Bodies without authors

reading Jordan Castro's The Novelist

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I walk around the East Village trying to notice things. I see who I believe to be Brendan Urie of Panic! at the Disco shoving a doughnut into his mouth outside a Crunch gym. We make eye contact and he kind of glares at me. It was a private moment, I understand. I had forgotten to put on deodorant before I left my apartment, so when I get off at Union Square, I hurry into a Duane Reade. I have plenty of time. The deodorant I want is behind a locked case. There’s no option to do my usual cursory sniffing of the different deodorants, which really bothers me. I push the button to summon an associate, then see a different deodorant (cheaper) in a case that is unlocked, so I choose that instead. The PA announces assistance is needed in the deodorant aisle, but I’m nowhere to be found near that aisle. I feel like I’m in a low-stakes road movie. Except I’m not stealing, just running away from assistance. And no one is looking for me. It’s hot back out on the street. I’m trying very hard not to sweat through my knit top someone later calls black. I correct them–it’s actually navy. I walk into a bookstore on Fourth and consider buying Žižek’s Organs without Bodies, but it’s twenty-six dollars and I would have to carry it around for the rest of the night. I do a little performance for no one in particular and pick up other interesting books, skim the back covers. There’s still thirty minutes to kill. Of course, I’m early to a reading most people would be late to anyways. 

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The reading is at KGB for Jordan Castro’s new novel The Novelist. The lineup consists of him and three out of town writers. It’s very crowded, and I’ve picked the worst spot to sit, which is at the exact spot at the bar where people squeeze in to order a drink. Someone passes out two readers before the headliner. The bartender supplies me with refills of water even when there’s a huge demand for Peronis. He must not want me to also pass out though I am far from it. Maybe this isn’t obvious to him. His face is kind, accented with a goatee and a fedora. I must give off this vibe. The vibe being, literature so good it makes you faint.

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In between readers, I overhear a man talking about how he will send his work out for the first time on Tuesday. What is the monumental occasion of Tuesday? The friend is confused too. It’s getting published? No, no, just not being a pussy anymore and sending shit out. Poems, of course. It’s always poems. 

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A reader shares a story she wrote the day before about God in a start-up board meeting post-Creation. This is when someone evidently passes out. God so good it makes you faint. It’s hard to pay attention to the next reader. I’m not sure any writer really minds not having one hundred people’s attention fully on me, but still the energy shifts. The story involves a murderous girlfriend. For some reason I get the sense it’s set in Florida. Short stories these days are always set in Florida. It is warmer than outside inside. I’m wondering if I pass out, too, or someone else does, will it have a domino effect? Wan girl after girl dropping to the floor. The crowd collectively performing a cathartic catatonia? A sympathetic magic that could be known as the Dimes Square Crucible reenactment.

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Castro reads a passage where his narrator is attempting to write about shit. He reads from his phone rather than from a physical copy stacked on the table beside him. It’s charming, a very poet thing to do. The fictional novelist considers the phrase “speckled the banister” to describe an incident of explosive diarrhea. I think of the floor in the public restroom at Prospect Park from a few weeks ago. There was shit on the floor. And a flattened mouse. I hadn’t seen a mouse flattened like that before. Now I’ve seen many, even in the last two days. Speckled hadn’t been a word I thought of then. But it’s the right one. What I thought of was my shoes and how much I didn’t want to leave the restroom with anything new on their bottoms. The real novelist Jordan Castro’s reading is the shortest of all, which only makes me respect him more. 

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 I wanted to ask the living breathing Jordan Castro the novelist, because he used to write poems, how his sense of syntax has changed between genres. I was too lazy to look up any of his work beforehand, so the question could have very easily been answered by the internet. I also wanted to ask him about creating time in books since the book takes place over a single morning. A KGB reading isn’t really the place for questions. I imagine if there was a Q&A, such MFA style questions would get me laughed at. It’s a gift when I get to keep my mouth shut.

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The end of reading features a downtown rapper/singer blaketheman1000 who people are really excited to see perform. Watching him is like listening to someone read Twitter out loud. It’s not entirely unpleasant but I also would prefer for it to be over. Eventually it does. By this time, he’s in his underwear, and when I leave, most of the merch thongs with his name on them haven’t been purchased. I meant to buy a copy of The Novelist there, but it was on the merch table beside the thongs that looked so sad and lonely. I feel guilty making a choice between a novel and novelty. I opt for the e-book version when I get home later. Before I leave I tell a different novelist that I liked his novel. I can’t tell Jordan Castro whether or not I liked his book because I haven’t read it yet. Later when I do read the novel, I think of the singer’s performance and the novelist’s own tendency to stand at the back of literary events and scoff. “In short, I was critical of everything because I was afraid of everything.”

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I hate reading books on a screen. This is probably something the novelist would feel he would need to dislike, too. But reading The Novelist on my computer is actually the perfect format for a novel whose action mostly takes place on the computer. It’s tedious to read a book these days. There are so many distractions. The distractions that prevent the novelist from actually writing start to derail me as I read. Twitter, Instagram, email. Except as I write this I don’t have a longstanding email chain with a friend strictly about our bowel movements. I think about if there’s an equivalent thread in my inbox about abjections of the body. Earlier I’d said to my friend I loved emails of any kind. I get up to make coffee in the French press, just like the novelist. Then I begin to write a story about having a UTI. Another form of sympathetic art making. It’s a tedious first thirty pages, The Novelist, not my story. At least not yet. 

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It’s not the novelist’s failure to actually produce, but instead the idea of writing he obsesses over that prevents any real writing. He has an idea about what writing should look like, how it should feel when it’s happening, and when it’s done. He can’t make anything because he is too busy trying to make himself in some other writer’s image. Unfortunately for him, the only thing he really makes over the course of 190ish pages is literal shit. And some emails. 

He obsesses over criticism about the writers as people, not the writing itself. The most solid piece of criticism he offers still focuses on the perception of the work/writer rather than the made thing itself. “Every review focused on something other than its novelistic qualities: it was a political, historical, or sociological document; it was a philosophical treatise, and so on. What was the point of literature, I’d wondered, if it could only be something else?”

The novelist’s main fixation is character-novelist Jordan Castro. Jordan Castro becomes another idea of a writer to both compare himself and aspire to. Jordan Castro the character has been accused of being a fascist or at least a protofascist, but to the novelist, he is a blueprint, even when he’s self-conscious about his idolatry because of what others think. Criticism of Jordan Castro feels personal. When he tries to learn Brett Easton Ellis’ style by transcribing the entirety of Less Than Zero, he stops after about thirty pages, partly because another writer friend says he doesn’t like Easton Ellis. Every act is a self-conscious act. The novelist self-consciously acknowledges this throughout the novel. 

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I try to reverse engineer my day down to the minute, the novelist-style. I do notice things outside of my phone, but I confuse the time and days. After the reading, I blister my feet walking around the East Village. I start to walk to St. Dymphna’s on Avenue A, but decide against it and go to Bushwick. I walk with purpose to Fourteenth in my shoes that will give me a blister by morning. I walk in circles. I see two friends from college within a span of six hours in two different coffee shops in two different neighborhoods. I buy a seltzer and some medication, then I buy a Perrier at some other point in the day. I sit on a patio at a bar with the blue light of the tv distracting me, so we move tables. Someone I meet says he only spends money on rent and takeout. I spend money on rent and seltzer. I get off at the wrong stop from the B-38, then walk nineteen minutes home in the early morning sun.

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“I imagined Calvin, not me” doing X activity is a refrain the novelist writes to convince himself. He tries not to, but the novelist still is writing himself as Calvin, the main character in his novel. The novelist engages in the same self-deception the Lauren Oyler character does in Fake Accounts. The cleaving of self from the constructed self isn’t so easy in writing whether in a book or on a dating app. And similarly to Fake Accounts, we’re meant to believe our narrator isn’t the writer (Castro, Oyler) himself/herself. Unlike Fake Accounts, the separation of self/writer as character/and real writer is more convincing. What you’re like and what you like is more reflective of who you are than what you make yourself to be in writing. And in its own circular way, this separates novel from novelist from Novel from Novelist. 

Castro the real writer’s characterization of himself as fake Jordan Castro isn’t meant to lead us back to the belief the novelist is really Castro. “Every reader who encountered Calvin could envision their own version of him, whereas I was specific.” This is the moment where we know what’s true. There is no Castro in this world. And there is no novelist either. 

Jordan Castro as Jordan Castro as the novelist

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How many word documents exist on my drive with titles that include the word “novel?” I’ve lost count, deleted many of them. “I considered working on my main novel,” the novelist says while he works on his new side novel about how much he hates his friend. All the prospects–the main novel, the side novel, the novel yet-to-be–are bleak. He stops writing again.

The novelist eventually says he is not smart enough to write all the books he wants to write. It’s distracting to fail, maybe even more than all the distractions inside his phone. The outside world doesn’t keep his attention as easily. “I tried to focus on the beauty around me, but I was too self-conscious to earnestly experience anything.” The novelist does write, if you buy the idea that the depiction of a narrator’s thought process is writing. In this way, I’m writing, too.