Muscle meme

Madeleine Adams on Jordan Castro.

In Muscle Man, out now from Catapult, Jordan Castro burrows into the muscled mind of a Dostoevskian malcontent. Castro’s protagonist Harold is an English professor at fictional Shepherd College who likes three things: lifting, literature, and his lifting buddy Casey, who also happens to be his only friend in the department.

Harold is Crime and Punishment’s Raskolnikov if he lurked on weightlifting meme accounts. “Power,” says Raskolnikov, “is given only to him who dares to stoop and take it.” Change “stoop” to “deadlift” and you have Harold’s philosophy. Smuggling a half-serious body fascist manifesto into an uncanny thriller, Castro produces a “sincere” satire in the tradition of novelist, bodybuilder, and ultranationalist Yukio Mishima.

Harold’s resentment feeds on imagined conflict, recalling Dostoevsky’s creations—the embittered “Underground Man” of Notes from Underground and the scheming Raskolnikov. Like them, Harold embodies ressentiment, the condition described by critic René Girard—Peter Thiel’s former teacher and a frequent touchstone in Castro’s essays—whose work on the “underground man” also surfaces in Muscle Man. As in Girard’s reading, Harold is a thwarted romantic, soured by envy and paralyzed in action.

Before the faculty meeting that takes up the first half of the novel, Harold does take a sort of action: a glinting object he sees in the hallway near the meeting appears to be a knife. When he steals an unattended backpack that he thinks contains the knife, the reader begins to wonder whether Harold’s paranoia is justified. But there has been a spate of stabbings on campus, reframed by “ALERT TO INSPIRE” emails as “opportunities to get inspired to consider new ways of thinking about how we might better relate to and understand each other.” The wannabe Übermensch professor isn’t Muscle Man’s only target of satire. The nanny-state liberal arts college, in fact, holds much of the blame.

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