The Good Will Hunting of Novelists

Jordan Castro, Muscle Man, and Fiction’s Place in The Discourse

WILL

Is that your thing? You come into a bar, you read some obscure passage, and then pretend you, you…pawn it off as your own…as your own idea just to impress some girls? Embarrass my friend? See, the sad thing about a guy like you is in fifty years you’re gonna start doing some thinkin’ on your own, and you’re gonna’ come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life: one, don’t do that, and, two, you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a f—in’ education you coulda’ got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library.

CLARK

Yeah, but I will have a degree, and you’ll be serving my kids fries at a drive-thru on our way to a skiing trip.

WILL

Yeah, maybe. But at least I won’t be unoriginal.

You may recall that exchange from Good Will Hunting. As they’re walking out of the bar, Casey Affleck’s character delivers the famous line: “My boy’s wicked smaht.”

This scene has been on my mind since I got lunch with Jordan Castro a few weeks back. His new novel Muscle Man has made a splash — it was covered by The Free Press, GQ, and The Atlantic — but Castro is not your stereotypical Up And Coming Author. He’s more like the Will Hunting of novelists.

He never got an MFA. He went to college as an adult. And his literary career began with him writing free association poetry at age 16. As he put it to me: “I’m not institutionalized.”

He believes college and grad school weeds out disagreeable and differentiated writers. There is a regression to the workshop mean. As a result, the writers who emerge from these programs may be stylistically skilled, but often they don’t have a worldview that they bring to bear on their fiction. They’re just going with whatever cultural trend, trying to write what they think readers want, parroting whatever style they think will sell.

They are aggressively unoriginal.

Resting MFA Face

When I ask Castro how he’d define his worldview in contrast to these “institutionalized” novelists, he hesitates. Eventually, he says that most conservatives are morally formed but aesthetically stuffy. Most modern novelists have the opposite problem. He sees himself as someone who came of age on the internet and has a contemporary aesthetic, but at the same time he’s grounded in the Christian tradition, literary modernism, and literature more generally.

This combination is working.

Castro says people joke, “I got to get a publicist like Jordan Castro,” but he tells me that most of the press he’s gotten is organic: “People hit me up. People literally hit me up directly. The Free Press hit me up. You hit me up…Clearly there’s something resonating.”

Muscle Man is influenced by Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Castro guides the reader through one day in the life of Harold, an avid weightlifter, disgruntled academic, and seething Nietzschean.

Like the unnamed narrator of Notes, Harold develops strange obsessions, like vowing that he will “lock eyes” with another professor in a departmental meeting and not drop his gaze. Harold also oscillates between crippling self-doubt and delusions of grandeur. And while it’s easy to hold him in contempt, the honest reader will find Harold’s neuroses and resentments more familiar than he might like to admit.

Castro says he tries “to draw out the universal from the particular or the socially meaningful or psychologically meaningful from a very specific situation.” Stylistically, that means exploring things on the edge of experience, things that are made invisible by habit. For instance, scrolling reels is banal, but Castro’s precise description in Muscle Man makes its strangeness visible again:

Harold tapped a video with a shredded woman in the thumbnail: she marched around an empty gym with a barbell on her shoulders; text appeared on the screen, EXCITED TO START DEADLIFTING MORE BECAUSE THEN I’LL GET THAT [PEACH EMOJI]; the video cut to her wearing a tight tank top, flexing her huge arms and shoulders—which Harold passively recognized as the same size as, if not bigger than, his—as the text changed to JUST GET BIGGER TRAPS with a skull emoji; then the video jump cut to her standing bent over with her arms and head and hair all hanging, slumped. Harold slid his finger up on the screen to scroll to the next video: a black man with dreadlocks squatting 405 pounds while a rap song kept repeating the phrase “How much money you got? A lot.”

By exploring the texture of Harold’s consciousness, Castro bypasses the familiar form of our cultural debates. He contrasts how on social media “everything is garish and obvious [but] literature deals in gesture and innuendo and irony and metaphor and symbol.” That makes people uncomfortable. They want to know exactly what he means, but he admits that he’s a “terrible culture warrior.”

He is a novelist, and as the excerpt above illustrates, he is more concerned with granular detail than some sweeping indictment of “feminization” or “the manosphere.” He recognizes far too much gradation among individuals to be interested in the sort of generalizations that play well online, things like: “Where Have All the Novel-Reading Men Gone?”

I told him about a recent clip where Louise Perry was discussing how her friend admitted: “If I came home and [my husband] was like, ‘I just read something in The New York Review of Books.’ I would kill myself.”

Castro barked out a laugh and then launched into an animated riff:

I mean that is like a cartoonish reaction. It’s like a cartoonish, reactionary, and illiterate posture. You know what I mean? It’s not true. And not only is it not true, it’s just idiotic…This is why, like, if you drill down a discourse lover, a sort of current event connoisseur and you say, “What do you mean specifically? What are you talking about?” It’s like they would melt.

…

“Is it masculine or not masculine to read?” It’s just like what are you talking about? Like what even is that? You know what I mean? That’s not even a real thought. It’s like a totally fake thought. Nobody has ever woken up in their whole entire life and had the organic, legitimate thought, “I wonder if men are reading?” No one’s ever thought that. It’s like a full-blown fake discourse hallucination.

In part because Castro isn’t offering clickbait, fake discourse thoughts, he has an unusually broad appeal. His work isn’t reducible to partisan politics. The Free Press describes Castro as “obsessed with masculinity,” but that’s a bit misleading. Castro is not positioning himself relative to Jordan Peterson, Aaron Renn, or Scott Galloway.

That’s partly for the reasons above — he’s interested in specific characters rather than a unified theory of masculinity — but more importantly, it’s because Castro recognizes that talking about masculinity is “just a very cringe, like deeply cringe thing” to do. Here again, Castro has an everyman appeal so often lacking among the chattering class. He’s just a normal dude.

Uncaptioned photo from November 3rd, 2025. (@jordancastroofficual [sic])

Castro also eschews a more didactic approach for metaphysical reasons. He joined the Eastern Orthodox Church a few years ago, and he was attracted in part by the space Orthodoxy holds open for mystery. If Jesus says, “I am the Truth,” then the truth is a person not an abstraction, something he says is “totally radical.” He quotes the theologian Paul Tillich: “You will meet the liberating truth in many forms except in one form: you never will meet it in the form of propositions which you can learn or write down and take home.”

Muscle Man aims to be truthful without becoming polemical or rationalistic.

There’s also a meta layer to the novel because Castro wrote a popular essay for Harper’s on weightlifting back in 2024. Some of the lines are used verbatim in Muscle Man. Others are tweaked. In his original essay, he writes: “I push my finger up on the screen to scroll to the next video: a black man with dreadlocks squatting 405 pounds, while a 21 Savage song keeps repeating the phrase ‘How much money you got? / A lot.’”

Castro knows the song is by 21 Savage, but in the book, Harold just knows it’s “a rap song.” This blurring between author and protagonist is part of Castro’s artistic persona. His first novel, The Novelist, is about an aspiring writer who spends all morning getting distracted by Twitter, email, and toilet breaks. That narrator spends much of the novel griping about the undeserved success of another writer named “Jordan Castro.”

Fortunately, Castro has a sense of humor that makes this meta/ironic/sincere style entertaining rather than painfully self-indulgent. He’s developed this aesthetic for over 16 years now. As The Free Press reported:

In 2011, at 18, Castro tweeted: “If 100 people retweet this i’ll earnestly try to rip my penis off in a video.” Over 100 retweets later, Castro recorded a video of his attempt at dismemberment, which appeared more tongue-in-cheek than earnest (he did not succeed), while reading aloud a poem he wrote about human connection. “I have tried giving a piece of my penis to everyone, / so as not to be discriminatory / or hierarchical or / something,” the poem said, “but my penis was not strong enough.”

When I bring this story up to Castro, he is neither defensive nor embarrassed. He just laughs and says, “I’m glad I’m finally getting credit for that.” When we discuss the (infamous) 22-page poop scene from The Novelist, he admits that he’s a bit of a troll but also points out that the narrator’s contemplation on the cause and meaning of a clean poop is a sort of “Hegelian dialectic.” His Instagram account features events promoting his novel alongside a picture of his wife running for a box of Papa John’s pizza.

The impish autodidact is always lurking beneath the accomplish author.

Uncaptioned photo from October 4th, 2025

In the original script for Good Will Hunting, the confrontation with the snobby grad student ended differently. After the taunt about how Hunting will be serving fries at the drive-thru, Will fired back, “Maybe. But at least I won’t be a prick.” In the final cut, he says “Maybe. But at least I won’t be unoriginal.” It’s a small difference, but it’s an important distinction.

Castro’s frustration with the “current event connoisseur” or the vacuous modern novelist is not that they are strident or self-important. It’s that when you strip away the rhetoric, they have nothing to say. And the traditionalists who might have something to say are so fixated on a long past golden age of literature that they make themselves irrelevant. Muscle Man is the rare new release that has something to say, can say it well, and maintains a sense of humor through it all.

Castro isn’t sure what will come next. He says maybe a literary thriller, maybe the opposite of that. Either way, he’s nuked his X account so that he can “lock in,” and whenever he emerges, I’ll be ready.