Cuck-Coded Zarathustra

Cracking open Muscle Man, the sophomore novel by Jordan Castro, it is hard not to recall a passage in his debut, The Novelist, in which his narrator remarks, after opening a draft of his own book on his laptop, “I read the first few sentences while sipping coffee. They were completely fucking terrible. The sentences didn’t follow one another, they didn’t sound good, and they weren’t interesting.” The reader’s first impression is of an overwritten not-quite-rightness: a staircase seems to swing “as if suspended from the ceiling by thick chains”; at the same time, it is “monstrously rooted in the floor.” Halls unfurl like tentacles—can something rectilinear unfurl? A long description of furniture fails to quite gel: it is of “many different kinds” and “from many different time periods and many different parts of the world,” but most of it is “created by a single company,” and being ten years old, it is somehow an “old-new simulacrum of something even older.”