Sub-Incel Homesick Blues: Jordan Castro's 'Muscle Man'

In late 2025, on a routine search of the internet for anything about the experience or phenomenology of weight training, I found a piece in Harper’s Magazine by Jordan Castro, called ‘Getting the Pump’.

I am what Americans would call a ‘college professor’, one who is currently researching the phenomenology of resistance training. So I am hungry for literary accounts like this. When I found out that Castro also had a new novel out, called Muscle Man, I was very excited. An entire novel about an American ‘college professor’ obsessed with bodybuilding! This felt like a gift.

So, instead of ordering it there and then, I instead asked my wife to get it for me for Christmas. And then I waited, looking forward to a good few days of quality reading in late December.

To say I was disappointed is an understatement. To be fair, most of this disappointment cannot be attributed to Castro himself. It relates, rather, to the profound mismatch between the superlative praise lavished by the cover endorsements and my actual experience of the book.

After reading the cover blurbs, I was fully expecting a truly unique literary work. The cover blurbs promised a new experience, one that probed the depths of the dysfunctional modern university, and delivered laughs from start to finish.

What I encountered, however, was fully humdrum from the get-go. And not a new genre or style in any sense. The narrator takes us through the thought processes and incessant fretting about appearances of a seemingly taciturn ‘college professor’. I was unable to establish why it was meant to be funny, or indeed what it was meant to be.

Certainly, this was no David Lodge novel. I couldn’t help thinking that Castro would have been well served by reading a couple of those, which poke fun at the academics of a fictional university in a fictional city, in the 1970s and ‘80s.

In comic satires like Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975), Small World: An Academic Romance (1984) or Nice Work (1988), David Lodge sent up many of the academic fads, affectations and intellectual crazes of the day – such as the enthusiastic uptake of ‘French theory’, mainly in the form of Jacques Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’, by such British scholars as Terry Eagleton, and others.

Jordan Castro’s Muscle Man updates this for 2025 by poking fun at, well, ‘French theory’, via references to such contemporary figures as Jacques Derrida and his work of the 1970s, and the dropping of names of such contemporary scholars as… Terry Eagleton. Eagleton was influential in literary and cultural theory from the 1970s to the 1990s.

Castro even has one of his characters get a kick out of saying theory-words like ‘hegemony’… Hegemony, of course, is a 1930s concept that returned to academic vogue in the 1980s. It would be more radical and of the moment to have someone get a kick out of discussing the newfangled thing called the Information Superhighway, or marvelling at email.

But maybe this is just the sour grapes of a ‘college professor’ who can see holes big enough to drive a bus through in the depiction of college professors. Maybe there are indeed colleges and professors like this somewhere in the US, like stranded Japanese soldiers on some Pacific island still thinking they are fighting the war.

Or maybe it’s representative of the book as a whole. Muscle Man is divided into three sections. Section one charts ‘Harold’ waiting for a meeting to start. In the process, for some inexplicable reason, he confiscates a student’s backpack. Then he doesn’t look inside it, and instead frets about his action. This, I think, is meant to generate tension, or comedy, or … something. I know, right? It feels most like 1970s British sitcom farce.

Section two is the section I wanted. This is Harold going to the gym. Unfortunately, most of the time is spent describing him scrolling through Instagram. The actual literary account of the experience of training that I was waiting for was little different to that given in Castro’s Harper’s Magazine essay… As Harold himself might ‘think-speak’ (yes, ‘think-speak’), ‘Fffff’. Or ‘Rrrrr’. Or ‘Nnnnn’.

Section three sees Harold called back to college after his workout. Of course, Harold fears that this must be to do with the bizarrely confiscated backpack. But it is not. The backpack, it turns out, is less even than a Maguffin. It just fizzles out of importance.

I am not the only reader to have noticed many of these things. The book has received some scathing reviews. And also a few gushing ones. Quite why it has received so many reviews at all, and in some prominent places, is a mystery to me. All I can think is that this guy must have a great agent.

However, along with the scathing and the fawning, are some interesting reflections on this work as being in some sense ‘about’ (if not ‘of’ - although it might well be ‘of’) the contemporary ‘sub-incel homesick blues’ moment of American masculinity. This piece in The Atlantic, for instance. Or this one, in The New Statesman.

In fact, these two review articles, which link such work to issues in and around the so-called ‘manosphere’ (which I think would be better called ‘the manscape’), have made me if not rethink Muscle Man, at least develop a grim curiosity about this kind of work. After reading these two review essays, I immediately ordered the other book that the The New Statesman adds into the zeitgeisty mix: a novel called Fresh, Green Life by Sebastian Castillo. Fresh, Green Life purports to be about another dysfunctional ‘college professor’ who becomes obsessed with exercise…

As I write these words, I am sitting waiting for Fresh, Green Life to be delivered. This time, however, I am considerably less ‘excited’ about what I am about to read, and considerably more ‘braced’ for it.