The Novelist
A Novel
-
-
4.3 • 4 Ratings
-
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
Brisk and shockingly witty, exuberantly scatological as well as deeply wise, The Novelist is a delight. Jordan Castro is a rare new talent: an author highly attuned to the traditions he is working within while also offering a refreshingly fun sendup of life beset by the endless scroll. —Mary South, author of You Will Never Be Forgotten
In Jordan Castro’s inventive, funny, and surprisingly tender first novel, we follow a young man over the course of a single morning as he tries and fails to write an autobiographical novel, finding himself instead drawn into the infinite spaces of Twitter, quotidian rituals, and his own mind.
The act of making coffee prompts a reflection on the limits of self-knowledge; an editor’s embarrassing tweet sparks rage at the literary establishment; a meditation on first person versus third examines choice and action; an Instagram post about the ethics of having children triggers mimetic rivalry; the act of doing the dishes is at once ordinary and profound: one of the many small commitments that make up a life of stability.
The Novelist: A Novel pays tribute to Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine and Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters, but in the end is a wholly original novel about language and consciousness, the internet and social media, and addiction and recovery.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Castro debuts with the meticulous accounting of a day in the life of a struggling Baltimore novelist. Awakening early one morning, the unnamed novelist, perhaps in his 30s, gravitates to his laptop, where he contends with a strong urge to check email and tries to follow his "don't check Twitter before noon" rule. He ends up scrolling anyway, and his mind wanders to the nature of followers. Soon he is searching for old high school friends on Facebook and Instagram while mulling over his novel-in-progress's semiautobiographical subject material about his life back in Ohio, during a period of withdrawal from heroin addiction. With increasing intensity, and while "staring vacantly" at the screen instead of writing, the young novelist begins to feel the morning slip away in a swath of procrastination, which Castro punctuates and harnesses by taking his protagonist down rabbit holes of thought. It is in these intimate and unabashed ruminations, such as about the difference in taste between "organic and inorganic" bananas, that Castro manages to trace the process of his protagonist's distracted thoughts. Their quotidian miniaturism bears the influence of Nicholson Baker and Lucy Ellmann, making for a welcome relief from the novelist's obsession with the internet. Struggling creative types will undoubtedly see themselves in this confident and surprising chronicle.
