The reader’s first impression is of an overwritten not-quite-rightness ... Castro is a beneficiary of what one might call normal privilege, as someone who does things millions of others do in a literary milieu where they are deemed exotic ... Muscle Man and its predecessor have the awkwardness of extended improvisations in the wrong key ... If Muscle Man was never going to be all things to all people, it might as well have been something to someone; instead, it thumbs its nose at wokeness while giving the right-curious too little to chew on, and spurns character development, the objective correlative, and anything else that might have made of it a novel with proper heft.
Neither of Castro’s novels has much in the way of a plot; the narrative propulsion comes instead from his protagonists’ relentless internal chronicling ... Castro’s talent lies in meticulously creating a realistic—and entertaining—portrait of one man’s compulsions, bringing individual texture to a curious social phenomenon ... A lot of fun ... As Castro layers thoughts and reactions into a mesmerizing rhythm, Harold is made real.
Castro understands better than most that not only contemporary life but contemporary consciousness have become hopelessly contaminated by the internet. His novels center around characters scrolling helplessly ... In Castro’s signature move, he creates a kind of digital-consciousness stream, stacking a series of connected but unrelated thoughts, sensations, and impressions on top of one another, evoking the cacophonous simultaneity of contemporary life ... Castro is a precise and immensely readable stylist. He’s fun to read, and very funny, and his novels do not read like a simple transposition of online life to the page. Muscle Man is a deeply ironic book, creating a vast chasm between Harold’s strongman self-image and his infantile powers of self-expression ... Yet Castro, too, is obsessed with capturing his audience and controlling their attention, an obsession which gets in the way of his own fiction ... He imposes his view without giving you the breathing room to gauge if it might even be true, shrinking his novel to the size of his own mind, rather than opening it out to the reader, and the world.
Castro’s focus on everyday minutiae breathes new life into the campus novel as Harold’s experiences capture the precarity and commercialization of academia in this gloriously bewitching, funny, and meditative tale.
