate tribal big man: he provides and protects, and we rely on Him. Below that apex, there is what I will call the “Christianized big man.” By this I mean, a man who satisfies the basic elements of being a tribal big man: he’s a provider; he’s physically large and strong, and he has a lot of dependents, most of whom are not his children. He should be “Christianized” in a philosophical sense: the project of Christianity is, in large part, to bring instinct under the control of reason. Big men who simply prey on weak others, who allow themselves to be governed by animal instinct are lower in this hierarchy than those who govern themselves according to reason. By adding this Christian dimension, we’ve disqualified figures like, say, Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gadaffi and Andrew Tate or Dan Bilzarian, all of whom seem to behave according to animal instinct. 

The Christianized big man is mostly not a celebrity: he might be a prominent person, on the steering committees and boards as a respected figure in his industry, which can really be anything: firefighter, educator, private equity, military, law, union leadership, medicine, software, etc. Often, he runs a construction company or something like that. The important details are (a.) he has dependents–employees, children, parishioners, junior teammates, neighbors and family members–maybe elderly, maybe young–who instinctively flock to him because of his strength and reliability and (b.) he governs his behavior and sphere according to reason.

Basically, think Don Corleone, but trying harder to be morally upstanding–that is, aiming to bring his impulses for sex, violence, and so on under control.

The experience of men like this is inherently contrarian in a period of strident, often farcical, feminism. From the big man’s perspective, the majority of men and women are essentially children. He doesn’t have to be mean or misogynistic about it, but there are just few people who are reliable like this man, who lives to keep his clan alive and happy. Part of this job is to model appropriate behavior. Like with anyone else, this can be difficult. For instance, a non-trivial number of women, especially middle aged women–including his own relatives, his friends’ wives, his wife’s friends–love to be physically near him, and this can manifest in weird and unexpected ways. He’s not a rock star fawned over by 22 year old girls; he is the roofing company boss and shadow mayor, who older and more sensible women will almost literally launch themselves towards. Sometimes he admonishes them as fools; sometimes he succumbs because he is human.

This kind of charismatic masculinity is a complicated phenomenon for Marxist feminism–essentially the reigning philosophical commitment of the American left–to process. Marxist feminists view gender equality as a kind of historical process that starts somewhere in the patriarchal past and moves through periods of material development to the abolition of gender in the future, where there is no significant difference between “men” and “women.” There are of course lots of variants, but ultimately gender–a paradigm Abrahamic faiths view as embedded in the human person by the creator of the universe–Historical Materialists view as a result of simple conditioning by external material forces. Change the external conditioning, and you change gender expectations.

Therefore, why would the marxist feminists in American letters capture the charisma of Christianized big men? It’s not the conversation we’re having right now. To accurately describe this charisma–for instance, the way that both men and women willingly subordinate themselves to guys like this–is to describe the charisma of patriarchy; it’s to hold up divine qualia to the demented gaze of Marxist “rationalism.”

But, for a number of people, especially men, who recognize the validity of the structure, this absence is conspicuous. Masculine hierarchy is a significant dimension in their lives and personal development: they, like all men, exist somewhere on the continuum of obsequious beta-males like Ben Lerner to dominant big men like Don Corleone.

Or so I thought.

Apparently, there is a writer who is somehow able to describe a less masculine man in this big man sense than Ben Lerner, and he is Jordan Castro. His book is called The Novelist: A Novel, and the purpose of the previous discussion is to frame the context for my review of this book: contemporary fiction struggles to process masculinity, even acting like there is a question of “healthy” masculinity at all. Therefore, readers like myself seek alternative markets that are more expressly reality-based in their approach to themes like masculinity. This is the context in which I arrived at The Novelist, a book by a kind of right-friendly (“based autofiction”), even Catholic, author. He claims Nicholson Baker as an influence, the writer who had permission–in the face of institutionalist hysteria and outright censorship–to argue that a sensible person could wonder if the novel coronavirus had leaked from the nearby novel coronavirus lab in Wuhan. I’d seen the book reviewed on substack. It seemed worth reading. 

Instead, it was bafflingly bad, and in this review I will touch on a number of its maddening elements. The structure will be as follows.

1. Positive elements

   1. Capture of writer’s block

   2. Emotional maturation

   3. Capture of “flow state”

2. Negative elements

   1. Imprecise language

   2. Connotation of “content”

   3. Pathetic nature of protagonist

   4. Connotation of “novel”

3. Conclusion

Positive elements

As awful as this story is, there are three well-executed elements that are worth mentioning–in fairness to the author and fans of the book.

The first and primary virtue is that Castro captures the experience of writer’s block with rigorous clarity. There is a boldness in his willingness to represent how petty a person can be. For instance, there is an extended scene in which he clicks through pictures on facebook of a girl he knew in high school. She is among a cohort of apparently professional class Ohioans, people he’s left behind for the East Coast, and they are conventional bourgeois people. He describes them as follows.

“A group of wealthy-looking small women and thick men, all white, wearing dresses and high heels or blazers and partially unbuttoned button-ups, standing crammed together on a roof, a skyline I didn’t recognize behind them” (37).

Here is his reaction.

“Suddenly, as though roused from a deep sleep–or, impossibly, roused from sleep into another sleep–I imagined arguing about racism with one of the thick men in the picture. The existence of people who looked like that baffled me. I never saw people like that in real life anymore, and even when I had seen them in high school, even when we had talked and laughed and gotten along, they had seemed somehow a mythical other to me” (39).

There are a number of ways to analyze this response: a certain type of conservative would likely focus on liberal envy or on a Marxist inversion of values: look at this weak lib who cannot stand the sight of happy people: they’re white, so they’re racist; they’re rich, so they’re bad, and so on, and obviously this resentful attitude is a symptom of a deeper personal problem–it’s certainly not a manly response. But, I think what we’re seeing his is an example of the “torture” the “tortured poet” endures. He sees an image of simple, privileged people–and is immediately resentful. They sell financial products, maybe; they are headhunters or lawyers; they have conventional jobs and earn decent paychecks; the men are “thick.” This cohort probably settles down and marries relatively early for bourgeois people–say, 27–and has kids and goes on vacation and gets promoted and pays off mortgages and so on. 

They chose life, as it were.

Meanwhile, the novelist “chose not to choose life.” If he has a job, I don’t remember mention of it. His primary fixations are (a.) various questions related to his “novel,” a word that repeats and jars, (b.) his relationships to people on social media and in the past, (c.) bowel movements, (d.) his dog and girlfriend, and (e.) drugs, especially caffeine. 

In a way, The Novelist is a record of the torture of being an artist: his peers from school develop professionally and financially, which leads to a kind of personal maturation; meanwhile, the obscure artist remains professionally and financially underdeveloped because he is focused on the hopeless task of writing a novel at the expense of a normal career. In many cases, the artist copes with this inadequacy by adopting an angry resentment that expresses itself as “critique” of capitalism, whiteness, or whatever other bourgeois-associated concept (heteronormativity, cis-genderism, religion, etc.) Revealing the pettiness, childishness, and inadequacy that can flow from underdevelopment is an intimate act if the writer recognizes inadequacy as the source of his resentment. In this case, I believe that Castro is probably aware–that is, he is representing an embittered writer not as a victim of circumstance, but as a petty child–and this awareness lends depth to the story.

The second virtue is that The Novelist is also a portrait of emotional maturation. For all of the childishness–and permutations of that word and its diminutive (“?”) appears probably 20 or more times in my annotations of this text–by the end, I felt like I was seeing glimpses of a person who might yet become an adult. There are a few elements that draw the adult out of the protagonist: his sleeping girlfriend, Violet; their dog, Dillon; and, his relationship with “Eric.” I’m most interested in Eric because he inspires useful self-reflection in the protagonist.

Here’s an example.

“We’d bonded over a shared ironic disposition toward the world, an unarticulated hatred toward almost everything; we wanted the same things, were afraid of the same things, and looked up to the same people. At a time when everything had seemed hostile and opposed to me, Eric had been dynamic and fun–a kind of confidant amidst the stupid, brutal world; and unlike the predictable violence of interacting with others, who were always smiling and saying predictable things, spending time with Eric often surprised me. I’d felt less alone, when we would stand in the back at literary events, scoffing; or listen to rap music, talking shit, free-associating. In short, I was critical of everything, because I was afraid of everything, and Eric was too…” (126.)

Again, see the torture of the tortured poet: he feels “hatred toward almost everything”; the world appears “stupid” and “brutal”; there is “predictable violence” in simply “interacting with others”; even at literary events, he stands apart, “scoffing.” To be sure, there are college educated people with normal white collar careers who feel this way, but they are lunatics. This kind of brooding resentment, not uncommon among young male artists, is the result, I think, of hopelessness. You finish your book, then what? There’s no money in it. Well paid jobs consume your life. If you simply write on weekends, you will never finish. It’s an extremely difficult situation, and people who don’t have to figure out this extra problem can seem smug and simple. When you realize the world is filled to the brim with people for whom selling customer relations management software to paper manufacturers is the extent of their life’s ambition, you can feel like the world is brutal and stupid.

But the protagonist sees that his hatred of bourgeois conventionality is rooted in psychological maladjustment, which is a brave–even Nietzschean–step in the difficult process of self-overcoming. This willingness to pursue the truth beyond comfortable frameworks leads to further unsettling observations. Here is an example of how critical appraisals of Eric’s novel strike the protagonist as evidence of widespread corruption among contemporary literary critics.

“Every review focused on something other than its novelistic qualities: it was a political, historical, or sociological document; it was a philosophical treatise, and so on. What was the point of literature, I’d wondered, if it could only ever be something else?” (127)

This rumination on Eric and the state of literary fashion results in the third virtue: a good capture of the experience of so-called “flow state” writing, which happens as the protagonist rides an angry brainwave against Eric into a new google doc and new novel idea. I can’t reproduce it here, but it spans pages 133 to about 151, beginning with “Eric has always had a problem with authority, I typed” (133) and ending when he is “Overcome with sudden lethargy, and negative feeling toward what I’d written so far” (151). This almost 20 page section, which isn’t all flow state writing, is about 10 percent of the 192 page book, and I’d say that it is the overall highlight. 

Negative Elements

All of that said, I want to make something crystal clear: I did not like this book.

Before describing why, I want to quickly clarify a point about frivolous and silly interiority. In Ulysses, James Joyce renders benign goofiness in the thoughtstream of Leopold Bloom into something worth the reader’s time. Part of the appeal is Joyce’s style, which presumably my readers are aware of. But, there are other elements at play: (1.) a lot of the writing is genuinely funny, and (2.) there is the political context of antisemitic nationalism in the background, which Joyce touches on frequently in the characters of the schoolmaster, Haines, and others. Part of the humor in Bloom’s largely pathetic thinking is that he is–ultimately–a harmless man, with curiosity about local customs and Catholicism, a genuine love of his wife, and so on. He is not an evil subversive seeking to extract resources, destroy local customs, or impose foreign ideas. In this way, his absurd thoughtstream makes a convincing mockery of the jar-headed elements–personified in part by local big man Blazes Boylan–of antisemitism appearing in Europe at the time.

In the case of The Novelist: A Novel, we have a childish protagonist without Joyce’s prose, humor, novelistic context–that is, there are no other characters–nor do we have the same global political context. 

There are a few significant elements contributing to the overall childishness of the protagonist, and the first that comes to mind is his use of imprecise language.

Here’s an example.

“Twitter had become a grisly hellscape of parasitic babblers, dominated by the nothing-lords, seeking nothing and creating nothing, destroying and deconstructing, complaining and resenting, mindlessly snatching at scraps, and whoever could lord over these nothing-scraps least gracefully gained the most nothingness…” (16–italics and ellipsis in the original text)

To a certain kind of reader–ChatGPT, for instance–this paragraph might feel powerful. It is, in a sense, a kind of 4th of July fireworks finale of descriptive language: “grisly hellscape,” “parasitic babblers,” “nothing-lords,” “destroying,” “deconstructing,” “mindlessly snatching,” and so on. These words are powerful and in condemnation of bad people. Still, to me this section reads like someone shouldering an AK-47, toggling to full-auto, and firing on a cobweb that could have been waved away with a rolled up newspaper. It rings hollow because the target–an undefined mass of “nothing-lords” on Twitter–is at once (a.) one of the easiest and most defenseless targets in the American cultural landscape and (b.) too undifferentiated and broad to actually constitute a meaningful target. Twitter is simply too complex to be reduced to one thing, but don’t tell that to Castro’s peers in this kind of low effort observational humor, Greg Gutfeld and Andy Borowitz.

This problem of imprecision often appears in the frequent use of absolute words, like “always,” “never,” “every,” and so on. For instance, “There was nothing good about it. Facebook had always been miserably pointless and bad…” (34). At dinner with Eric, the protagonist remarks that his friend “had been belligerent the entire evening, constantly rambling...” (117). That’s because “Eric acts like he is right about everything, when in fact, he is wrong about everything” (134). Worse, “Eric spent his life ruining every relationship he had, thinking only of himself,” etc. (131). This is the context in which the protagonist realizes that he was “critical of everything, because [he] was afraid of everything” 126. And, finally, the protag concludes that “everything with people like Eric was nihilism…” (128). Language like this–especially the line about Eric being “wrong about everything”–sounds childish because it is imprecise. Eric is not wrong about everything. The imprecision of language and idea creates an impressionistic blur, which might work for, say, impromptu stand-on-a-chair-to-address-a-room rhetoric, but not longform prose dealing heavily with ideas. Saying someone is “wrong about everything” or is “afraid of everything” indicates a kind of dim perspective of a person too lazy or dull to be specific, and over the course of 200 pages, this kind of imprecision grates.

On top of this problem with vague and broad language, which I think is objective, I have a more subjective critique: I think the internet word “content” has off-putting connotations. It’s a word one sees and hears in a number of contexts, and often its use is technically appropriate. Still, I expect most of my readers are obscure writers and readers of obscure writers, so I will assume a special dedication to the arts; I will assume that I probably don’t need to elaborate too much on my aversion to this word “content,” which smacks of X personalities writing in all lowercase letters (see: Tony Tulathimutte). Basically, I assign to “content” the same connotations associated with referring to X as a “website” (“This website is free”), as using the term “logging on,” and–I think worst of all–“Twitter dot com.” Content, I think, is the godfather of them all: it smacks of shallowness because it, too, is imprecise: it is a vague word like “material,” “stuff,” or “things”–except worse because of its status as a cliche in internetspeak and its strong associations with personalities who cloud the world with bullshit. In general, it is the job of authors of literary fiction to transcend this kind of writing. 

Here’s what I mean: the protagonist doesn’t want to be “confronted with content from people [he doesn’t] like” (9); later, he sees a “barrage of awful content” (12); “On Twitter, “[he] saw content not only from people [he] followed, but also from accounts”–another word nearly in this class with content (“delete your account,” etc), “from people [he] followed replied to, liked, and retweeted,” and then in the same compound sentence, he says advertisements “assault [him] with content” (52). “Instagram stories created a space for more marginal content…” (56), and on and on. Later, he uses a spiritually similar verb “consume” in the neutered and macro-economic sense to describe the intimate act of reading: he “consum[es]” an “awful tweet” (96). 

Can you imagine saying that you’ve “consumed” text?

The thinking is infected with bad language, which is another way of saying that the writing is bad. If you are an author, your job is to write well: it’s to write clearly and precisely and to avoid cliches. In that writerly sense, because of the absolutes and the insensibility to connotation, this book is a failure. 

But, there is, in my opinion, still a worse problem: the pathetic nature of the protagonist, who behaves like a prepubescent boy. For instance, here is an example of an interaction with a grocer, who claims that there is a difference in taste between organic and inorganic bananas. 

“I had nodded and agreed, mumbling, ‘Yeah,’ and averting eye contact by pretending to look at something on my phone” (43-44).

There isn’t any elaboration on why he treats the grocer this way–rudely, childishly: the reader just has to accept that this is the protagonist. But, I have a Tony Soprano-level problem with this behavior. I want to walk into this scene, slap the phone out of his hand, and instruct him to look the grocer in the eye like an adult. 

More embarrassingly, here’s the protagonist describing a flight of fantasy in which he “inhabit[s] a memory” of an Italian kid.

“[The mirror] leaned against the wall in such a way, pointed slightly upward, as to make me look thinner and stronger; my face looked less round, my chest and shoulders broader. I flexed my chest and shoulders and turned sideways, flexed my triceps, then turned to face the mirror. Body…I thought, hesitantly. Body man, I confirmed. Sup brotha, I thought, inhabiting a memory of an Italian kid I vaguely knew from Cleveland, who always said, ‘Sup, brotha.’ I touched my hair and made a face. ‘Yo,’ I mouthed, moving my body, imagining myself as a rapper onstage” (83). 

I’ll leave aside the baffling “body man” line and review the phrases I can talk about: “flexed my triceps,” “Sup brotha,” “Italian kid I vaguely knew from Cleveland,” and “imagined myself as a rapper onstage.” Here, masculine strength is (a.) accidentally associated with the protagonist because of a trick of a mirror and (b.) immediately associated with declassé, weird, and culturally different social elements: an Italian kid (presumably a dumbass) and a rapper onstage (presumably a dumbass). Further, part of me wonders how comparable this scene is to a little boy making fun of an adult man for, say, having a deep voice or thinning hair: traits natural to adult men, but foreign to boys. The idea that the protagonist would speak like either of these guys (“sup, brotha” and “yo”), the idea that he is strong like these guys is a literal fantasy: it’s a joke; it’s bizarre to associate the protagonist with other–“thick”–men, which is because he is, psychologically, both weak and childish.

I will admit that my case is complicated by the fact that the protagonist–who is not Jordan Castro, but a fan of Jordan Castro–expresses annoyance with some of the criticisms of a Jordan Castro novel about an amatuer bodybuilder. Being a fan of someone who writes about bodybuilders I guess technically indicates some familiarity with a variety of masculine strength, but not necessarily adult masculinity: little boys, of course, watch professional sports; they can also read about bodybuilders.

There are many other examples of further childishness. For instance, on page 61, he mentions that he allows an easily fixable drip to persist in his house for months because he “didn’t want to deal with the resultant interaction, however brief or relatively painless” with his landlord. (How about fixing it yourself?) This aversion to even brief and transactional conversation calls to mind the passage quoted above in which he refers to the “predictable violence of interacting with others” (126). Happy, healthy, sane people do not experience “violence” (another loaded term) when talking to other people; therefore, I think it’s reasonable to wonder if the author suffers from a kind of social-emotional disability, possibly an Autism Spectrum Disorder, which would make sense considering the author’s close friendship with Tao Lin. That said, I’m not going to assume a diagnosis like that, so I have to work with what I do know: this character has an aversion to simply speaking with others. Further, in this passage, “deal with” is another vague and badly chosen phrase, which readers can expect at all times from this author.

On page 66, we learn about his schedule for the day:

–work on novel 2 hrs.

–respond to emails

–

Who could be surprised?

On page 70, he describes a memory of childhood “trauma” (another loaded word) induced by the toilet paper ripping as he wiped himself on the toilet. 

“I’d become convinced for days after the incident, which happened at school, that my hand smelled and someone would notice; I’d faked sick, skipped class, had a panic attack, stayed home for days, and when I went back to school I put my hands in my pockets and looked down, an act that would go on to characterize much of my young adulthood…”

Here we see that even as a child, the protagonist was abnormally fearful and anxious, and this anxiety remained with him–irrationally–into young adulthood, even characterizing him as a young adult. There are probably a number of readers who are sympathetic to this kind of psychological “complexity.” For a number of reasons that are beyond the scope of this review to discuss, I ultimately am not among their number; instead, I view fixating on these kinds of memories, in which one was once powerless and overwhelmed, as a symptom of further weakness. I sense, for instance, that I probably behaved similarly as a kid at some point; that said, I have to search my memory to come up with anything remotely similar, and there is simply no emotional charge associated with the memory: I have matured beyond the point of being able to perceive these memories as happening to the person that I currently am. Meanwhile, it’s clear that there is an absence of this process of maturity in the person of the protagonist. For instance, here are some of his thoughts on Eric: “Eric is a greasy nincompoop! I surprised myself, grinning. Eric is a greasyweasy nincompoop! I typed” (139). I’m not sure I need to reiterate my analysis, but these are the thoughts of a little boy–possibly as young as a first grader–not an adult man.

I want to stop here and mention that there is a kind of romance associated with introverts and brooding personalities in the history of the arts: there can be something profound associated with this persona if the artist produces profound work. For instance, Gerard Manley Hopkins was supposed to be like this. However, The Novelist is so shallow and poorly written that I am forced to consider if there is a mental disability at the source of it.

All of this brings me to arguably the most immature and stupidest part of the book, a long and tortuous description of a bowel movement, which, as

Adam Pearson

noted recently, comprises something like 25% of the narrative. It begins on page 47, where my first annotation occurs in reference to the following sentence. “I scurried out of the bathroom, back into the kitchen…” (emphasis mine) to find his phone. The verb choice here raised an eyebrow, of course: it is a verb appropriate for rodents and prey animals, not adult men. On page 49, I noted that he “shimmied backward off the bed” (emphasis mine). My next annotation comes on page 54 beside a description of the insufferable people appearing on his instagram feed, including “a child-actor-turned-author-turned-socialist-activist,” who wrote a book about “imagining a new politics, ‘love’ as an obfuscatory weapon, and why anxiety is good.” My annotation simply reads, “This is his social milieu.” Finally, after a number of pages describing the act of defecation, checking social media, and responding to an earlier email from “Li”–probably Tao Lin–who announced via email that he was pooping, my annotation reads, “This whole scene is just disgusting and childish”–and as I reread sections of the text to write this review, I maintain that it is just that: disgusting and childish. It is not an effective exploration of the mundane; it is not effectively confessional or some kind of meditation on the petty indignities of whatever: it is just a childish and disgusting description of defecation and wiping. As mentioned above regarding the job of authors to avoid cliches, successful authors should also avoid dwelling on pointlessly disgusting scenes. Yet again, this book fails to meet a basic standard; yet again, I am forced to seriously ask myself, Does this author suffer from a mental disability?

In more surface level reviews, this section could be passed over as “scatological.” But, the context for this “scatological” element is childishness in the quality of the prose and in the qualities of the protagonist. In this context, an extended scene about defecation is consistent with the age-inappropriate thinking and behavior seen elsewhere.

I want to remain at the level of broader context for a moment now that I’ve approached my final complaint about this book. If you’ve read this far, you understand my analysis: the protagonist is so bizarre and unmanly that I have had to ask myself if he is mentally disabled. As I read with this question in mind, the word “novel” ticked like a metronome on almost every page. By page 80, according to the search function in the Kindle app, you’ve already encountered this word over 100 times. Here are some clips from page 81: “...while reading a novel…,” “...and so both of my novel documents…,” “...first person past tense novel…,” “...arbitrary place in my original novel…,” “I looked at my novel,” “Everything about most novels…,” “I didn’t want my novel…” At some point, the ticks begin to clang. You read about him scurrying; you read about him being nervous about wiping his ass; you read about him averting his eyes from some genial man in the grocery store; all the while: my novel, my novel, my novel, my novel–the word becomes worse than a clang; it produces a kind of mind-bending hysteria; you imagine Golem on the toilet, hunched over his phone: my NOH-vel, my NOH-vel, my NOH-vel, my NOH-vel–

Even in its title, The Novelist: A Novel refuses to relent.

Conclusion

I am not happy to have written this review. I’m sure the author is a nice guy; I’m sure we could even be friends.

But, this book should have not been written, edited, or published; it should not have been positively reviewed (here, here, here, here, here); it should not have ever come to my attention. It did come to my attention, though, because of the problem referenced in the introduction to this review. 

I’ll quote Juliet Escoria writing in BOMB.

“The Novelist feels masculine to me. If I were to put myself in the shoes of a straight white man, I might feel inclined to obfuscate or apologize for masculinity, or at least try to counterbalance by performing wokeness.”

The reality is that within American letters, Castro is right-coded, and this novel is probably one of the best male readers can expect from contemporary American literature.

What else can you say?