I have a certain fondness for the gym bro. There’s a puppy-like, amateurish idea that you can decimate your body and push it to failure with the obliteration of the mind. It makes intuitive sense that bodily manipulation will result in mental stability, as it sometimes but does not often do, and the 18-year-olds raised on muscular supremacy via Instagram Reels have internalized this to create a new lifting revolution based on the ideal of physical beauty. But with all of this emphasis on appearances, where does the mind come in?
Like Murakami was a runner, Jordan Castro is a lifter; his new book, Muscle Man, follows a day in the life of a college professor who can’t wait to get out of this meeting and into the gym. Not notably enormous, but so entrenched in the world of physical fitness such that every second thought revolves around it, Harold’s itch to lift goes hand in hand with his ire at the “mentally defective” oafs that are students, the pretentious teachers, and even Shepherd College itself, to the point of fanatical, paranoid thought — Harold would “always be in the clutches of some malevolent, tentacled beast; the sinewy halls.”
Harold’s distrust of academia and college-aged minds is not new, but is funny — the book dances around the word “woke.” The furniture in his department rejects a dead architect’s designs (he had some “eccentric” eugenicist ideas), but sources global furniture to “give the students a broader, more inclusive historical sense.” “Violence was bad, but the right kind of violence was not violence at all: it was justice, or love,” Harold thinks, and several Fox newscasters making fun of careful leftist thinkers come to mind.
The book’s best bit is the ALERT_TO_INSPIRE@shepherd.edu email, which sends out emergency broadcasts about events that are definitely not crimes. These were “opportunities to get inspired to consider new ways of thinking about how we might better relate to and understand one another,” Castro writes in placating, soft university-speak; “What might have been the systemic cause of the student’s getting stabbed twenty-three times in the back? And how might better scholarship, or better pedagogy, prevent it?”
His colleagues, too, are blundering idiots who only forbid Harold to hit gym — he holds contempt for basically everyone except Casey, his lifting buddy that’s suspiciously absent today. “Dolly’s lips were always flapping with an anecdote about back home and her kin,” and “If you took David and put him in a vat of hot liquid and boiled him down, [an] anecdote would be all that remained.” Part of this comes from Casey, who posits that words written by nonmuscular people aren’t only inferior, but worthless. He reckons “the academy is infested with vampires who have become so lopsided by their focus on words that their very existence has come to mirror that of words: constantly typing and deleting and editing. They are, in effect, writing and reading themselves. Academics have ceased to look or act like people, and they’ve begun to act and look like words.”
This line of anti-academic thinking is familiar — Muscle Man arrives at a time where lifting is politicized. The 2024 election saw energetic young men listen to manosphere podcasts and join the Republican Party in droves; Democrats, in return, have posted videos of themselves bench-pressing or criticizing Trump in their home gyms. Who cares if you pass legislation if you can bench 315 pounds? Nancy Mace comparing health secretaries under Biden and Trump showed that Rachel Levine’s doctoral degree can’t compare to RFK Jr’s muscles. Despite a brain worm, he is jacked, and thus he is better.
This sort of lopsided logic feels correct because it is so feeble-minded; on the surface, it makes sense that a bodybuilder is better than a normal human because he has put in so much work. Casey says this outright — “There are no major figures in the academy of the twenty-first century with muscles.” But bodies hold things that would never be possible without our minds. Is it worth investigating the body fat percentage of anonymous authors like Elena Ferrante to see if their writing is any good?
But Muscle Man isn’t so quick to resort to binaries of good and evil, jacked and frail. A good mind is just as important as a sound body, even as Harold flip-flops his thinking between periods of serious philosophy and the indecipherable grunts he produces in the gym. Frail professors can be mentally built, the same as a bodybuilder can be a mental twerp. “Each large muscle of a bodybuilder represents a language he didn’t learn, a poem he didn’t read, a fun fact he never memorised,” reads one of my favorite tweets.
In one of his rants, Casey says that there’s “no better defense against the parasitic nature of language than to have a strong body.” Like all extremist ideas, you can trace a small path from its reasonable start. It is a tremendous sensation to run as fast as you can on a treadmill or hit a perfect rally on the tennis court, your body acting without the burden of your mind, pulling from an innate knowledge that you didn’t need to read from a book. Often at these moments it can feel like your mind doesn’t matter, that you can operate based on instinct and anatomy alone. In his car, Harold watches videos online, one of which with a shirtless dude in a megaphone in Barnes & Noble yelling that “Books are for pussies.” It makes Harold laugh, and I did too — why does it sort of, for a brief moment, make sense?
But Harold realizes his neuroticism doesn’t waver even if his body is moving. Before the gym, he’s wondering if the vegetable oils in his protein bar will produce autistic children, and afterwards, he’s worried that the other guys in the sauna will judge him for the YouTube video essay he’s watching about a bodybuilding feud. This is familiar territory for Castro, whose first novel, The Novelist, traced a day in a distracted writer’s life (with a 20-page scene about shit). Familiar too for readers of Castro’s work is the internet fitness culture he documents in a Harper’s essay about lifting, down to the exact titles of YouTube videos and play-by-play scenes of Instagram Reels, which isn’t egregious, but maybe a little unimaginative. But he supplements this with diatribes about Southern posterity becoming a parody, the death of the self while reading someone else’s words, or Mel Keyes, a mix between Mike Mentzer and Arnold Schwarzenegger whose book on lifting and life Harold reads like the Bible: “Any life that involved the possibility of being crushed to death meant that one had to adopt a sort of spiritual disposition toward it,” he writes.
Mel actually illuminates the divide Harold tries not to think about during the whole book — that both body and mind is useless without the other, no matter how good it feels to get a PR. “Mel’s body, despite being one of the strongest on Earth, could not quell his encroaching doom. He had to put his faith in something else.” What about literature and thinking? It’s as good of a choice as any, even if there’s no such thing as a mind pump.
Muscle Man is out now.
