After a year of self-imposed exile, a young writer attends a New Year’s Eve party in hopes of reconnecting with old classmates in a blackly humorous tale set on a single snowy night.
Castillo’s prose luxuriates in intellectual snobbery, wielding it as both shield and self-inflected wound ... Castillo is relentless in exposing these absurd desires ... While the first half of Fresh, Green Life seems to stall, caught in controlled delay and imagined outcomes, this deliberation isn’t the plot’s absence, it’s its launch. The second half gives way to movement, conflict, and consequences. That structure...is right at home in the broader arc of Castillo’s work ... Castillo’s work is marked by a distinct and nimble experimentalism that’s only growing in its playfulness, generosity, and gravity ... Fresh, Green Life is about having a mind that believes it can juke the messiness of being human, of thinking yourself smarter than your circumstances, and realizing that having an intellect isn’t the same as having a life.
Fresh, Green Life demonstrates how fun misanthropy can be as a linguistic gambit and how poorly it plays as a spiritual position ... Fresh, Green Life succeeds by limiting the whimsy and making the surreal elements all close enough to plausibility to replace the slack energy of a goofy daydream with the tension of everyday anxiety ...
The Victorian tinge to our narrator’s voice gives the story just the right level of unreality ... You will not ultimately be asked to love or forgive or even understand anybody in the book, and this is a gift that feels incredibly generous.
Castillo dramatizes a version of himself that is both vain and wryly self-aware ... Castillo’s pretentious persona is...jaded yet endearingly idealistic. Castillo’s hypnotic, funny, and wonderfully surprising novel, an exemplary example of autofiction, wraps up the reader and takes them on a fascinating journey.
