A few pages into Jordan Castro’s debut novel, The Novelist, a slim autofictional account of a writer attempting, and often failing, to write a novel while contending with the ruinous effects of a social media obsession, I snapped a photo of the cover and uploaded it to Twitter. I don’t usually flash my review copies of the books I’m reviewing. But since The Novelist was receiving significant buzz and high praise from some of the coolest cats in the literary scene, I wanted to get in on the action. I, too, received an early copy of The Novelist, my tweet not-so-subtly intimated. Alex Perez is one of the literary scene’s cool cats. The likes rolled in, confirming my supreme coolness, and as I sat poolside in Orlando, Florida, on vacation — I now blame the heat for my tackiness — I felt embarrassed but, sadly, also very validated. I knew what I was doing, but did it anyway, because Twitter, as The Novelist’s unnamed narrator, whose “brain felt glitchy” due to social media overuse, so aptly reminded me when I resumed reading, “had proven calamitous when it came to getting work done. I clicked unthinkingly, often feverishly, and if I started in the morning, I would generally continue, unhinged, throughout the day, on both my laptop and my phone, everywhere I went, no matter what else I was doing.”
I’d uploaded the photo for the clout and to induce the feverish clicking, which, ironically, was keeping me from finishing reading the novel about a novelist struggling to finish writing a novel due to the same affliction I was suffering from. The Novelist, which is yet another Internet Novel, like Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts, enamored with metafictional conceits and which flaunts its influences, is the best of the lot because it superbly captures the circuitous psychosis of the degenerate social media user who can’t stop clicking and eventually becomes one with the cursor.
The Novelist, which takes place over a single morning as the narrator works on a novel — “a third person, present tense, short-chaptered account of three days in 2015” — is reminiscent of Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, which is name-dropped in the early pages of the book. Castro makes it clear that The Novelist is a hyperliterary novel, which is to say that he never shies away from his influences and the twee playfulness that animates such narratives. His unabashed commitment to the bit, along with a propulsive prose style that hits its incisive peak in the final third of the novel when the narrator skewers his nemesis, Eric, a literary misanthrope who “hates policemen, parents, teachers, even firemen, all with the same indiscriminate zeal,” is what separates The Novelist from similarly niche novels that are geared and marketed toward the cool cat crowd. But its slimness and autofictional pyrotechnics belie its philosophical heft and seriousness. Initially, it gives off the impression that it’s a funny novel with traces of seriousness, but in actuality, it’s a serious book that uses humor to lull the reader into a comfortable state before unleashing the vitriolic, yet life-affirming, rant that is the heart of the narrative.
I was waiting for the edge — rage, even — to materialize fully because in this current passive-aggressive moment in which woke posturing passes for literary edginess, the angry novel is a great rarity. I could sense Castro getting closer as The Novelist progressed, courting the rage, and as I read on, I hoped he’d get there. “Release it, Castro,” I thought. Before The Novelist reaches its vitriolic climax, there’s the requisite table setting required of the Internet Novel, in which stylized everyday interactions are passed off as relaying grand philosophical wisdom. It bogs down the narrative a bit, as when the narrator obsessively describes his favorite mug or excruciatingly details the “one and done wipe” technique after a bowel movement. But Castro is savvy enough that even during these moments of affected rumination, the constant below-the-surface edge that makes The Novelist such a distinctive read is always present. After all, it’s no easy feat writing a tense book in which the plot hinges on a writer who’s frustrated with the tense of the novel he’s working on.
The bubbling anger permeating The Novelist makes sense if one has followed the career trajectory of Castro, a pillar of the alt-lit scene that dominated internet writing from the mid-to-late aughts. The scene, which was birthed and led by Tao Lin, has transformed, and fallen off, in recent years as the young writers who made it up have moved on to other styles and lives. But Castro, along with Lin, his literary godfather, remains and continues to produce compelling work that captures the zeitgeist.
Lin’s most recent novel, Leave Society, was released last year and signaled a major shift for the writer. His previous works revolved around his obsessions with internet culture and its attendant minutiae, but Leave Society, just as it sounds, is an autofictional account of leaving all that behind. Lin, whose alter ego goes by “Li” in Leave Society, makes an appearance in the early pages of The Novelist. Castro and Lin are longtime friends, so it’s no surprise that Li makes an appearance in The Novelist, just as Castro’s alter ego shows up in Leave Society. The novels complement one another and put to bed alt-lit as they rebuke the lifestyle and obsessions of the scene.
The failing third-person present novel the narrator is working on in The Novelist is a junkie narrative about his days as a heroin addict, which parallels Castro’s well-documented struggles with addiction. This is a writer contending with moving on to a healthier lifestyle in which yerba mate and French press coffee have replaced the powders and the pills. The purging of the addiction awakens a philosophical side in the narrator, but it isn’t until he decides to quit working on the junkie novel and begins work on a first-person rant inspired by Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard that The Novelist goes from good to great. The purging of the junkie preoccupation, and narrative crutch, complete, Castro hits his final form.
A successful literary rant novel, a la Bernhard’s Woodcutters, must be a biting annihilation of the system or people under dissection while never tipping over into the purely misanthropic. The contrivance of the plot matters less than the subject and efficacy of the rant insofar as the ranting reaches heightened levels that allow for the suspension of disbelief. After some hit-or-miss attempts in the first part, Castro goes “full Bernhard,” aping the legendary Austrian’s style. The result is the total decimation of the contemporary literary scene: “Every novel, like Eric’s novel, failed as a novel, but since no one read novels, no one noticed, and instead of despairing over the failed state of our literary culture, they rejoiced, like madmen delirious from bashing their heads into the wall. Eric’s novel was one such wall. Every review focused on something other than its novelistic qualities: it was a political, historical, or sociological document; it was a philosophical treatise, and so on. What was the point of literature, I’d wondered, if it could only ever be something else?”
The rage permeating The Novelist comes from our culture’s inability to answer, or even care about, answering that question. The irony, of course, is that in attempting to solve the problem of contemporary culture’s disinterest in the straight novel, Castro has written a book that traffics in the autofictional stylings of the very same novelists he’s deriding. But in order to slay a beast, sometimes one must play by its rules. The Novelist succeeds because Castro, a true novelist, deploys the tools of the contemporary novelist enamored with himself and an insular literary culture and turns them against the despicable Erics of the literary world who speak of books and literature and art but know nothing of the soul and spirit.
Alex Perez is a fiction writer and cultural critic from Miami. Follow him on Twitter @Perez_Writes.
