Day 19 of Getting Jordan Castro to Read My Blog About His Book
The perfect internet novel doesn't exi—
Cutting to the chase, the title of this piece is a joke based on those memes or video challenges you might have come across on your internet app of choice. They vary by subject and seriousness; Day Five Of Throwing Spaghetti At The Wall Instead Of A Marketing Strategy, Day 31 Of Eating Raw Meat Until I Get Sick, etc. Explaining a joke upends its effect but in this case I’ve decided on the title in an attempt, not to be funny, but to be a bit meta, which is a deft little nod to the book I just read, Jordan Castro’s debut novel The Novelist.
I picked it up after reading an essay by Castro in which he acknowledges Nicholson Baker’s influence on his own path as a writer, a path that led him in one way or another to writing The Novelist.
In one of a few metafictional moves, The Novelist explicitly mentions its influences, too, including Baker’s The Mezzanine (which I wrote about here), as well as Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters (which I haven’t read yet). In short, I like when writers openly pay respect to the ones who influenced them. I don’t really need to know anything about an artist, but I’m not alone when it comes to wanting to know how other artists do their thing.
The Novelist is a comedy of errors that follows an unnamed narrator, the titular novelist, on a morning like any other as he attempts to work on his novel but, like anyone would, he gets distracted. His thoughts jump from the act of making tea, Facebook, and narrative perspectives to addiction, friendships, and his future success as a writer. After the narrator’s perspective on each of these topics is followed to a logical conclusion or to another mental impasse, he returns to the book’s comic refrain (bolded by me):
“I touched my laptop and the screen lit up; I logged in and opened the internet; particles of coffee sunk into the back of my damp tongue and the roof of my mouth; I delighted in the taste and temperature. I took another sip—then unthinkingly took out my phone and opened Instagram. I closed Instagram and put my phone next to my laptop, shuffling it side to side and then picking it up an inch off the table and dropping it. I shuffled it twice more, then moved my hands toward the keyboard and typed “doc” in the search bar, opening my novel. I read the first few sentences while sipping coffee. They were completely fucking terrible.”
As a writer, there probably isn’t anything more relatable than this process: write, get distracted, return to writing, realize what you’ve written sucks, repeat. Roughly, that’s the plot of The Novelist.
I don’t think this process is exclusive to writing, however. I’m sure the same could be said about most jobs and even modern-day leisure time. It’s actually hard to sit through a movie without a device in hand.
Which brings me to say, while that’s essentially the plot of this book, I’d say what the novel is really about is the internet, or, more specifically, what it’s like to exist in the age of the internet.
The internet is, obviously, ubiquitous. Average screen time for humans is around six-and-a-half hours per day. I think up until five or six years ago I thought of the internet like a pool1, something anyone could step in and out of as they pleased, I could always go offline. But it has gotten a lot more difficult—way more—in the last few years to separate ourselves from the pool water, to step away, maybe even impossible. Being on a screen for six hours a day needs no explanation—screens are equal to the internet at this point.
Beyond the novelist’s girlfriend Violet, their dog, and an email companion named Li, he recalls from memory his friends and classmates and colleagues, but the main cast of characters is the apps: Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. And the novelist has fallen prey to their endless scroll invading his thoughts.
At one point, the narrator thinks about how amazing it is that things work, that his laptop can light up at his touch, and goes on to recall the teachings of a public intellectual/internet guru-type wherein the intellectual expresses a similar pop optimist wonderment at the miracle of life—the fact that things work, that a laptop can light up at our touch—and it’s here that it’s made clear to the reader that the novelist might not be thinking for himself. He is and he isn’t. One moment having an original thought and in the next haunted by the feeling that he’s thought that thought before, perhaps having lifted it from from a timeline.
(It needs to be noted that, in probably the book’s most heightened moment of metafictional revelry, the public figure is named Jordan Castro.)2
After this moment of self-awareness and others like it, the novelist describes the broken things in his life: his coffee press, a dripping tap in the bathroom, his inability to interact with his landlord in any meaningful way, etc., things that don’t really work at all and are far less miraculous, which seems to irritate and distract him more. The novelist’s self-awareness has exhausted itself the same way our brains tire out after scrolling for too long. We get the sense all of these thoughts and feelings pile on.
Furthermore, the novelist feels conflicted because, despite the fictional Castro’s popularity, certain types of people largely hate him and his politics. But politics aside, isn’t this exactly what it is to live with the internet now? It’s hard to know if the narrator is ever thinking clearly in this book. Are the thoughts he conjures up ever his own or are they reactions based on what chooses to expose himself to or has unwillingly been exposed to? Has this new guy I like lived scot-free? What is it to think clearly in the 2020s?
The novelist again “parrot[s]” the Jordan Castro character, furiously typing away, finally making some progress.
“I acknowledged that I was almost entirely taking on the tone and worldview of Jordan Castro… What will justify suffering? Evidently, Eric doesn’t know. And neither do my peers, I typed. Neither do I! I typed, bizarrely. … Millennials suffer from the age-old delusion that material conditions of life are the primary cause of suffering, I typed, self-conscious about my uncharacteristically didactic tone and the use of the word “millennial” and “age-old.”
He deletes the “neither do I.” He admits he’s “veering into weird territory.” He says he doesn’t believe what he’s typing. But he’s trying to write his own version of The Mezzanine, his own Woodcutters.
This layer of inauthenticity makes the narrator feel hard to pin down, maybe hard to trust. Maybe he’s just an unreliable narrator. And yet, what does that mean when our lives are so intertwined with what’s online anyway? Maybe he’s as reliable as one can be. I think what the real Castro is unearthing is the fact that, in the age of the internet, we’re all unreliable narrators3. We always have been, but it’s more obvious now than ever.
The internet is no longer a pool, it’s a mirror, except we have little control over the reflections we see. It hurts a bit to think that we aren’t as smart as we think we are, but that’s always been true, and hopefully humbling, but what’s nightmarish to me is to now have to think about which ideas, thoughts, or conclusions are actually mine. This tension lives at the heart of The Novelist.
The level of distraction the novelist experiences because of the internet feels clinically bad (when the 196-page book begins on page one, it’s 8:14 a.m., by the time we reach page 153, it’s only 10:03 a.m., only two hours have passed!) and although the novelist has struggled with addiction in a previous life, I don’t think the depiction of internet life in this book is by any means extreme or a result of previous addictive behaviour—that six hours of screen time is an average. We’re all right there with him (and only for a few hours, no less). Whether that’s not very much time or forever, Castro’s novel accurately captures what it’s like to live with the internet, in all its glory; its pure distraction, manufactured anxiety, and unrelenting stress.
Jordan Castro the writer of The Novelist in the reality of this essay has done what I don’t think any other writer has been able to do: write the perfect internet novel. No internet speak, unnecessarily formatted chat threads, or online outliers necessary.
Like any great book, it’s also a love story, however briefly. We get a less internet-addled version of the novelist when he’s with Violet or his dog. What elevates these moments, in my mind, is the language, or lack thereof. In these scenes, the novelist no longer relies on words; his actions are loving and purely expressive, as he plants one too many kisses on a half-asleep Violet and makes nonsensical noises to get his dog excited for a walk.
But I believe the moments of self-reflection and self-awareness are when the novelist is at his most authentic, when the book feels most real: when he feels bad after writing negatively about his friend, when he knows he’s not thinking for himself, when he acknowledges that all of this is for his book. However, I began to confuse “how self-aware is the novelist?” with “how self-aware is The Novelist?”
Was it because of the metafiction? Was the author trolling me? Was I overthinking it?
I found myself itching to know what the novelist actually thought—what were his feelings on X, what about his politics regarding Y? I’m certain this was as intended.
If trolling4 is baiting people into having a specific emotional reaction, isn’t doing so successfully just a sign that the one pulling the strings has mastered their craft? I think the novelist’s constant reevaluating and recalculating of his and his friends’ politics, influences, philosophies, identities, or how to make coffee, are symptoms of being trapped online. By the end, he knows he might be wrong about everything he’d thought earlier in the morning, but all that matters is if the book is well-written.
In The Novelist, what we see is a very regular person who perseveres through self-doubt, a self-doubt unsettlingly exacerbated by the internet, and, ultimately, what we are seeing, once again, is ourselves.
I think Ian Mackaye, founder of Dischord Records and Minor Threat alum, said something to this affect in an interview once, more specifically, an aquarium. Something we can choose to exit—I’m still looking for the original interview.
Why would he name a character Jordan Castro? I liked that the novel made me reflect on this, which I believe is the intention. “Jordan Castro” as the controversial writer-thinker-intellectual ju dour. I think it was a great move, perhaps the only move–it breaks apart the contemporary expectation of “autofiction” while solidifying the work in a metafictional realm, toeing an absurdist (comedy) line. No other name would do.
“Unreliable narrator,” a lazy term, I know. If you think a even a little hard, every narrator is unreliable. Fiction, non-fiction, poetry—it’s all he said she said, isn’t it? You get the point.
Terrible word. Possibly worse than “unreliable narrator”. Doesn’t hold a candle to “autofiction,” though.