In a pivotal scene in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), Travis Bickle works out in his filthy New York apartment. Over a montage of push-ups, pull-ups and bicep curls, we hear Bickle’s voice:
I gotta get in shape now. Too much sitting has ruined my body. Too much abuse has gone on for too long. From now on I’m gonna do 50 push-ups each morning, 50 pull-ups. There’ll be no more pills, there’ll be no more bad food, no more destroyers of my body. From now on it’ll be total organisation. Every muscle must be tight.
Bickle’s dream of “total organisation” concerns not just his own body, but society as a whole. In the next scene, we see him pointing a gun at a poster of Charles Palantine, a presidential candidate Bickle has asked to “clean up [the] city” because it’s “like an open sewer… full of filth and scum”. If Palantine doesn’t, Bickle will take matters into his own hands. “True force,” Bickle says, eyeing Palantine’s face on the wall.
Bickle is a well-established type in literature – an isolated, lonely man, hurtling toward violence – but this preoccupation with fitness feels distinctly contemporary. In two perceptive new novels – Fresh, Green Life by Sebastian Castillo and Muscle Man by Jordan Castro – we find echoes of Bickle, this time in the form of underpaid and precariously employed English professors attempting to give their lives order and meaning through the pursuit of weightlifting.
Both novels take place over the course of a single day, featuring protagonists – Harold in Muscle Man and Sebastián in Fresh, Green Life – who ruminate endlessly on perceived slights and obsess over the transformation of their bodies. Sebastián, the seemingly autofictional narrator of Castillo’s novel, informs us that “in the past several years [he’s] taken an utmost interest in [his] health” and “began exercising six days a week, eating the healthiest and most organic food [he] could afford”. Harold’s diet and exercise habits are also related in precise detail, from the “L-citrulline” and “beetroot powder” that form part of Harold’s pre-workout routine to his various exercises (deadlift, bench-press, dips). Bench-pressing 225 pounds is a “rite of passage.”
In the gym, both characters seek to achieve the “total organisation” Bickle speaks of; at times, they seem to realise it. In an extended gym sequence, Harold attains an almost spiritual state while weightlifting. “He was one with the pump. He was blood… he did not feel the usual self-consciousness…” Sebastián, meanwhile, mentions his body has become “more lissome and statuesque”. Both characters believe that if they could only perfect their bodies, the rest of their lives will follow. Can we trust their version of events? In Taxi Driver, after the workout montage, Bickle enters a porn cinema and peeks through his fingers – not wanting to watch, but unable to resist. Later, he drinks beer in his cab, and in the film’s final, chaotic sequence, he returns to his apartment for pills, washed down with more beer, before heading out again in search of victims of his rage. When “every muscle must be tight”, something is bound to snap.
Harold and Sebastián are equally unreliable. While at the gym, Harold disdains another lifter who is “big and pimply and clearly on steroids”. But just a few pages later, we learn, Harold has himself “developed minor back acne recently” – a telltale sign of steroid use. Sebastián’s delusions are equally present throughout the text, the novel effectively being an extended monologue of his. When Sebastián comments on his own body, he does so obliquely. “One might call my physique admirable,” he says, “but I would not.” He hasn’t left his apartment in a year (except for the gym) and has taken a vow of silence; he’s lost touch with reality.
Both characters live in solipsistic worlds of their own creation. They are lost, lonely men seeking purpose, but lacking a suitable guide. For previous generations, Dante’s journey through the afterlife provided the model. The Italian poet is mentioned repeatedly in Fresh, Green Life by Sebastián’s former philosophy teacher, Professor Aleister. Sebastián is, quite intentionally, 35 years old – Dante’s age in The Divine Comedy. At the same time, the descriptions of Shepherd College, where Muscle Man’s Harold in has been teaching in different capacities for ten years, frequently resemble visions of the inferno. He imagines “a heap of broken bones and bloodied faces” piled up at the bottom of a staircase, and people appear to him in a hallway as “strange limbs stretched over everything like unspooled yarn”. When Castro writes that Harold “left the dark hall and stumbled” but “couldn’t remember the path he had taken”, and that he’s “hoping to encounter something that might direct him”, we can, hearing Dante’s echoes, only wonder: at what point will Virgil appear?
Once upon a time, the Roman bard would guide Dante through hell in an epic poem; in 2025, Virgil takes the form not of a poet but of an influencer on a screen. In one hilarious sequence – Fresh, Green Life is full of dry humour – Sebastián describes the videos he watches in his basement studio apartment:
There were videos featuring health personages who had advice as to how much protein or carbohydrates one should consume, and there were also videos of men who claimed that taking very brief, cold showers improved them, and other videos that said that eating only according to the dictums of a limited, typically meat-centered diet was the key to one’s salvation… in the comments to all these videos were several young men who claimed that their life was saved because they no longer ate bread, or no longer came to pornography, or no longer cooked eggs in vegetable oils, but in butter: a whole ecosystem of young men who said that they had been saved, very thankfully saved, because they took the advice a man in a video had given them.
These “personages” go unnamed. We can fill in the blanks: Jordan Peterson, Andrew Huberman, Andrew Tate – the male self-help gurus who preach self-discipline to millions of followers, but whose personal lives do not always correspond to the advice they give.
Harold, too, watches videos, fantasising about his own YouTube channel or podcast. In the sauna, he puts his earbuds in and watches auto-suggested bodybuilding videos rather than talking to the other gymgoers. He has gone from being a pitiable character to a potentially dangerous one. The slogan-like thoughts he accepts reveal a mind lured by fascism: “Strength… was the king of all virtues”; “We need the great to be exalted”. I wondered if Castro would introduce Yukio Mishima, the neo-fascist warrior novelist of postwar Japan, and he does – in the form of a YouTube video.
Exercise, health, and wellness are not fascist; strength and beauty can be virtues. But the obsessive pursuit of them and their being instilled as political ideals are dangerous. If strength is “king of all virtues”, weakness must be stamped out; when health and wellness become an all-consuming goal, illness cannot be tolerated. Life itself is pathologised, and these futile pursuits lead men down dark paths. Why is Sebastián alone on New Year’s Eve, having spoken to no one for a year? Why is Harold unable to speak more than a few words to anyone? How does this happen to two English professors?
Harold and Sebastián’s actions, their need for total control, ultimately result from their extremely pessimistic views about the state of the American university, much in the way Travis Bickle’s actions were responding to the decay of 1970s New York. Sebastián is an “adjunct” instructor, or, as he puts it, “a classroom garbage man”. Poorly paid, he must teach courses at multiple universities to survive. The “great horror” of his job is the realisation that students “had taken out large loans to sit in front of [him]” and that he will “in turn pay [his] creditors for having had the same experience many years prior”. Eventually he quits teaching, retreats to his apartment, watching videos and focusing on his body – the one thing in life he can direct.
Harold’s pessimism results from material concerns, too. He frets about the impossibility of achieving tenure and thinks teaching is like being an “insurance agent”, reducing students’ risk of future unemployment in exchange for money. But his malcontent also has an ideological bent. He criticises English departments, claiming they’ve become “recent event departments, where ‘recent events,’ and not literature, were the prism through which everything was read”, and lamenting how “the Literature Department scrambled to align itself with progress”. There is, of course, a knowing irony here, with Castro having created a work of literature inspired by contemporary trends.
True to type, both novels have thrilling conclusions. The alienated protagonists must confront the outside world they’ve been avoiding. We know, in Taxi Driver, this ends in a bloodbath. Will violence be expressed or sublimated for Harold and Sebastián? Will their health routines lead to any sort of mental enlightenment, or simply a deepening of their shame and self-loathing?
I was reminded, in both novels, of the ending of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, when the butler Stevens laments his life, realising that in deferring to the authority of his master, he has unwittingly wasted his days, thrown away his one chance at love and inadvertently aided fascists. “I can’t even say I made my own mistakes,” he remarks. Sebastián and Harold might find themselves thinking the same thing – and so, shuffling between YouTubers and podcasters at the gym, might countless other young men today.
Derek Neal teaches at McMaster University in Canada and writes a literary newsletter on Substack
Fresh, Green Life
Sebastian Castillo
Soft Skull Press, 160pp, £14.99
Muscle Man
Jordan Castro
Catapult, 272pp, £19.78
[Further reading: The Booker Prize 2025 shortlist]
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This article appears in the 25 Sep 2025 issue of the New Statesman, “Are you up for it?” – Andy Burnham’s plan for Britain
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