'The Novelist' Is Among the Best Books About Addiction

I first heard about Jordan Castro’s debut, The Novelist, on Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan’s podcast Red Scare, which is fitting since the book is, much like that podcast, a highly ironic, hyper-self-aware look into the effects of contemporary internet culture on attention spans and the ability to produce “authentic” cultural work in our era. The Novelist is more than that, though. In particular, it profoundly reflects addiction as a universal human condition.