THE NOVELIST

Castro’s debut traces the routine of a frustrated writer.

Set over the course of a few hours in the life of its unnamed narrator, this novel meticulously tracks the myriad ways a writer can procrastinate or be distracted while working on a book. There are several directions this could have taken, but Castro opts for the most deadpan options, which include the narrator periodically communicating with his friend Li, checking Twitter, and visiting the bathroom. In this relatively short book, a lot of time is spent on bodily functions. “It occurred to me that Li and I had probably been pooping at the same time,” the narrator muses early on; later, several pages are dedicated to the narrator defecating and then wiping his ass. There are some very self-aware moments, as when the narrator alludes to Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine or waxes poetic about bananas, a favorite food of the title character in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. And while the mundane elements of the book can at times be overwhelming, there are moments that feel genuinely clever—for instance, for all the metafictional games, there’s also a sharp break from them in that Jordan Castro exists as a distinct character within the novel’s universe. “It was wasteful enough getting sucked into Twitter by the vacuous, mind-deteriorating tweets of the people I followed, but it would be even more time consuming if I were to follow Jordan Castro,” the narrator thinks. The novel opens up in its second half, with the narrator reflecting on his sobriety, but it can be frustrating getting there.

Deadpan and scatological, this will likely be a polarizing book.