The Brooklyn Rail

The figures are grim but familiar: (straight) men are lonelier, more suicidal, less educated, less sexually active. They gravitate toward conspiracy rabbit holes and the hollow self-optimization regimes of the manosphere. In a deeply online “return to tradition,” tradwives post cottagecore selfies and male fitness influencers push “Day in the Life” videos where they never interact with another human person. Everyone warns of a “crisis of masculinity.”

What is the fix? Destigmatizing mental health? More third spaces? Pickleball?

Jordan Castro doesn’t know, but the protagonist of his new novel Muscle Man is desperate to find out.

Harold, a middling literature professor at Shepherd College, trudges through a single afternoon of paranoia and self-pity: stealing a student’s backpack (he suspects a knife inside), attending a deadening faculty meeting, and hitting the gym. As with Castro’s debut The Novelist, the “plot” is skeletal. The real drama is interior: Castro expertly renders a claustrophobic, sometimes funny, sometimes frightening study of consciousness.

From the start, Harold’s most important identity is that of the victim. He hates Shepherd College, and he’s equally certain the college hates him back. Uneven ceilings and office furniture thrum with hostility; students confuse him with other professors and vandalize posters with messages like “Islam is right about women.” Most of his animosity is reserved for his colleagues: two-faced, white-savior academics who posture over diversity initiatives and mispronounce Indigenous names.

It’s unsurprising then that Harold is profoundly alone. His jokes aren’t funny, he’s awkward in every exchange, and he assumes the worst in everyone but himself. In fact, there’s only one person Harold likes: Casey. He’s a tenured professor in their department, but Casey rebukes his own popularity and shares Harold’s contempt for academia. Harold also likes Casey’s body (from a purely utilitarian viewpoint, of course!), and we learn Casey is the one who introduced Harold to weightlifting. To Harold, “if it weren’t for Casey, he wouldn’t have known what he wanted.”

Casey also nurtures an important part of Harold’s worldview: his failures. Casey convinces Harold that his stalled career and lack of respect are not any fault of his own but the byproduct of a culture that has abandoned the Übermensch. After a comment from Harold is misconstrued, he accuses colleagues of scheming to “topple him over like a Greek or Roman statue.” His obsession with his own failures is even present in his academic work. Harold’s first book “began as an analysis of novels about exceptional men in societies that punished them.” Like magnificent seeds planted in bad soil, “they could not flourish; they grew, and became deformed.” Thus spoke Andrew Tate.

They’re a dangerous pair. When Harold doubts himself, it’s Casey’s voice reminding him the world is against him, and before long, Harold’s transformation is complete. In his head, Harold imagines himself speaking on a podcast—Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson hovering just off the page—where he expertly lambasts his colleagues, finally recognized as the brave truth-teller he is convinced he could be. Harold muses that “wearing strapped bags as a man had become, like all of the most detestable behaviors, ‘normalized.’” On the way to the gym, he skips down the hall singing Casey’s name.

And yet, for all Harold’s fixation, Casey is absent. This is Castro’s sly structural trick: the figure Harold reveres and desires never appears in the immediate story. He exists only in Harold’s obsessive retellings, and a central question forms that the author leaves readers to answer. Did Casey choose Harold, seeing a vulnerable junior colleague he could inculcate? Or did Harold, desperate for validation, project his philosophy onto the nearest willing listener?

When Harold finally escapes the miasma of Shepherd College and reaches the gym, Castro delivers what the novel has been circling all along: intense homoeroticism. His gym session, meant as proof of discipline and virility, dissolves into obsessive fantasies of Casey and other men. He doesn’t imagine them sexually, but can’t help himself from studying their bulging biceps, juicy glutes, and straining backs. Their grunts form a lulling choir. As Harold strains to beat his deadlift PR (on a chest-and-triceps day, no less), he worries, “What if he couldn’t get it up and everyone saw?” Subtlety be damned!

This fanaticism about the male form quickly descends into the tried-and-true world of fascist aesthetics. While failing his deadlift, Harold wonders whether head shape determines cognitive ability and whether an overly muscled man is “primitively feminine” for having curves. He declares, Leni Riefenstahl-style, that “bodies communicate values” and that “weak people think backwards.” Even his social media feed, which Harold admits is completely controlled by “the algorithm,” parrots misinformation like seed oil causing autism. The line Castro has drawn, from paranoia to isolation to radicalization to extremism, reaches its inevitable conclusion.

The novel’s third act, its strongest, summons Harold back to campus after his workout. Higher-ups at the college have questions for him, and Casey’s absence from the afternoon is finally explained. Harold’s vapid, elitist, identity-driven colleagues are preparing to take down Casey with the left’s ultimate weapon: vague allegations couched in the rhetoric of #MeToo and cancel culture. The prophecy Harold foresaw from the beginning, the death of manhood, draws near, but they need Harold’s eyewitness account.

Harold must choose whether to defend his friend-crush-idol-god. Can he reverse the pathetic cycle of self-loathing and mediocrity to un-topple the statues of old?

Reading Muscle Man is deliberately uncomfortable. No word is out of place, but no word offers relief. Indeed, Castro follows the growing trend of fiction to eschew absolutes and instead present a portrait of a broken person, allowing the reader to draw from their struggles what they will.

Harold is the quintessential dying man: isolated, radicalized, primed for violence. He’s gasping for air, but most choking victims run away from the party, too ashamed to ask for help.

Come back, Harold! There’s strength in numbers.