Muscle Man

A day in the life of a discontented literature professor forms the core of Castro’s caustic latest (after The Novelist). Harold would rather lift weights than attend his department’s monthly staff meeting at Shepherd College, where tuition soars and students are pampered. Though Harold has a chiseled physique and conceited nature (he’d “always known he had a great mind”), Castro portrays him as confused and alienated, confounded by the maze-like campus and loathsome toward most of his conformist colleagues. While waiting for the meeting, Harold scrolls his phone and entertains himself with private jokes, wondering if being a “lifter” makes him one of the “marginalized people” routinely celebrated at campus events. He likes one colleague, Casey, who unlike him has tenure and a successful publishing record, and who introduced Harold to gym culture, but Casey hasn’t been around much. Casey’s absence and Harold’s swelling obsession with his more successful friend injects a bit of tension into the novel, but other potential plot devices don’t quite pan out, as when Harold picks up a student’s neglected backpack, telling himself it was left suspiciously. While the story drags in places, Castro mostly holds the reader’s attention with Harold’s pensive internal monologues. This captures male loneliness in all its funk and fury. Agent: Chris Clemans, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Sept.)