Minding the Mindless: On Jordan Castro's "The Novelist"

Jordan Castro | The Novelist | Soft Skull Press | 2022 | 196 Pages

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Twitter was very excited to share that, under his own quarantine during the bubonic plague, Shakespeare wrote King Lear. Surely the people sharing this ad nauseam meant it to land somewhere between purely interesting and subtly encouraging. Often the tweets came with a message: “What great work will you produce during this forced downtime?” These tweets were turned into a meme, with responses ranging from the playful (“Sure, King Lear is cool but have you ever choreographed a TikTok dance?”) to the rightfully frustrated (“Oh, yeah, thanks for making me feel like shit that I couldn't get a paragraph done today.”). People often pointed out that Shakespeare hadn’t needed to contend with the myriad modern-day impediments to writing or creating, and no one needed the pressure of comparison to one of literature’s greats.

Jordan Castro’s fiction debut, The Novelist, feels like a drawn-out response to that early quarantine call to produce great art. It’s an account of the thousand distractions which make the very act of sitting down and opening a Google Doc seem like a Herculean effort. The novel shares the sentiment of the frustrated responses to the Lear tweets, though in tone and style it’s often more akin to the joking responses—it is a book which balances struggle, commentary, and philosophy with wit, cleverness, and bathroom humor. The novel holds a certain sense of familiarity, as if its writing comes, in part, from the reader as much as from Castro. There is something recognizable in The Novelist, but it also transcends that lowest common denominator of relatablility to perform sincere examinations of what it means to attempt writing or art or creativity in the modern world.

Much of this familiarity can be tied to social media, and the omnipresent role it plays in our existence—regardless of how one feels about Twitter, say, or Instagram, these platforms have become very real forces in the function of daily life. The Novelist strikes an interesting balance in its portrayal of social media; it’s definitely critical, but not to the point of being a polemic against the Internet and all its ills. Though the book’s nameless narrator is continually drawn to the siren song of Twitter and Instagram, Castro writes about social media with a care and consideration that borders on mindfulness. Not only does the book depict tweets or Instagram posts themselves, it also makes a point to include the physics of social media use—the narrator almost always mentions the act of tapping an app icon, scrolling with a finger or thumb, swiping a tab away. It’s more attention given to these automatic procedures than one is used to seeing, and it acts as a subtle but important reminder that these little movements, these taps on a screen, are actions, just as much as anything else we choose to do or not do is an action. It puts the act of using social media on the same stage as writing, yes, but also as eating, thinking, exercising. It requires our time and our input; it is a choice we make, as unconscious as that choice may seem.

Even when the narrator finally does, ostensibly, work on his novel, intrusive and distracting thoughts remain, this time dressed up as something almost productive. There is a near-constant back and forth in his head about what tense his book should be written in—first-person or third-person, present tense or past? This consumes a huge amount of his thinking, and the first time any real work is done on his novel (nearly halfway through the book) it’s only to swap the tense around, then quickly swap it back. “Finally, my novel was coming along,” he reflects at the bottom of one page. “It was undoubtedly worse than before,” he thinks at the top of the next page.

In an 1817 letter to his brothers George and Tom, the poet John Keats made use of the phrase “negative capability” to describe what he believed to be a quality found in only the greatest of poets. Simply put, a poet possessing negative capability is able to accept uncertainties and doubts without actively trying to reason their way through or to reach after conclusions, thereby coming closer to objective truths and beauties. Negative capability, to Keats, meant writing for the sake of beauty, rather than for anything rational or didactic. Castro’s writing is in almost every way the opposite: everything is considered, everything is a potential conclusion to reach for. But just as soon as those conclusions are arrived at, they’re refuted by answers to the same uncertainties looked at from a different perspective. To the narrator, everything is both good and bad, depending on how you look at it. Rather than not reaching for answers at all, the narrator overreaches, and the result is too much, too many, all at the same time.

Distressing and counterproductive as that might seem to the stability of a piece of fiction, oddly, it works. And the reason it seems to work so well—the reason this book works at all, the reason it feels genuine and thoughtful instead of arrogant or, frankly, masturbatory—is Castro’s abundance of self-awareness.

In interviews, Castro has been (perhaps unsurprisingly, given the way the novel is written) a bit wavering on whether The Novelist should be considered autofiction. In an interview with Juliet Escoria for BOMB Magazine, he explains that he has a “weird, defensive, gut reaction thing where [he] always want[s] to stress that [his] book is not ‘about [him]’ and that it’s not ‘autofiction,’” and saying he could potentially see the book being described as “a kind of ‘meta-anti-autofiction.’” And in the very next paragraph, he explains that he’s pretty sure The Novelist began as a rant about a friend—a rant which is echoed by the narrator of The Novelist—and that, around the same time he began this book, he was working on a different book, similar to the one we find the narrator working on. It’s not autofiction, and it’s not about him—but is it?

Ultimately, no, it still doesn’t seem that it is about Jordan Castro, but rather it pulls a handful of similarities or experiences from Castro to prop up a narrative which is, more broadly, about anyone. This is helped along—and also complicated—by the fact that Jordan Castro is not just the author, but a character within the novel itself, a character distinct from the nameless narrator. This other Castro is a divisive figure, and the narrator recalls multiple conversations he has had with people concerning their views on other Castro’s writing and personhood. If one wanted to psychoanalyze Castro (and, what with the book’s extended meditations on using the toilet, there are probably a lot of Freudians who would be overjoyed to psychoanalyze him), this self-as-other insert feels almost sadomasochistic, imagining himself as a target of online vitriol. But more than reflecting any deep-seeded punishment fantasies, it seems much more likely this other Castro is meant to show the illogical, reactionary nature of the Internet Age, where everything is a hot-button issue and you must have an opinion and it has to be a strong opinion, and everyone and everything is either ideologically perfect or completely corrupt. The presence of the other Castro allows for a critique that pokes fun at how a ubiquitous Internet and social media have conditioned individuals to interact with the world, and with each other; there is no room for nuance, there is no room for ambiguity.

Castro most likely has an astute understanding of audience. Between being the former editor of New York Tyrant Magazine and having now been published three times by small presses, Castro could safely assume that his readers may be interested in examinations of the writing process. The Novelist would certainly appeal to writers and artists, and because of that so much of the frustration one can feel while reading it might also be frustration with one’s self. In recognizing their own daily shortcomings in the narrator, readers are both forced to confront the ways in which they themselves fall prey to distraction, and at the same time are comforted by the fact that, despite the other impulses the narrator is mired in, he does end the book having made both personal and literary progress. He has made some potential headway on not one, but two novels—the second of which, in a very winky way, is shaping up to essentially be The Novelist—and the final moments show him taking his dog for a walk in the woods, intentionally leaving his phone behind, and reflecting on lessons from therapy about mindfulness and relishing the real, the present.

To return, at last, to memes: Everyone, I think, had their favorite Vine, and I’m not sure this one is mine, but it is the one most often repeating in my head. An uncharitable reader might say that this is all The Novelist boils down to. That it’s just another take among the litany of takes about how writers like to do literally anything but sit down and write. That sentiment is itself a meme, a repeating in-joke that you could find some variation of on almost any young writer’s Twitter timeline. Truly, we all do that. But Castro writes with such presence of mind, such introspection and observation and, yes, mindfulness, that the book goes far beyond that, and instead tries to make significance and meaning of these omnipresent distractions. It may help readers, or it may simply console them, or it may do nothing at all; this book might mean a lot to someone, and absolutely nothing. It doesn’t seem too concerned, one way or the other, with what any one person takes away from it—unlike the narrator himself, and his multiple, conflicting conclusions, this is a book which seems more concerned with questions than answers. And ultimately, in the face of every distraction, every doubt, every intrusive thought or mindless media scroll, The Novelist asks two very broad, open-ended questions, not necessarily to be answered, but, like everything else, to be considered: Why does this matter? What are you going to do about it?