Jordan Castro refines the phenomenological approach to narration he took in his first novel, THE NOVELIST, in his follow-up work about a bodybuilding English professor going through a six-or-so-hour period. The book unfolds in two main sections, set respectively at the university and in the gym, and plays with the unities and disunities of these settings: body and intellect, sincerity and performance, individual and institution.

To say that this book is uneven would seem to miss the point: Castro very much wants to draw out disconnections. And yet the criticism still stands: the book is uneven. The first part offers a lush and curious treatment of the university as Mark Fisher's "The Vampire's Castle"—a Gothic institution going through its death throes while also filled with the persecution and paranoia of the "woke" era. Though I have no qualms with the narrator's stridently anti-woke perspective, Castro seems to misunderstand what made performatively woke literature bad: not the ideological contradictions but the aesthetic clunkiness—passages that seem inserted only to make a point. At times, his critiques of the progressive liberal worldview, especially in the first section, feel like being pummeled by a blunt instrument (see, for instance, the scene about Equity for All), and one wonders whether we've really advanced past wokeness or are mired within its aesthetic structures. Whether you sincerely believe in or want to ruthlessly mock BLM-era infographics, you can't escape having to see them again. Is that the best these "dissident" or "heterodox" writers can do?

Castro offers a much better melding of literary description and ideological questioning in the second part, set in the gym. (Indeed, his observation that plates represent both equality and hierarchy is a rather elegant way of critiquing wokeness without sacrificing literature.) This section shakes off the Gothic tropes and tones of the university section, exalting individual vitality against institutional decrepitude, and yet this section lacks the lush atmosphere that made the first section compelling. Again, one imagines that this is intentional. The gym lacks environment and operates as a loose network of people's bodies, gazes, and etiquette, but the absence of atmosphere seems to deprive the scene.

The book, in the end, was all right. Perhaps further revision would have risked erasing the disunities that are so central to its thematic structure, but it certainly would have forgiven Castro of the embarrassment of his more ham-fisted passages.