Review by Booklist Review
Taking place over a single morning, Castro's debut is told from the perspective of an unnamed protagonist as he struggles to get back to writing his fledgling novel. However, he keeps being distracted by Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook as well as a persistent need to check his email. He details the obsessively pretentious way he drinks his morning coffee, the bizarre politics of social media "likes," and the awkward envy of distant acquaintances, many of whom feel doom while scrolling. With a wry knowingness reminiscent of Ben Lerner's characters, Castro's protagonist spends more time texting friends about his ablutions than writing and even more time fantasizing about completing his novel than writing it. While Castro has his narrator openly state a debt to Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine (1988) and Thomas Bernhard's Woodcutters (1984), his tale often echoes the later books of David Markson, and the metafictional elements do work supremely well. This is a confident, unique take on autofiction, a form that lends itself well to Castro's focus on the endless distractions of modern life, and it is hilarious and enthralling, to boot.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Castro debuts with the meticulous accounting of a day in the life of a struggling Baltimore novelist. Awakening early one morning, the unnamed novelist, perhaps in his 30s, gravitates to his laptop, where he contends with a strong urge to check email and tries to follow his "don't check Twitter before noon" rule. He ends up scrolling anyway, and his mind wanders to the nature of followers. Soon he is searching for old high school friends on Facebook and Instagram while mulling over his novel-in-progress's semiautobiographical subject material about his life back in Ohio, during a period of withdrawal from heroin addiction. With increasing intensity, and while "staring vacantly" at the screen instead of writing, the young novelist begins to feel the morning slip away in a swath of procrastination, which Castro punctuates and harnesses by taking his protagonist down rabbit holes of thought. It is in these intimate and unabashed ruminations, such as about the difference in taste between "organic and inorganic" bananas, that Castro manages to trace the process of his protagonist's distracted thoughts. Their quotidian miniaturism bears the influence of Nicholson Baker and Lucy Ellmann, making for a welcome relief from the novelist's obsession with the internet. Struggling creative types will undoubtedly see themselves in this confident and surprising chronicle. (June)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Castro's debut traces the routine of a frustrated writer. Set over the course of a few hours in the life of its unnamed narrator, this novel meticulously tracks the myriad ways a writer can procrastinate or be distracted while working on a book. There are several directions this could have taken, but Castro opts for the most deadpan options, which include the narrator periodically communicating with his friend Li, checking Twitter, and visiting the bathroom. In this relatively short book, a lot of time is spent on bodily functions. "It occurred to me that Li and I had probably been pooping at the same time," the narrator muses early on; later, several pages are dedicated to the narrator defecating and then wiping his ass. There are some very self-aware moments, as when the narrator alludes to Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine or waxes poetic about bananas, a favorite food of the title character in Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape. And while the mundane elements of the book can at times be overwhelming, there are moments that feel genuinely clever--for instance, for all the metafictional games, there's also a sharp break from them in that Jordan Castro exists as a distinct character within the novel's universe. "It was wasteful enough getting sucked into Twitter by the vacuous, mind-deteriorating tweets of the people I followed, but it would be even more time consuming if I were to follow Jordan Castro," the narrator thinks. The novel opens up in its second half, with the narrator reflecting on his sobriety, but it can be frustrating getting there. Deadpan and scatological, this will likely be a polarizing book. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
