The Novelist.
Jordan Castro.
Soft Skull. 2022.
ISBN 978-1593767136.
2. Nothing happens, nothing happens continuously, the caffeinated novelist "roused from sleep into another sleep."
3. The novelist does the usual things uninspired writers do. He sits on Twitter and becomes jealous of more successful writers. He checks Facebook and body-shames "thick" people from high school. He checks Instagram and views the stories he lacks.
4. The novelist thinks of Eric, his one-time friend, now nemesis: "I thought of Eric's novel, distantly desiring to work on my own novel, and felt a pang of disdain toward Eric's novel, then my own novel—then projected my disdain outward toward the literary world, at least the part of if that I could see online."
5. This is generally how the book goes. The Novelist reads, in our post-Internet age, like a work of historical fiction. (This could be due, in part, to how long it takes to get a novel like this one published.)
6. What is "Twitter" and "Facebook" and "Instagram" at this point but stock autofiction characters like "bike messenger" and "Tao Lin" and "new media company."
7. The autofiction generation, a shambolic literary cohort strongly influenced by the world you can see online, frequently write themselves into each other's books. And so the student of autofiction wonders who Eric really is, and observes that Li here is Tao Lin's Li from Leave Society, and that Jordan Castro is Calvin, both the name of a character in the unnamed novelist's novel, and in Lin's Taipei, when Lin wrote as Paul, as the unnamed novelist of The Novelist remembers. Even if the book's other characters, like the sleeping female, Violet, are not familiar to the student, they would assume she is also someone else. Even Dillon, the dog, walks with credits.
8. Do you belong? That's a common question when reading the literature of friends. Do you want to be friends with these people? Why? Why not?
9. Whenever this novel by Jordan Castro mentions a writer named "Jordan Castro" and describes how the unnamed narrator in this hardcover we're reading by Jordan Castro feels about "Jordan Castro," we are on the playing field of what the critic Andrea Long Chu, in a peppery review of Leave Society, called the "brazenness of autofiction's self-concealment." With "Jordan Castro," Jordan Castro comments, in part, on the oddity of seeing your own tweets in your own feed. The great discovery of autofiction is that you can't mute yourself.
10. The Novelist is a popular book. Readers are waiting for it. The Chicago Public Library, for example, has four copies with six holds on them. At least ten people in Chicago have The Novelist on the brain.
11. "The withheld work of art," Don DeLillo writes in 1991's Mao II, also about a novelist, "is the only eloquence left." Could that be the work of art our novelist refuses to write?
12. The Novelist is the kind of novel book jackets and dinner party guests call the novel of digression. I call a novel like this a vertical novel because it attempts to reach higher after the death of God, but finds itself slithering on the ground. And so it erects a pole.
13. The novel has a gorgeous cover image. It shows tall trees making prison bars for a laptop floating, like an ominous woodcutter, in the ferns below. This image slowly changed during my reading of the book. It made me place the book in the Pacific Northwest, even though the writing doesn't say. When I understood the book would never progress but only continue digressing, the cover grew into more of a cliché: not being able to see the forest through the trees.
14. I would almost call the cover Heideggerian. "Even before the path has properly begun to reveal itself to us," writes George Steiner on that digressive philosopher, "we have been thrust to the center. We stand at the Lichtung, or clearing, in the innermost part of the forest." This is where the novelist of The Novelist stands. In this clearing, he "resists the expository urge," and opens a space for healing.
15. The Novelist is a book that takes no risks. Like an infant, it is in love with its own shit. Like all vertical novels, it works to disprove Raymond Carver's quip that stories only happen to people who know how to tell them.
16. The Novelist is a fun book to read. It is a very easy book to conventionally review. There should be a 700-word review of The Novelist on the Arts & Leisure page of every newspaper in this country.
17. It is very easy to say The Novelist is ultimately a story of GRIEF. It's right there in the title.
18. After reading The Novelist, I better understand why normal people confess to me they'd rather not read novels at all, especially when they're on contemporary topics. Normal people want to steep themselves not in novelists but dragons, vampires, bikers, tech CEOs, spiritual gurus, marketing geniuses, chefs, Vikings, cars, Goths, crime, childhood, Russians, drugs but not recovery. Sometimes recovery. Readers like happy endings.
19. If a normal person asked me what book they should read, I would trick them and tell them Jordan Castro's The Novelist. Very suspenseful, I would say. Wait till you get to the plot twist in the woods. But if a novelist asked me what book they should read, I would tell them something else. George Steiner on Martin Heidegger, probably.
20. More about Eric: "This is what the literary world did now, I'd reminded myself, they celebrated stupid novels for stupid reasons. Every novel, like Eric's novel, failed as a novel, but since no one wanted to 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."
21. Should The Novelist reach readers who aren't writers? Would The Bougie Plumber reach readers who aren't plumbers? It would no doubt put up numbers, but not as many as The Elite Prosecutor, The Slutty Foreman, or The Greasy Don.
22. In one funny passage, the novelist, within his novel, thinks that telling the police he is a novelist means they will let him go. This is the opposite of how I feel about being a novelist. I should be arrested.
23. The Novelist works—or rather relaxes—best when the novelist is angry, at successful friends like Eric, or shrimp chips. Castro excels at writing what Geoff Dyer called in 1997's Out of Sheer Rage—another book about a novelist—"sub-Bernhardian rants." Which is not quite the same thing as the book the novelist is sometimes trying to write to get back at Eric, a version of Thomas Bernhard'sWoodcutters.
24. "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."
25. As The Novelist very well knows, the point of literature is always something else.
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