The Novelist covers six hours in the life of a young man, a struggling novelist. It’s a working morning: our protagonist gets up, makes tea (yerba mate, in a French press), opens his laptop, pulls up his work on Google Docs, logs on to Twitter, then Facebook, and returns to his novel. His wife is sleeping; his dog will eventually beg him for a walk. The Novelist switches to coffee. He goes to the bathroom. He barely writes.
What makes this novel more than a test of the reader’s patience is that the main character’s stream-of-consciousness has a narrative arc. The banality of a normal morning calls out for purpose, for meaning, for a reason to get up. Our hero looks for one. His rumination becomes first a self-examination and then a wrestling with the virtual and real environments that surround him. Castro is an ironist: he constantly exploits the gap between who the Novelist thinks he is, and what he actually might be. The Novelist is an unreliable narrator of his own consciousness.
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