Weightlifting in the Underground - First Things

Weightlifting in the Underground - First Things

Muscle Manby jordan castrocatapult, 272 pages, $27 Harold, the protagonist of Jordan Castro’s new novel Muscle Man, is a Gulliver who doesn’t travel. Or a Gulliver whose travels only take him back and forth across the campus of Shepherd College, where he teaches, encountering moral pygmies and moral giants, all of whom seem to lack something essential to the human perspective. Harold’s liberal arts lifeworld is unvital and strangely gray. His th…