Flesh, David Szalay.

 

Flesh, David Szalay. Scribner, New York, 2025. 353 p.p., $28.99.

REVIEW BY ED MEEK

Flesh won the Booker Prize in 2025 and has generated a lot of buzz. David Szalay is the author of Turbulence, London and the Southeast, and All That Man Is. He won the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for Fiction. The novel is written from the point of view of a white male and covers his life from the time he is fifteen until he is in his sixties. Although he is born in Hungary, he spends much of his adult life in London and he represents a current type of western male whose emotional growth and development is stunted or limited by his inability to express himself and understand who he is.

The novel is constructed in a way that reenforces this point of view. The entire novel takes place in the present tense. It is filled with sparse dialogue using words like “okay” and “things” as a substitute for details. The action often happens off-stage and is only later explained when the main character tells us rather than shows us what happened. In other words, the author has intentionally undermined or overturned a number of the conventions of fiction. This approach works well with his theme of undeveloped masculinity. The main character lives in the present tense. He doesn’t think about the future. In fact, he has no agency. He merely reacts to events. In another flouting of convention, he doesn’t seem to want anything. This makes for an interesting read if you are a writer. Zadie Smith when she reads asks, “how has this person made the novel new? And for me, this novel was new…Extraordinary.”

Sometimes it feels as if every story about men is Melville’s Billy Budd story. Billy Budd stutters so when he is unjustly accused of mutiny, the only response he has is violence and he pays for that with his life. Istvan in Flesh, also responds to challenging situations at key moments in his life with violence and he pays a serious price each time. The one time he rescues someone else from violence, he is rewarded.

As reader the novel can get annoying. Here is Istvan thinkng about his deployment in Iraq:

He realizes that the things that are so important to him—the things that happened, and that he saw there, the things that left him feeling that nothing would ever be the same again—they just aren’t important here.”

Ishtvan leaves it at that. That’s just bad writing. That Szalay does it on purpose doesn’t alter that.

Ishtvan gets a job driving for a rich woman. Here she asks him about himself:

“Karl says you were in the army,” Mrs. Nyman says.

“Yes.”

“How was that?” she asks.

“How was that?” The traffic was moving again and he has to focus on it for a moment.

“Yes,” she says.

“It was…” He wonders what to say, what sort of answer she’s looking for. “It was okay,” he says.

“It was okay?”

“Yes.”

“What does that mean?”

“What does that mean?”

“Yes.”

“It was okay.”

There is quite a bit of dialogue like this. The word okay is used hundreds of times. It is kind of like a conversation between a parent and a teenager about school. Ishtvan has difficulty expressing himself, like the main character in the movie Train Dreams. Nonetheless, it is terrible dialogue. The intentional bad writing makes a fair amount of the novel boring. You might find yourself saying, “All right, I get it.” On the other hand, it’s a quick read.

Thje other interesting aspect of Flesh is the way violence is treated. Istvan periodically finds himself resorting to violence. When he does, he feels detached, not in control. At one point he punches a hole in a door without any discernable reason. As someone who grew up in a working-class city, I can identify. In grammar school we had fights daily. Szalay has his finger on the problem many men have with violence. How it is something they can’t entirely control. The United States has a long history of using violence to resolve problems. Obama’s assassinating Osama Bid Laden, the torture of captured terrorists by the Bush administration. Trump’s striking down Aasem Soleimani with a drone and blowing up Venezuelan boats. The use of violence by ICE.

In Flesh the themes Szalay brings up and the way he structures the novel, make Flesh well worth reading and thinking about.