Jordan Castro’s Muscle Man – Teddy Burnette
September 22, 2025
In Nathalie Sarraute’s brief foreword to her novel, Tropisms, she writes “For no literary work can be a mere illustration of principles, however convincing.” Jordan Castro’s recently published Muscle Man is led by a character, Harold, who is driven by his principles (only to renege on them at the very end) and at all turns lambasts the degradation of university campuses and the demise of strong men in the world. “Society, particularly in the West, existed solely to keep exceptional men from living out their destiny…” he thinks at one point. It is, in effect, a Walter Kirn tweet come to life, and in its own right, a thoroughly accomplished satire of what many men perceive their existence to be today.
For context, I began reading Muscle Man with The Novelist fresh in mind, which seems to me one of the funniest, and best, novels of the last couple of years, and one of this era’s most accurate works. Castro’s debut novel captured the distractive nature of social media better than anything recently published, and I’d approached his new work with the sense that it would be a continuation of the themes around the intense interiority of our daily lives and serve as a kind of antithesis to the work of a writer like Robbe-Grillet. Yet, unlike in The Novelist, there are other characters in this novel who are given life other than the central character, namely the other faculty at the university, not to mention the very school itself and the gym he frequents, which provide the story with a broader sense of reality than The Novelist. In our modern world in which men writing novels that place men at the center of their stories has become an act that, ridiculously, is now the subject of long thinkpieces that have decided these decisions are somehow political or noteworthy or revelatory, or even an idea worth writing about, Castro presents us with something that expertly satirizes the idea of the ‘exceptional man’ who is beaten down by an imagined society.
This is an altogether more interesting thesis than simply pointing to Castro, saying he is a man and, shockingly enough, so is Harold! But that is the state of criticism nowadays. This thesis is also one that is shown in Harold to be a result of self-obsessed perception, rather than a description of the world in which we live. Identities, in Harold’s mind, are caricatures and performance, and the students and professors around him are obviously guilty of this, and, of course, whether he knows it or not, so is he.
Early in the novel, Harold thinks about his colleague, Casey, whose “first book, which Harold envied, was about the history of the way thought was rendered in the novel, and his second was about the relationship between the body and literature—calling for what Casey termed ‘embodied literature’.” As this idea comes to fruition in the very book we are reading, the objects and the school itself are given qualities of the human body; creaking chairs sigh and couches envelop students as Harold looks on, overly aware of his muscles and size, of his need to be at the gym and consume protein. He “was one, and his colleagues were all.” Harold, who exists in a seemingly permanent state of unease unless he is in the gym, is fully formed, and the reality of others is in doubt. He is surrounded by caricatures performing the rituals of the current day. That is, ensuring lesson plans are developed around the endless stream of ‘recent events,’ that sensitive issues be spoken about in delicate ways, that systemic racism be acknowledged, and other tasks that a certain kind of Twitter user might say are, in the words of Kirn, “turning college campuses into the least socially and intellectually free places in the country.”
It is this perception, of society’s scorn toward men which keeps them from reaching the exceptional, that colors all of Harold’s interactions and requires of him to question all those who reach out to him through this void. Upon receiving a text from his colleague, David, we learn that: “Ever since their first encounter, David had been nice to Harold, and it was precisely this niceness that was so brutal. Harold could see through it like water.”
Following a faculty meeting, which takes up most of the first part of the novel, Harold is finally free of the collegiate confines and drives to his preferred gym. There he experiences reality in a way that the university simply cannot provide. His place in society is set in stone, he is one and so are the others, the collective all of the classrooms and the faculty, the perceived fealty to homogeneity, political correctness, and the tamping down of stray, or potentially sensitive opinions, are no more. He is a mind connected to his body, ritually lifting weights with a careful strategy, in service of a greater, and very real, good (i.e. strength, bigger muscles, utility, beauty) that has actual stakes. This is a welcome relief for Harold, having had to spend so much time in a world of lumpy people whose bodies “slagged and slouched,” who are “…pump devoid. Modern people lived motionless lives: hunched over laptops, phones, tablets. Their bodies wanted the pump, were literally dying for the pump…”
What arrives toward the end of Muscle Man is a different kind of thesis. Universities, forever, have been an environment of ideas and changing principles, attached to progress and shifts in thought. Some faculty and students, then, are more likely to be pleased with the direction of these thoughts and principles than others, and then years or decades later, others will find that the winds have turned in their direction, and they will find themselves in the right, while others are in the so-called wrong. A gym, however, does not evolve. Muscles are muscles, a pump is a pump, and a beautiful body is a beautiful body. In the sauna, a man named Kevin tells Harold that, “…all of history is leading toward a synthesis of the abstract and concrete, and a lifter gets a glimpse of it each time he is in the gym.”
In the end, a twist arises that shows the benefits of a pump, and that endorphins and blood coursing through the body might be the perfect antidote to boring faculty meetings and the fear of conformity. Being part of the all might not be so bad for Harold, and it’s easier to slide into it than an exceptional man might expect.
But this is all to say, as a modern person devoid of a recent pump, who wrote this review hunched over a laptop, that I could be in fact dying for a pump, and that I must quickly learn to speak my body’s language, lest my ability to decipher literature goes the way of my muscles: forever impaired and weak. Who knows.