On its surface, Castro’s new novel Muscle Man (Catapult, September 2025, 260 pp.) faithfully justifies all the Thomas Bernhard comparisons that littered the blurbs and reviews of his first tome, The Novelist: The protagonist—or, in this case, maybe just agonist—Harold, an English professor at an out-of-the-way liberal arts college and obsessive gymrat, is a tangled maze of neuroses, often spiraling into repetitive, hyperfixated internal monologues like
One could know about mind-muscle connection; indeed even believe in mind-muscle connection (which is to say one could have mind-muscle connection swirling around in one’s head like a broken, endlessly flushing toilet); and he could make flailing, haphazard attempts at practicing mind-muscle connection, feeling vaguely pained by his new knowledge, meekly curling his arms, once or twice, at random times; but in the end, he was confronted with his own lack of discipline, a kind of anti-learning inside himself that did not want to grow,
which remind this reader of the art-theorizing in Bernhard’s Old Masters as much as of the pained stuckness and obsessions of fellow Bernhard-comparison frequent-flyer László Krasznahorkai’s story collection The World Goes On.
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