INTERVIEW: Jordan Castro by Brian Allen Carr

Brian Allen Carr talks to Jordan Castro about his new novel, Muscle Man (Catapult, Sept. 9)

Jordan Castro put out his first poetry collection in 2012 with Civil Coping Mechanisms and has grown from being a writer of trim and timely internet poetry into an author of sophisticated fiction.

His first novel, The Novelist, bridged a gap between his early works, showcasing Castro’s ability to extract engaging narratives from mundane moments but revealed Castro’s ability to comment on the world around him, both online and in real life—-much of The Novelist takes place via chat.

In similar fashion, Muscle Man (Catapult) is revealed to us via “thought talking”—a sort of method the narrator, Harold, uses for processing information and reflecting on his life.

Both novels take place over the course of a single day, but Muscle Man makes a broader statement about our society at large and gives a complicated and compelling peek at academia.

Castro and I spoke via text message shortly after Muscle Man was released.

Coincidentally, it was the same week Charlie Kirk was assassinated, and Muscle Man (which which is set on a university campus) is a full-throated meditation on the state of higher ed.

If Stoner is a campus novel that romanticizes higher education and Submission is a campus novel that demonizes higher education, then Muscle Man is a campus novel that shows higher ed as a kind of bureaucratic wasteland. People wait for meetings and people talk shit about colleagues, and the students are seen as something of a hindrance, and every character casts suspicion.

Castro and I talk about higher ed, his respect for Nicholson Baker, his early love of punk rock, and a little about lifting weights.

Brian Allen Carr: Does it seem like a weird week to have a campus novel released?

Jordan Castro: It definitely feels intense.

When I was writing [Muscle Man] I remember consciously trying to think about how to render the sense that I’ve had for years, which is that there is some sort of gurgling violence beneath a lot of what goes on at school, in all kinds of ways — and when I re-read the novel later the darkness bothered me, how dark and intense and unrelenting the perspective seemed, but this week kind of confirms that sense….

BAC: I can’t remember, are you a college grad?

JC: I am, I graduated in 2021 though, I went back as an adult.

BAC: Me too. I was 28 when I got my BS. Did you find it enriching or mandatory?

JC: Oh nice — I’m really happy I went when I was older, so I could just focus on the readings and actually learn a bit. I think I found it somewhat enriching—if also a bit degrading….

It was nice to read things I wouldn’t have otherwise read.

And to learn how to like, complete assignments on time, and keep a schedule.

It was also humbling, because I found out that I was really attached to my identity as like, a “writer who didn’t go to college.”

A few months ago I was at a dinner party and said “I actually didn’t go to college” automatically when people were saying what years they graduated.

Then I had to be like “…..until I was an adult” to save it.

What about you?

BAC: About the same. It definitely made me who I am. So I share your sentiment.

Could you have written Muscle Man without going to school?

JC: I doubt I would have written MM without going, I’m pretty sure some version of the beginning of the book was actually my final for a Gothic novel class I took.

I think I started it in some nascent form in 2019, and I sent to my agent in 2023.

BAC: Do you think much about various genres as you write or plan a book?

JC: No.

Celine said something about aiming for “truth in sensation” with his prose, I think about that.

And I think about other things, trying not to use cliches, or trying to describe an experience without using the pre-packaged ‘concepts’ we normally use to describe them.

BC: When you write, do you aim for genius?

JC: I’m not sure. I think in the moment it’s much more like, “How can I make this part more dynamic and propulsive? How can I fix this sentence so the language hits?”

Unfortunately I don’t think I’m a genius, so I try to just work really hard and make it all work as best I can.

But I definitely aim as high as I can.

I’ve written other novels that I haven’t put out — but the commonality with The Novelist and Muscle Man is that with both I thought I was aiming too high, and wouldn’t be able to pull it off, like the whole time I was working on them.

BAC: Do you use ‘thought talking’ to draft?

JC: Not really. I sometimes do use ‘thought-talking’ to try to think about things, for example, on drives…. If I imagine that I’m being interviewed, or explaining something to someone else…. Or I’ll even argue with myself….. But imagining that there’s an audience helps me focus….

BAC: I do the same thing. I drive a lot. It's almost like an imaginary podcast.

Do you think much about politics as you write?

JC: I basically first got into reading and writing because of being into leftist punk music as a small child. I would write these way-out-of-my-depth political essays, read theory and stuff when I was mad young. Then I’d turn the essays into poems/lyrics to sing….

Then I became disillusioned with that stuff, like by age 15 — and started writing other things.

But one thing I always try to think about is what literature can do uniquely well — music can do emotion well; movies can do action well; painting can do image well — but literature alone can portray a particular texture of consciousness, and filter the world through a particular subjectivity that basically ‘replaces’ your own as you read it….

So I think about phenomenological stuff, language stuff, other things.

But politics is a part of it, I’m sure.

Novels can kind of harmonize a lot of different aspects of experience. Politics is one — but I’m mainly interested in politics as like, the ‘thin outer layer’ of deeper realities.

BAC: Who were your favorite bands then?

JC: Against Me!, Defiance, Ohio — but Anti-Flag was like the first major band for me

I went to one of Anti-Flags shows when I was 16 and one of them ‘called me out’ during their set and said I was best dressed, or something… I think I was wearing a tie…….

BAC: Who do you listen to now?

JC: For the past few days me and my wife Nicolette have been listening to ‘Everything Hallelujah’ on the new Justin Bieber album….

BAC: You and Justin Bieber have been working a long time.

JC: True.

He has a line in that song, ‘brush my teeth Hallelujah’.

Kind of alt lit 1.0 style.

BAC: Was it weird to grow up as an artist?

JC: I don’t really have anything to compare it to — I’ve loved literature and have been writing and publishing since I was so young, I can’t really imagine anything else

BAC: Your writing journey coincided with your sobriety journey. Did sobriety change the way you write?

JC: When I was young and on drugs, everything was basically unconscious. Then when I got a little older and got sober, I felt basically paralyzed with possibility. So I kind of think that’s when my ‘real writing’ actually started. I experienced life as having some real, existential stakes — and was able to become interested in things and other people.

When you’re young and on drugs, your world is very small.

BC: Did addiction ultimately make you a stronger person?

JC: I think it humbled me, and that paradoxically made me stronger.

But I don’t really think “I’m stronger.”

I started praying and relying on God and other people.

BAC: You've lost some pretty important people. Did that make you closer to God?

JC: I think so. I wrote a long tweet about it. But yeah — I lost my cousin to gun violence, my best friend, then Gian, then my brother to overdoses — and, even though there’s no easy ‘takeaways’ from those kinds of experiences, I think they’ve just convinced me of the reality of sin and grace. I wish there were better words for it, but I haven’t found them.

BAC: Those are good words I think.

BAC: Do you think much about literary scenes?

Like movements or aesthetics?

JC: I must have thought about them once, but I haven’t in a while…

I don’t self-consciously think of myself as ‘belonging’ to any, and I think generally they’re media creations to categorize things and write bad essays.

BAC: I feel the same. There are scenes and I have seen them. But I’ve always wanted to be my own thing.

But there are definitely some authors whose careers I admire.

Are their living or dead authors whose careers (or catalogues or trajectories) that you admire or seek to in some way emulate?

JC: Nicholson Baker.

He has such a surprising catalogue, from the masterpieces The Mezzanine and U&I, to this huge pacifist book about WWII that uses only primary sources in a kind of collage way, to his sex books (which I don’t love), to breaking the Covid lab leak story. He also writes with a kind of generous mirth and attention/care that I love.

He has a line in his Paris Review Art of Fiction interview about how he (I’m gonna butcher it) likes to pop up, do his thing, and then run away laughing, feeling like he got away with something.

It’s way better than that — but whatever he said in that interview I relate with.

I know shockingly little about writers careers though tbh.

BAC: I’m the same. I don’t spend a lot of time studying author’s lives.

What about literary beefs? Do you think about those at all? Either recent or from the past?

JC: Literary beefs… Hm…

I have a wife and a job and stuff now.

I feel smooth brain about a lot of things that maybe would have got me energized before.

Writers hate writers who are either a.) similar to them, b.) slightly more successful than them, or c.) way more successful than them, as long as they can’t get anything from them.

Part of the reason why it’s good to read old books, besides them having ‘stood the test of time,’ is because you can read them without getting into a mimetic rival situation with them.

BAC: Do you think there's too much drama in the literary world?

JC: I wouldn’t know. But my sense is that there is too much fake drama, and not enough real drama.

There’s bad writers accusing other bad writers of being bad people.

BAC: Do you think Harold [the protagonist of Muscle Man] sees the academic world as overly dramatic?

JC: I think part of the drama in academia and the literary world comes from the structural dynamic of it. In 2022, 3,000 people got advanced degrees in creative writing. 10,000 got Masters in English lit, and 1.5k got PhDs.

That’s almost 15,000 people in one year with pieces of paper that say they’re experts in this field.

And there are no jobs — even if you just take creative writing— 3,000 in one year......

BAC: Is most of the drama built around scarcity?

JC: That’s part of it — people using ideological hackery and so on as a way to tear people down and move up — but it’s even bleaker than that, because even if there were let’s say 3,000 tenure track creative writing jobs, that doesn’t solve the fact that there is no world in which 3,000 people per year are good writers.

It’s kind of insane, there are like 350 MFA programs.

BAC: Haha. There’s probably not 3,000 really good anything, professionally. Scarcity probably drives most of the conflict in all walks.

Do you see Muscle Man as a critique of our current society in that regard? The fears and anxieties?

JC: Yeah definitely.

BAC: What’s your bench max?

JC: 275 pounds

BAC: Strong!

What’s your goal?

JC: It’d be nice to bench 315 one day…

BAC: Do you think if you put up 315 you'd wanna put up 320?

JC: Yes

Well.

I’m actually not sure.

BAC: What are you working on now? Writing wise?

JC: Major Motion Picture novel.

I always hesitate to talk about what I’m working on while I’m working on it, in part because it seems to ruin it, and makes me unable to actually work on the thing.

But I’ve been obsessed with Patricia Highsmith’s novels recently and am finally, I think, trying to Do Plot.