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The Novelist
Brisk and shockingly witty, exuberantly scatological as well as deeply wise, The Novelist is a delight. Jordan Castro is a rare new talent: an author highly attuned to the traditions he is working within while also offering a refreshingly fun sendup of life beset by the endless scroll. —Mary South, author of You Will Never Be Forgotten
In Jordan Castro’s inventive, funny, and surprisingly tender first novel, we follow a young man over the course of a single morning as he tries and fails to write an autobiographical novel, finding himself instead drawn into the infinite spaces of Twitter, quotidian rituals, and his own mind.
The act of making coffee prompts a reflection on the limits of self-knowledge; an editor’s embarrassing tweet sparks rage at the literary establishment; a meditation on first person versus third examines choice and action; an Instagram post about the ethics of having children triggers mimetic rivalry; the act of doing the dishes is at once ordinary and profound: one of the many small commitments that make up a life of stability.
The Novelist: A Novel pays tribute to Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine and Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters, but in the end is a wholly original novel about language and consciousness, the internet and social media, and addiction and recovery.
4 hours and 13 minutes
In Jordan Castro’s inventive, funny, and surprisingly tender first novel, we follow a young man over the course of a single morning as he tries and fails to write an autobiographical novel, finding himself instead drawn into the infinite spaces of Twitter, quotidian rituals, and his own mind.
The act of making coffee prompts a reflection on the limits of self-knowledge; an editor’s embarrassing tweet sparks rage at the literary establishment; a meditation on first person versus third examines choice and action; an Instagram post about the ethics of having children triggers mimetic rivalry; the act of doing the dishes is at once ordinary and profound: one of the many small commitments that make up a life of stability.
The Novelist: A Novel pays tribute to Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine and Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters, but in the end is a wholly original novel about language and consciousness, the internet and social media, and addiction and recovery.
4 hours and 13 minutes
5 pages, Audible Audio
First published June 14, 2022
107 people are currently reading
10433 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 432 reviews
July 9, 2022
excellent ass-wiping discourse.
June 5, 2022
Autofiction, the internet, writing: my faves. The Novelist is at once a corporeal look at the mundanity of writing a novel with the internet looming over your shoulder (the novel is told over the course of one morning in which he attempts to write a novel, while being distracted with social media, bodily functions, and his surroundings), exploring the artifice of the form, and all the while still seeking profundity in its creation. Smart as hell and so funny.
August 30, 2021
Succulent.
Read
July 4, 2022I don't care how much dark money Random House is giving to Anna Khachiyan to signal otherwise, alt lit isn't coming back and we're all better off for it. The book is a monologue about Twitter,"scene politics," and the nature of millennial narcissism in the social media age, interrupted by an eternal digression about shitting and emailing Tao Lin. It begs the reader to understand it as "Bernhardian" but it's not repetitive or demanding or rewarding enough to accomplish that. If you, a major publisher struggling to understand what 25-year-olds are up to these days, want to shoot for the "premature internet nostalgia" market, why not just make a bound copy containing every surviving Hipster Runoff post, supplement the posts with critical essays, and call it a day? You're not making the internet better, you're just making books worse.
August 21, 2023
The book is really short. Written well I would say. Actually one good read for a debut book. But I just can't stand when author's describe in painfully long details about body excreta and what they do what they do in the toilet. Is it really necessary for the plot or the book?
Ruined my reading. Bye.
Ruined my reading. Bye.
November 17, 2022
Tell me you’re a bitter nerd with no self-discipline without telling me you’re a bitter nerd with no self-discipline.
July 17, 2022
if i could give this book 0 stars, i would. this is the book equivalent to nails on a chalkboard. a cool concept would be to not give jordan castro a 2nd book deal bc…this is truly one of the worst things i’ve read, very confused by all the positive reviews.
August 9, 2022
Perhaps this was the reason I’d been so resistant to working on my novel all morning: I hated drug literature, which—with a few exceptions—caused anyone with a modicum of awareness to cringe. It was all, in large part, half-formed sentiment and navel-gazing drivel, seeming more to have dribbled out of the author’s mouth than been penned with any intent. Even the so-called great drug authors were undeniable hacks with no skill or insight into anything lasting or true. If there was any place in literature I did not want to stake my claim, it was among the explicitly drug-addicted—or worse, the recovered.
I was tipped into reading this novel, which had already been recommended in my Twitter feed, by a LA Times Article “Why are these summer books indebted to an Austrian author of nihilistic rants?”
Anyone who follows my review will know that I hold Thomas Bernhard as the most important and influential European author of the 2nd half of the 20th century so this article was music to my ears:
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment...
The article also references the brilliant Panthers and the Museum of Fire by Jen Craig.
The Novelist also featured in one of my favourite new blogs, Bram Presser’s A Book for Ants, which focuses on shorter works (“Yes, all books under 200 pages. All reviews under 200 words”), although his review was not entirely positive: https://abookforants.substack.com/p/t...
The Novelist is set over a few hours one morning as our first person narrator procrastinating as he tries but fails to work on his novel, spending the time instead addictively scrolling through social media while disparaging the medium, cataloguing his toilet paper wiping technique and musing on the pros and cons of the French press he uses to make his morning tea (including lamenting the loss, through breakage, of his Bodum, which I would concur is an excellent brand).
This on the pleasure of the morning’s first sip of tea:
I pursed my lips, inhaling air with the hot tea in a burst of focused sucking, a small sip, the tea touching my tongue but not the roof of my mouth—until I swished it between my cheeks—then disappearing into me; it was a joyous experience; simultaneously new and familiar
Two key influences are Nicholas Baker’s The Mezzanine and Thomas Bernhard’s The Woodcutters, both explicitly referenced in the text by the narrator. Castro himself makes no apologies for wearing his influences on his sleeve:
(from https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/f...)
Although if anything I was reminded more of Mario Levrero’s The Luminous Novel, in Annie McDermott’s translation, and that comparison, to a book I found disappointing, may explain why this also didn’t entirely work for me. It always strikes me that the topic of novelists struggling to write books is somewhat more of interest to novelists than it is to readers unless those readers also have literary pretensions (and I don’t).
Here the appearance of the novelist Jordan Castro as a character in the novel adds another layer of self-indulgence and this Paris Review article (https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...) suggests large parts of the novel are an in-joke with a novelist friend.
And Simon Okotie’s Absalon trilogy has set the bar on moment-by-moment analysis of actions so high that anything else (here the mechanics of using a PC to check on different social media) feels like a pale imitation.
The novel is perhaps at its strongest in comparing the demerits of different social media platforms, the observations are not particularly original but one could imagine Thomas Bernhard if he were alive today saying:
Twitter had become a grisly hellscape of parasitic babblers, dominated by the nothing-lords, seeking nothing and creating nothing, destroying and deconstructing, complaining and resenting, mindlessly snatching at scraps, and whoever could lord over these nothing-scraps least gracefully gained the most nothingness.
Unlike with Twitter and Facebook, I didn’t struggle with a near-constant desire to delete Instagram, even though I checked it just as frequently. I felt much less troubled by it; I actually kind of liked it. Pictures, though niggling at times, weren’t as nauseating as text; the captions and comments on Instagram were auxiliary, and, much of the time, I didn’t read them. Twitter and Facebook had devolved into a kind of text-based theater, with people showing only the worst parts of themselves, hurling half-formed opinions and immediate reactions at one another, while Instagram remained a space where people still attempted something less aggressively debasing; where people shared pictures from their lives, attempting candor, or—though they most often failed at this miserably and had no understanding of what it meant whatsoever—beauty. In practice, Instagram did not produce beauty, or candor, and lent itself only to a different kind of lie. In short, Instagram was vanity and Twitter was pride. Twitter would kill everyone then kill itself; whereas Instagram would only peter out, slowly disappearing into a kind of pleading void.
The novel on which the narrator is working sounds rather tedious. Told in the third-person present it was to be an autofictional account of his life as a drug addict, a topic which, as the quote from the narrator that opens my review agrees, is typically a recipe for a bad novel.
Rather more fun is the alternative novel he conceives while not working on the original, a version of Woodcutters targeted at his erstwhile friends:
I felt excited at the prospect of writing a novel like Woodcutters. I would talk shit about Eric and everyone else I felt unarticulated aversion toward, while inveighing against a certain worldview which had been infecting my peers like an intellectual plague. This plague spread on social media and throughout the universities and its symptoms included an inability to think deeply, speak honestly, or interact with anyone or any idea that tried to resist said plague, resulting in what seemed like severe brain damage, among other things. Woodcutters . . . I thought, sipping my coffee. Ah, yes—my Woodcutters. Bernhard had employed repetition to achieve a certain rhythmic, hypnotic effect, and I could do that too, I considered in the form of a single-word thought: Repetition.
But overall, this wasn’t entirely successful to me although an interesting read.
3 stars.
I was tipped into reading this novel, which had already been recommended in my Twitter feed, by a LA Times Article “Why are these summer books indebted to an Austrian author of nihilistic rants?”
Anyone who follows my review will know that I hold Thomas Bernhard as the most important and influential European author of the 2nd half of the 20th century so this article was music to my ears:
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment...
Despite his “difficulty” in text and in life, we find ourselves in the summer of Bernhard.
Jordan Castro’s debut novel, “The Novelist,” published two weeks ago, not only mentions Bernhard on its jacket but also references one of his books in the text. Mark Haber’s second novel, “Saint Sebastian’s Abyss,” out last month, is the closest to a straightforward homage. Emily Hall’s debut, “The Longcut,” also published in May, follows an artist who wonders “what my work was” on a meandering walk to visit a gallerist.
Each of the three books could be described as a Bernhardian rant, or in some cases a diatribe, centered on the creation and purpose of art. Marked by lengthy monologues, emphatic hatefulness and a disgust with modern life, they pay implicit tribute to a writer whose influence seems only to grow with the decades.
The article also references the brilliant Panthers and the Museum of Fire by Jen Craig.
The Novelist also featured in one of my favourite new blogs, Bram Presser’s A Book for Ants, which focuses on shorter works (“Yes, all books under 200 pages. All reviews under 200 words”), although his review was not entirely positive: https://abookforants.substack.com/p/t...
The Novelist is set over a few hours one morning as our first person narrator procrastinating as he tries but fails to work on his novel, spending the time instead addictively scrolling through social media while disparaging the medium, cataloguing his toilet paper wiping technique and musing on the pros and cons of the French press he uses to make his morning tea (including lamenting the loss, through breakage, of his Bodum, which I would concur is an excellent brand).
This on the pleasure of the morning’s first sip of tea:
I pursed my lips, inhaling air with the hot tea in a burst of focused sucking, a small sip, the tea touching my tongue but not the roof of my mouth—until I swished it between my cheeks—then disappearing into me; it was a joyous experience; simultaneously new and familiar
Two key influences are Nicholas Baker’s The Mezzanine and Thomas Bernhard’s The Woodcutters, both explicitly referenced in the text by the narrator. Castro himself makes no apologies for wearing his influences on his sleeve:
We still have this obsession with authenticity and originality, but originality is, paradoxically, always imitative. There is truth in that cliché, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” I think it could be translated into something like: “Good artists lie to themselves about where their work comes from; great artists see the role of the Other.” Everything involved in the creative act has to first be learned through imitation, and this can feel fraught if the creative act is primarily an attempt to differentiate oneself.
(from https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/f...)
Although if anything I was reminded more of Mario Levrero’s The Luminous Novel, in Annie McDermott’s translation, and that comparison, to a book I found disappointing, may explain why this also didn’t entirely work for me. It always strikes me that the topic of novelists struggling to write books is somewhat more of interest to novelists than it is to readers unless those readers also have literary pretensions (and I don’t).
Here the appearance of the novelist Jordan Castro as a character in the novel adds another layer of self-indulgence and this Paris Review article (https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...) suggests large parts of the novel are an in-joke with a novelist friend.
And Simon Okotie’s Absalon trilogy has set the bar on moment-by-moment analysis of actions so high that anything else (here the mechanics of using a PC to check on different social media) feels like a pale imitation.
The novel is perhaps at its strongest in comparing the demerits of different social media platforms, the observations are not particularly original but one could imagine Thomas Bernhard if he were alive today saying:
Twitter had become a grisly hellscape of parasitic babblers, dominated by the nothing-lords, seeking nothing and creating nothing, destroying and deconstructing, complaining and resenting, mindlessly snatching at scraps, and whoever could lord over these nothing-scraps least gracefully gained the most nothingness.
Unlike with Twitter and Facebook, I didn’t struggle with a near-constant desire to delete Instagram, even though I checked it just as frequently. I felt much less troubled by it; I actually kind of liked it. Pictures, though niggling at times, weren’t as nauseating as text; the captions and comments on Instagram were auxiliary, and, much of the time, I didn’t read them. Twitter and Facebook had devolved into a kind of text-based theater, with people showing only the worst parts of themselves, hurling half-formed opinions and immediate reactions at one another, while Instagram remained a space where people still attempted something less aggressively debasing; where people shared pictures from their lives, attempting candor, or—though they most often failed at this miserably and had no understanding of what it meant whatsoever—beauty. In practice, Instagram did not produce beauty, or candor, and lent itself only to a different kind of lie. In short, Instagram was vanity and Twitter was pride. Twitter would kill everyone then kill itself; whereas Instagram would only peter out, slowly disappearing into a kind of pleading void.
The novel on which the narrator is working sounds rather tedious. Told in the third-person present it was to be an autofictional account of his life as a drug addict, a topic which, as the quote from the narrator that opens my review agrees, is typically a recipe for a bad novel.
Rather more fun is the alternative novel he conceives while not working on the original, a version of Woodcutters targeted at his erstwhile friends:
I felt excited at the prospect of writing a novel like Woodcutters. I would talk shit about Eric and everyone else I felt unarticulated aversion toward, while inveighing against a certain worldview which had been infecting my peers like an intellectual plague. This plague spread on social media and throughout the universities and its symptoms included an inability to think deeply, speak honestly, or interact with anyone or any idea that tried to resist said plague, resulting in what seemed like severe brain damage, among other things. Woodcutters . . . I thought, sipping my coffee. Ah, yes—my Woodcutters. Bernhard had employed repetition to achieve a certain rhythmic, hypnotic effect, and I could do that too, I considered in the form of a single-word thought: Repetition.
But overall, this wasn’t entirely successful to me although an interesting read.
3 stars.
June 30, 2022
The Reviewer
Some days prior while I was scrolling through my Google News Feed I came across an article, which had been written some days prior to my reading it, by Kate Knibbs titled "Finally, a Novel That Gets the Internet Right". That seemed interesting so I read it and by the end I decided I'd try reading it at some point, despite the obvious red flags, or perhaps because of the red flags in this particular case.
Then came the end of the month, which was the halfway point of the year and my Goodreads Reading Challenge stood at ninety-nine of a hundred books read. More accurately it was sixty-eight novels, sixteen anthologies, seven collections, five short fictions, and three novellas. I thought back to this novel, which at around forty-thousand words, could've been classified as a novella with a few deletions. After considering both its length and content, I decided it would be an entirely appropriate accompaniment to the arbitrary accomplishment of completing the self-set vanity challenge.
How much I would enjoy reading it had already been decided by my prejudice against alt-lit and my unreasonable dislike of Tao Lin, for both his style and his pervasiveness a decade ago in a certain corner of the Internet I frequented. So, while it wouldn't quite be a hateread, it would be a relative thereof. I confess that the main reason I read this was to write about it afterwards.
Almost right away the narratives goes towards the scatological, the importance of which over the course of narrative becomes almost eschatological. The various absurdities of the book overshadowed the mundanities. I don't regret reading this, but I was disappointed by it, even with my low expectations. Though, I'm also not the target demographic, for the most part anyway.
Now it's the day after I read the novel. I had slept on it and thought it over more, which didn't give me any further appreciation of the novel itself, but I did find the context of the author more interesting, if not the author himself. The conversation between Castro and Lin in the The Paris Review was rather informative, if only because I wasn't that aware of the background details. There's so much more that I could write about this, but the time and place where I would doesn't exist in this timeline.
TL;DR: This is a novel-length shitpost. What you think of that will probably determine what you think of this more than anything else.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-novel...
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...
------
Thoughts on Excerpts
This was originally more than twice as long, but that was too much.
Li and I had probably been pooping at the same time. I was delighted.
Li is Tao Lin's stand-in for himself. There seems to be a considerable amount of intertextuality with his works.
The physical makeup of the mug was exquisite.
Which is described quite in detail and is one of several times where a spotlight is thrown on some arbitrary subject and explained in elaborate detail but doesn't really say anything. It isn't so much filler as it is an ambient experience.
I hadn’t understood her pride in having sucked a bigger penis than her friend, and it affected me.
I understood now why one might feel proud of sucking a large penis
This is excerpt bait. If it were an article it would be clickbait.
“really taste the difference between organic and inorganic bananas.”
This was the exemplar of sincerity in the face of absurdity that reminded me of why I disliked this style.
Jordan Castro fans seemed troubled.
I won't disagree with that. Jordan Castro is mentioned forty-six times. It's narcissistic to say the least to have your narrator be obsessed with you and all but worship you. The Jordan Castro in the story isn't the author, but I only see that as a dodge.
“People don’t know the difference between the opinions others want them to have and the opinions that they actually have; people mistake how they think they should think for how they actually think, and how they want to seem for how they are."
One of the few parts that I liked and that was only because I agreed with it. Which naturally means it's repeated over and over again, consecutively.
I often wondered if my entire worldview when I was young had been based on aesthetics rather than the kinds of ideological convictions I’d imagined myself having.
As far as I can tell this is unfortunately common in online spaces, regardless of it may be about. Sometimes it happens outside of that as well, but that usually seems to be from the same people who are unable to distinguish any difference between the two any longer.
Jordan Castro’s first novel, which critics had said contained only one flat female character—the narrator’s girlfriend
This is his first novel and that's exactly what it contains. I don't know what preempting potential criticisms of your novel in the text itself is called, but it ought to be a word.
Eric
This was the low point for me. I don't know whether Eric represents his disillusionment, but it really goes on at length about how they were best friends but now he utterly loathes him in every way. The other low point was the self-pity and sense of persecution.
many such cases
Oberlin graduate
There were a lot of signifiers scattered throughout the text like this, many of which were ambiguous as to whether they meant what I thought they meant. But why obliquely reference various memes that may not be relevant to your audience, or at least I wouldn't think I would be, but maybe I'm wrong.
I didn't believe what I was typing
I can believe that, which goes back to the phrase he repeated over and over again. There are a quite few times where the narrator's actions line up with he professes to loathe, which is also what he says truly matters.
My choices, over years, had stacked up on top of each other until they felt like external forces, walls that obstructed my view and confined me; even this morning, I considered, I’d made terrible choices unceasingly
Reminds me of Kafka's A Little Fable.
The coffee dripping sounded exactly like Violet peeing
I remembered, or imagined remembering, listening to my first girlfriend pee
I imagined hearing my most recent ex-girlfriend pee
I had never been in the same room with Violet while she peed
There's also a lot about his own as well.
into the hallway and projectile shits onto the walls. He falls down the stairs while shitting—“speckles the banister,” as it’s rendered in the novel—and continues before sitting down on the toilet, spraying the seat with shit and then squishing down into it
Calvin showers after projectile shitting, then continues shitting in the shower
Calvin walks past his girlfriend the next morning, while she is crying and cleaning the bathroom, before going back to bed and passing out.
As a note, Calvin is Tao Lin's stand-in for Jordan Castro.
I did not want my first novel to be so vulgar as to not get taken seriously—I was a serious person, who deserved to be taken seriously, and I wanted to have a career.
eyeroll
Writing about myself in third person allowed me to take a third-personal view of myself; a view which eliminated the possibility of choice.
Without choice how I could possibly be personally responsible for anything that I do?
girl who was reading Lolita, who I had sex with for months afterward, who had the word “Cocaine” tattooed in cursive on her back.
facepalm
It was all, in large part, half-formed sentiment and navel-gazing drivel, seeming more to have dribbled out of the author’s mouth than been penned with any intent.
Yes, yes, it was.
I was not smart enough to write the kinds of books I wanted to write; it was entirely possible that no matter which novel I worked on it would never come out anyway. Then again, I felt confident that some independent press would put it out; independent presses put out anything now; there were a million of them and they all, more or less, put out anything. I nobly resolved to be fine with this.
Being traditionally published still retains that authoritative sheen as compared to self-publishing.
Some days prior while I was scrolling through my Google News Feed I came across an article, which had been written some days prior to my reading it, by Kate Knibbs titled "Finally, a Novel That Gets the Internet Right". That seemed interesting so I read it and by the end I decided I'd try reading it at some point, despite the obvious red flags, or perhaps because of the red flags in this particular case.
Then came the end of the month, which was the halfway point of the year and my Goodreads Reading Challenge stood at ninety-nine of a hundred books read. More accurately it was sixty-eight novels, sixteen anthologies, seven collections, five short fictions, and three novellas. I thought back to this novel, which at around forty-thousand words, could've been classified as a novella with a few deletions. After considering both its length and content, I decided it would be an entirely appropriate accompaniment to the arbitrary accomplishment of completing the self-set vanity challenge.
How much I would enjoy reading it had already been decided by my prejudice against alt-lit and my unreasonable dislike of Tao Lin, for both his style and his pervasiveness a decade ago in a certain corner of the Internet I frequented. So, while it wouldn't quite be a hateread, it would be a relative thereof. I confess that the main reason I read this was to write about it afterwards.
Almost right away the narratives goes towards the scatological, the importance of which over the course of narrative becomes almost eschatological. The various absurdities of the book overshadowed the mundanities. I don't regret reading this, but I was disappointed by it, even with my low expectations. Though, I'm also not the target demographic, for the most part anyway.
Now it's the day after I read the novel. I had slept on it and thought it over more, which didn't give me any further appreciation of the novel itself, but I did find the context of the author more interesting, if not the author himself. The conversation between Castro and Lin in the The Paris Review was rather informative, if only because I wasn't that aware of the background details. There's so much more that I could write about this, but the time and place where I would doesn't exist in this timeline.
TL;DR: This is a novel-length shitpost. What you think of that will probably determine what you think of this more than anything else.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-novel...
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...
------
Thoughts on Excerpts
This was originally more than twice as long, but that was too much.
Li and I had probably been pooping at the same time. I was delighted.
Li is Tao Lin's stand-in for himself. There seems to be a considerable amount of intertextuality with his works.
The physical makeup of the mug was exquisite.
Which is described quite in detail and is one of several times where a spotlight is thrown on some arbitrary subject and explained in elaborate detail but doesn't really say anything. It isn't so much filler as it is an ambient experience.
I hadn’t understood her pride in having sucked a bigger penis than her friend, and it affected me.
I understood now why one might feel proud of sucking a large penis
This is excerpt bait. If it were an article it would be clickbait.
“really taste the difference between organic and inorganic bananas.”
This was the exemplar of sincerity in the face of absurdity that reminded me of why I disliked this style.
Jordan Castro fans seemed troubled.
I won't disagree with that. Jordan Castro is mentioned forty-six times. It's narcissistic to say the least to have your narrator be obsessed with you and all but worship you. The Jordan Castro in the story isn't the author, but I only see that as a dodge.
“People don’t know the difference between the opinions others want them to have and the opinions that they actually have; people mistake how they think they should think for how they actually think, and how they want to seem for how they are."
One of the few parts that I liked and that was only because I agreed with it. Which naturally means it's repeated over and over again, consecutively.
I often wondered if my entire worldview when I was young had been based on aesthetics rather than the kinds of ideological convictions I’d imagined myself having.
As far as I can tell this is unfortunately common in online spaces, regardless of it may be about. Sometimes it happens outside of that as well, but that usually seems to be from the same people who are unable to distinguish any difference between the two any longer.
Jordan Castro’s first novel, which critics had said contained only one flat female character—the narrator’s girlfriend
This is his first novel and that's exactly what it contains. I don't know what preempting potential criticisms of your novel in the text itself is called, but it ought to be a word.
Eric
This was the low point for me. I don't know whether Eric represents his disillusionment, but it really goes on at length about how they were best friends but now he utterly loathes him in every way. The other low point was the self-pity and sense of persecution.
many such cases
Oberlin graduate
There were a lot of signifiers scattered throughout the text like this, many of which were ambiguous as to whether they meant what I thought they meant. But why obliquely reference various memes that may not be relevant to your audience, or at least I wouldn't think I would be, but maybe I'm wrong.
I didn't believe what I was typing
I can believe that, which goes back to the phrase he repeated over and over again. There are a quite few times where the narrator's actions line up with he professes to loathe, which is also what he says truly matters.
My choices, over years, had stacked up on top of each other until they felt like external forces, walls that obstructed my view and confined me; even this morning, I considered, I’d made terrible choices unceasingly
Reminds me of Kafka's A Little Fable.
The coffee dripping sounded exactly like Violet peeing
I remembered, or imagined remembering, listening to my first girlfriend pee
I imagined hearing my most recent ex-girlfriend pee
I had never been in the same room with Violet while she peed
There's also a lot about his own as well.
into the hallway and projectile shits onto the walls. He falls down the stairs while shitting—“speckles the banister,” as it’s rendered in the novel—and continues before sitting down on the toilet, spraying the seat with shit and then squishing down into it
Calvin showers after projectile shitting, then continues shitting in the shower
Calvin walks past his girlfriend the next morning, while she is crying and cleaning the bathroom, before going back to bed and passing out.
As a note, Calvin is Tao Lin's stand-in for Jordan Castro.
I did not want my first novel to be so vulgar as to not get taken seriously—I was a serious person, who deserved to be taken seriously, and I wanted to have a career.
eyeroll
Writing about myself in third person allowed me to take a third-personal view of myself; a view which eliminated the possibility of choice.
Without choice how I could possibly be personally responsible for anything that I do?
girl who was reading Lolita, who I had sex with for months afterward, who had the word “Cocaine” tattooed in cursive on her back.
facepalm
It was all, in large part, half-formed sentiment and navel-gazing drivel, seeming more to have dribbled out of the author’s mouth than been penned with any intent.
Yes, yes, it was.
I was not smart enough to write the kinds of books I wanted to write; it was entirely possible that no matter which novel I worked on it would never come out anyway. Then again, I felt confident that some independent press would put it out; independent presses put out anything now; there were a million of them and they all, more or less, put out anything. I nobly resolved to be fine with this.
Being traditionally published still retains that authoritative sheen as compared to self-publishing.
Read
June 13, 2022such a weird little book lmao
March 17, 2023
196 pages of a dude with ibs contemplating the millennial writing experience
January 28, 2023
the most insufferable thing I’ve ever read
Read
April 30, 2024This was REALLY GOOD. Castro really captured what it feels like to be stuck inside your own head in a morning of procrastination plagued by social media and feelings of inadequacy. Really smart writing, wildly entertaining and very funny. I love how meta it gets and for me it didn’t feel gimmicky at all. I think it honestly could have been even longer and stretched out, but everything Castro threw into the air all came together in the end very well so perhaps it didn’t need anything else. Recommend to binge read if you have a day on your hands. Read it in a few sittings.
November 28, 2022
Author procrastinates in writing his novel; reader gives up after 50 pages.
The LA Times in June 2022 asked "Why are these summer books indebted to an Austrian author of nihilistic rants?" They clearly assumed their readers would not recognize the author, Thomas Bernhard, in their leader, but since I am a great fan of his, I took notice. Of the three Bernhard-influenced novels that they cite, The Novelist by Jordan Castro got the highest goodreads rating, so I ordered a copy.
This was clearly, in retrospect, a dumb move. With music, I've had some luck with recommendations along the lines of "If you like X, then you may like Y." But that approach, doesn't seem to work for authors, or at least no one has marketed an effective algorithm, as far as I know.
What do I like about Bernhard? The musicality of his prose, with repetition of key words like baroque counterpoint; the relentless flow of his writing, like a force of nature; the periodic glimpses of dark humor (the temptation is to quote Beckett here); the over-the-top misanthropy of Bernhard's protagonists, which goes beyond lunacy and approaches the messianic.
And what do I find with Jordan Castro? A sad tale of an author obsessed with his social media ratings on twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. While the Bernhardian character is proud and scornful of society and carves out his own path, Castro's is insecure, self-loathing, and subordinates himself to society. I read the first 50 pages of The Novelist and can guess where it is going. The writer is so distracted by social media and domestic tasks (making tea, bathroom breaks) that he doesn't even start his writing. One assumes that in the remaining three-quarters of the book, this will continue and, hey presto, we will find that what started out as an account of the writing of the novel becomes the novel itself.
I have no problem with literary tricks of this kind, and have a reader's constitution that will take a good deal of punishment if the payoff is good enough. (Bernhard can be hard going, almost monotonous, at times, but the periodic fireworks make it worthwhile.) But in Castro's case, I could not find any pleasure in the writing itself, or at least not enough to keep me from junking this novel in favor of a large pile pleading for attention on my bedside table.
I recognize that other goodreads reviewers have been more welcoming. But Jordan Castro is clearly not for me.
The LA Times in June 2022 asked "Why are these summer books indebted to an Austrian author of nihilistic rants?" They clearly assumed their readers would not recognize the author, Thomas Bernhard, in their leader, but since I am a great fan of his, I took notice. Of the three Bernhard-influenced novels that they cite, The Novelist by Jordan Castro got the highest goodreads rating, so I ordered a copy.
This was clearly, in retrospect, a dumb move. With music, I've had some luck with recommendations along the lines of "If you like X, then you may like Y." But that approach, doesn't seem to work for authors, or at least no one has marketed an effective algorithm, as far as I know.
What do I like about Bernhard? The musicality of his prose, with repetition of key words like baroque counterpoint; the relentless flow of his writing, like a force of nature; the periodic glimpses of dark humor (the temptation is to quote Beckett here); the over-the-top misanthropy of Bernhard's protagonists, which goes beyond lunacy and approaches the messianic.
And what do I find with Jordan Castro? A sad tale of an author obsessed with his social media ratings on twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. While the Bernhardian character is proud and scornful of society and carves out his own path, Castro's is insecure, self-loathing, and subordinates himself to society. I read the first 50 pages of The Novelist and can guess where it is going. The writer is so distracted by social media and domestic tasks (making tea, bathroom breaks) that he doesn't even start his writing. One assumes that in the remaining three-quarters of the book, this will continue and, hey presto, we will find that what started out as an account of the writing of the novel becomes the novel itself.
I have no problem with literary tricks of this kind, and have a reader's constitution that will take a good deal of punishment if the payoff is good enough. (Bernhard can be hard going, almost monotonous, at times, but the periodic fireworks make it worthwhile.) But in Castro's case, I could not find any pleasure in the writing itself, or at least not enough to keep me from junking this novel in favor of a large pile pleading for attention on my bedside table.
I recognize that other goodreads reviewers have been more welcoming. But Jordan Castro is clearly not for me.
July 2, 2023
I've never really understood the word navel-gazing, or considered it to be a widespread or pervasive issue, in the way that whoever invented the word "navel-gazing" must. Why punish people for wanting to think critically about things/life in general? As long as you aren't recycling clichés, there has to be some nobility to trying to read the world--even the mundane elements. Especially the mundane elements. Well, now I understand.
This book was so convinced of its own cleverness that I experienced secondhand embarrassment, which is saying something given that the novel talks for long stretches about poop. I don't know what's worse--the addition of the novel's protagonist worshiping the author Jordan Castro and his twitter, or the idea that someone would put that in their novel ironically. I hesitate to call anything pretentious on the internet, with its tendency towards anti-intellectualism, but I've never read anything so self-congratulatory in my life. I avoid rating books I DNF out of respect for the author, but I truly believe I deserve credit for all 92 pages of this I read.
This book was so convinced of its own cleverness that I experienced secondhand embarrassment, which is saying something given that the novel talks for long stretches about poop. I don't know what's worse--the addition of the novel's protagonist worshiping the author Jordan Castro and his twitter, or the idea that someone would put that in their novel ironically. I hesitate to call anything pretentious on the internet, with its tendency towards anti-intellectualism, but I've never read anything so self-congratulatory in my life. I avoid rating books I DNF out of respect for the author, but I truly believe I deserve credit for all 92 pages of this I read.
June 6, 2022
THE NOVELIST: A Novel by Jordan Castro is an AMAZING novel!! I loved it!! Right away from page four I was loving this book! We follow an unnamed narrator who goes about his morning routine and tries to write a novel. I loved so much about this book! It’s funny, insightful, meta and written spectacularly. So many parts made me laugh especially one section about wiping. I loved the detailed descriptions of everyday things like making coffee and checking Twitter. It was so relatable how we get sucked into social media. I loved how Jordan Castro is a character in this novel. It made me want to Google him and look up his tweets. I’ll definitely be tweeting and posting about this book. You’ll be seeing it again soon in my mid year top ten! I definitely recommend this one! I loved it so much!
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Thank you to Soft Skull Press for my gifted review copy!
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Thank you to Soft Skull Press for my gifted review copy!
July 2, 2022
You know all those thoughts you have about your own poop that you find really interesting but would never share with anyone because you’re embarrassed they will think you are gross? This book captures all those thoughts in an exciting and beautiful way, as well as thoughts about other stuff too.
July 23, 2024
This book is about a man who recounts his day trying to work on his novel. You’d think it’d be interesting, a little inspiring? Right? Wrong.
I DNFed at 30%
Bummed I spent money on this book and sorry that this is contributing to my Goodreads reading goal, but I needed y’all to know.
In the short amount I read, it felt like a white man’s podcast - he goes on about his Twitter addiction, looking up girls who went to high school with him (judged their choice in partners and their appearance) talked about his quality of a shit in the bathroom, and procrastinated writing his novel.
“I farted which startled me” is actual quote from this book.
This book is bad. But not in a fun guilty pleasure way, like a legitimately awful way.
I DNFed at 30%
Bummed I spent money on this book and sorry that this is contributing to my Goodreads reading goal, but I needed y’all to know.
In the short amount I read, it felt like a white man’s podcast - he goes on about his Twitter addiction, looking up girls who went to high school with him (judged their choice in partners and their appearance) talked about his quality of a shit in the bathroom, and procrastinated writing his novel.
“I farted which startled me” is actual quote from this book.
This book is bad. But not in a fun guilty pleasure way, like a legitimately awful way.
Read
September 2, 2022the scatology wasn't even THAT BAD / i don't think this gets to be called Bernhardian
July 29, 2022
The concept of this book is interesting....
I have read a few other books that take place over a short period of time (a day) in this case, but this book didn't really have me on edge like I was hoping.
This book started out strong due to being somewhat unique (writing about a day for a writer), but petered out by the end. Maybe a different style would have made this more exciting such as poetry, diary form, letters, etc.
I wonder how exciting a book would be if I wrote about a regular day in my life, probably not too interesting which is how I felt about this book.
I have read a few other books that take place over a short period of time (a day) in this case, but this book didn't really have me on edge like I was hoping.
This book started out strong due to being somewhat unique (writing about a day for a writer), but petered out by the end. Maybe a different style would have made this more exciting such as poetry, diary form, letters, etc.
I wonder how exciting a book would be if I wrote about a regular day in my life, probably not too interesting which is how I felt about this book.
March 11, 2023
This book talks about Twitter and I can’t believe I finished it. I would compare it to an episode of the Big Bang theory
December 11, 2022
He articulates internet-addicted thoughts really really well. Reading this made me feel cynical about my own progressive loss of focus over the last few years, and how badly I want cohesive thoughts but end up getting mostly “pop-ups” with a few caffeine-induced Big Ideas that are ultimately vague and unsatisfying. I think most people will relate to the struggles with impulsivity, which is depressing and feels like a big theme of life these days. Loved the pooping bit- definitely have been considering the pressure of my fingers as i wipe. The last 50 pages wowed me- so smart! Love how the “explanation” he craves in the novel he’s writing revealed itself.
June 17, 2023
I found this book to be very successful at displaying what it is like to procrastinate all day because now that I finished reading it all I can think about is how I just totally wasted my time
September 24, 2024
picking up your phone and putting it down and picking up your phone and opening social media and scrolling mindlessly and putting your phone down and picking it up again is so real!
the novelist follows a writer throughout the course of a morning, as he tries to work on his novel. much of it is the narrator spiraling about how tethered we are to our phones and social media, even when we don’t want to be - definitely felt called out by that! especially when i would stop reading the book so i could tap around on my phone! a good chunk of it is about the narrator going to the bathroom, another chunk of it is the narrator calling out things that he takes issue with in the literary scene and politics.
i really enjoyed the discussion about social media, the insight into how much of a slog the writing process can be, and the mundane details that make up a slow morning. thought the bathroom stuff was funny. felt unsure about the ethical and political conversation that was taking place. that section really started to grate on me after a while, personally, and i find that i just don’t have many thoughts on the ideas that were presented.
3.5 stars for me - it was a fun, quick read that i enjoyed while i was in it, but i’m not sure how much it will stick with me now that it’s over.
the novelist follows a writer throughout the course of a morning, as he tries to work on his novel. much of it is the narrator spiraling about how tethered we are to our phones and social media, even when we don’t want to be - definitely felt called out by that! especially when i would stop reading the book so i could tap around on my phone! a good chunk of it is about the narrator going to the bathroom, another chunk of it is the narrator calling out things that he takes issue with in the literary scene and politics.
i really enjoyed the discussion about social media, the insight into how much of a slog the writing process can be, and the mundane details that make up a slow morning. thought the bathroom stuff was funny. felt unsure about the ethical and political conversation that was taking place. that section really started to grate on me after a while, personally, and i find that i just don’t have many thoughts on the ideas that were presented.
3.5 stars for me - it was a fun, quick read that i enjoyed while i was in it, but i’m not sure how much it will stick with me now that it’s over.
Read
January 14, 2025I hate myself for liking this.
I hate that maybe this thinks I need to revisit Tao Lin, whom I hated when I was 22, but it felt too close to home. Now I am older. Maybe I am wiser. I do not know.
But did I enjoy The Novelist? Yes. Is it an almost criminally self-indulgent bit of navel-gazing about an arch guy about my age who spends lots of time thinking about his Chemex and his poops? Also yes. Do I spend too much time thinking about my Chemex and my poops? I would if I had a Chemex. I used to have a Chemex.
But there’s something OK about being self-indulgent as a writer if you can actually be charming… and he is, even if it is a series of bitchy shower thoughts (which could sum up a lot of “autofiction,” to be quite frank, even if most of it sucks). And he charmed me. And that is enough.
I hate that maybe this thinks I need to revisit Tao Lin, whom I hated when I was 22, but it felt too close to home. Now I am older. Maybe I am wiser. I do not know.
But did I enjoy The Novelist? Yes. Is it an almost criminally self-indulgent bit of navel-gazing about an arch guy about my age who spends lots of time thinking about his Chemex and his poops? Also yes. Do I spend too much time thinking about my Chemex and my poops? I would if I had a Chemex. I used to have a Chemex.
But there’s something OK about being self-indulgent as a writer if you can actually be charming… and he is, even if it is a series of bitchy shower thoughts (which could sum up a lot of “autofiction,” to be quite frank, even if most of it sucks). And he charmed me. And that is enough.
December 25, 2023
i will sadly never get the hours of my life back that i spent reading this book!
it was so dull, but aside from that, the worst things were
-excessive talk about pee and poo. like c’mon, there’s a limit and he crossed it on basically the second page.
-the fact that the author made a fictionalized version of himself into a character (not the narrator, but someone the narrator looks up to).
this was actual garbage
it was so dull, but aside from that, the worst things were
-excessive talk about pee and poo. like c’mon, there’s a limit and he crossed it on basically the second page.
-the fact that the author made a fictionalized version of himself into a character (not the narrator, but someone the narrator looks up to).
this was actual garbage
December 17, 2025
This book made me feel seen. Unfortunately, I felt like I had been seen while taking a dump.
November 2, 2022
Listen, I got rid of all my Tao Lin novels a loooooong time ago, but apparently I am still a sucker for alt lit bro fic.
September 12, 2022
The Novelist is a completely pointless book, but therefore it’s a delight.
The character spends a morning trying to write a book. They’re a few chapters into the draft and when reading over decide it’s arse. Time to change the tense and do a whole new draft, and then have a poo, get in a Twitter hole then wander to the fridge la la la la la. I’m not kidding that’s the structure on repeat.
I think from that tiny description alone you'll be able to tell if it's one for your TBR or not.
The character spends a morning trying to write a book. They’re a few chapters into the draft and when reading over decide it’s arse. Time to change the tense and do a whole new draft, and then have a poo, get in a Twitter hole then wander to the fridge la la la la la. I’m not kidding that’s the structure on repeat.
I think from that tiny description alone you'll be able to tell if it's one for your TBR or not.
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