Weightlifting in the Underground

Harold, the protagonist of Jordan Castro’s new novel Muscle Man, is a Gulliver who doesn’t travel. Or a Gulliver whose travels only take him back and forth across the campus of Shepherd College, where he teaches, encountering moral pygmies and moral giants, all of whom seem to lack something essential to the human perspective. Harold’s liberal arts lifeworld is unvital and strangely gray. His thoughts are “sludge-like.” He wants nobility, strength, purity, but sees only “spiritual malady” in the “scrunched and squinty countenance” of the people around him.