Muscle Man
A Novel
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3.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A hilarious, suspenseful metaphysical thriller following a day in the life of an English professor who would rather be lifting weights from the author of the cult hit The Novelist
Harold, a middling literature professor at a liberal arts college, lives in a state of dissatisfaction and fear. His colleagues and students evoke nothing but disgust and disdain. None of them understand strength, power, and spiritual actualization like he does. His university’s campus—seemingly picturesque—constantly threatens to reveal something sinister.
Over the course of a single afternoon, he wanders the halls, sits in meetings, steals from a student, and goes to the gym—all while reflecting on his professional and existential situation. With every line of Harold’s frenetic consciousness, his mundane routine transforms into something more foreboding, culminating in an ingenious twist.
Brilliantly imagined and darkly funny, Muscle Man is as much a critique of resentment and contemporary masculinity as a satire on the state of higher education, exploring weakness and strength, rationality and irrationality, the spirit and the flesh, and the individual and the collective.
With his minute-to-minute occupation of Harold’s existential disquietude, Castro imbues the novel’s philosophical inquiries with thrilling suspense. Is Harold a raving lunatic whose disdain stems from his own perilous inadequacies, or is there something truly sinister about his colleagues? When all is said and done, is strength a virtue, or a mirage?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A day in the life of a discontented literature professor forms the core of Castro's caustic latest (after The Novelist). Harold would rather lift weights than attend his department's monthly staff meeting at Shepherd College, where tuition soars and students are pampered. Though Harold has a chiseled physique and conceited nature (he'd "always known he had a great mind"), Castro portrays him as confused and alienated, confounded by the maze-like campus and loathsome toward most of his conformist colleagues. While waiting for the meeting, Harold scrolls his phone and entertains himself with private jokes, wondering if being a "lifter" makes him one of the "marginalized people" routinely celebrated at campus events. He likes one colleague, Casey, who unlike him has tenure and a successful publishing record, and who introduced Harold to gym culture, but Casey hasn't been around much. Casey's absence and Harold's swelling obsession with his more successful friend injects a bit of tension into the novel, but other potential plot devices don't quite pan out, as when Harold picks up a student's neglected backpack, telling himself it was left suspiciously. While the story drags in places, Castro mostly holds the reader's attention with Harold's pensive internal monologues. This captures male loneliness in all its funk and fury.
