PositiveThe Chicago Review of Books... an engaging reflection on the anxieties of writing autofiction, and of the genre as it exists today. This is where The Novelist shines—not only in its exploration of the conventions of the genre, but in his experimentation with it as well. This novel, if at times tedious in its granular approach, breathes air into a tired form ... very little of The Novelist is devoted to the nitty gritty details of the narrator’s substance abuse. This is an inspired choice; it’s a feat to write a novel about addiction without including the particulars. These off-camera details of the narrator’s addiction become both the elephant in the room, and something else altogether—everything about him is in some way informed by his addiction. In refusing to write a drug novel, he is nonetheless doing just that ... By bringing attention to all that may be lobbed his way, those critiques are blunted in the process—if Castro has already acknowledged any controversial threads here, what is left to do? This seems to be a trend in fiction where any controversies are explained away within the text. This is made doubly so with autofiction, where separating the author from the narrator can already be a difficult task. Despite this, Castro continues to lean into the knottedness of autofiction at his own whim ... Ultimately, Castro surrenders to the greater pressures at play in the genre, and welcomes the collapse between the various competing forces in the novel. Between the fictitious Jordan Castro and the narrator and the author, between fiction and real life and all that comes in between. In rejecting autofiction, The Novelist ultimately welcomes it.
