Almost always—especially when it’s a book I’ll be reviewing—I read with Post-its. I use them to mark moments to which I know I’ll want to return: the shark fins of theme and thesis surfacing from beneath the prose; sentences that smell strongly of the author’s special brand. I go through about half a pad per book.
But on my first lap through David Szalay’s new novel, Flesh, I didn’t use a single one.
It wasn’t for lack of interest—the last book I read this fast, and with this much eagerness, might have been a Harry Potter. But to say I was simply swept away sounds too watery. The novel, which follows a tight-lipped, withdrawn Hungarian man named István from childhood through adulthood, moves less like a riptide and more like a European night train: readers wake up at the beginning of each chapter to find István older, in a new place, and further destabilized by recent off-screen events.
What we don’t see: István moving to a new town with his single mother; his stint in juvenile detention; his tour in Iraq with the Hungarian Army (that Hungary sent 300 troops to Iraq in the early aughts was news to me; leave it to Szalay, a British-Hungarian born in Canada, to remind an American about the global ramifications of the War on Terror); the birth of his child. What we do see: István smoking cigarettes (different brands at different stages); István eating (different foods at different stages); István working (different jobs at different stages); István having sex (different women at different stages).
This is not a political novel, a historical novel, a psychological novel, a sex novel, or a money novel. If it were, I probably would have stopped and put a Post-it somewhere. And yet it is all those things, too—because, at its core, this is a novel of the body in motion.
Szalay (rhymes with “Ahoy!”) has always been a master of the present tense, and here it provides the perfect track for shuttling his protagonist through time. The verby, staccato prose holds the reader captive and propels them from scene to scene, conversation to conversation, in István’s body. The single-line paragraphs help: “She shoots another slug of soda into the glass.” “It takes him a long time to come.” “Yeah, fuck, his right hand hurts a lot.” Each chapter opens en media res, leaving readers with little time to find their seats before liftoff.
“Chapter” might be the wrong word. For a while now, Szalay’s work has fallen into a specific, but growing, genre: short story collections billed as novels. His 2018 novel, Turbulence, originally a series of short radio-dramas written for the BBC, hands off the narrative to a new character at the beginning of every “chapter.” (The closest connection between any of the adjacent protagonists is that they brush shoulders on a plane.) Like those in Flesh, the chapters in Turbulence are punchy but elegant, patient but compressed, loosely-woven but completely stand-alone—because they’re stories. His 2016 Booker-finalist, All That Man Is, is even more egregiously mislabeled. Each of the nine chapters follows a different man, at a different stage of life, in a different place. (If you’re starting to see a pattern in the way Szalay structures his books, that’s because there is one.) One chapter even follows a stoic, shelled Hungarian security guard. Reading back, he resembles a kind of crash-test dummy of István.
To Szalay’s (and Scribner’s) credit, Flesh is the most novelistic of his recent novels. After all, the ten chapters all follow the same character, in the same world, in chronological order. But when the third chapter was published as a self-contained piece in the New Yorker (“Plaster”), it seemed right at home—not just as an excerpt, but as a short story, and a good one. (The gist: after Iraq, the engine of István’s daily life back home stalls and starts in sudden, violent lurches.)
But what makes these chapters stories? The tautness of the language? The suddenness of the action? The ghost-like presence of the beginning at the end and the end at the beginning? Maybe this is what a great novel is, or can be: a series of great stories, welded together to make a whole. Maybe a marathon is a sequence of sprints.
Such notions bring to mind a recent and under-sung Esquire interview with another New Yorker story writer, Zach Williams. “The most exciting work I’ve seen in recent years comes from people who are working in shorter forms to different ends,” Williams says. “I could say something banal about attention spans, but it’s more than that. There’s some [connection between] the form of short stories and life on the internet, scrolling and clicking.”
Maybe that’s why I didn’t use any Post-its: because speeding through Szalay’s bite-sized paragraphs is, like doomscrolling, equal parts immersive and addictive. It’s true that there is something almost VR-like about Flesh’s focus on movement, positioning, gesture, and dialogue. But is that the only reason I liked it so much? Because it moves fast, changes often, and rewards my limited attention with violence and sex? And I wonder if I, a man reading about a man, am not falling into a kind of trap, captivated by an aesthetic masculinity in the way men often are on social media. But there’s a reason the content of our algorithms gets more erotic, or extreme, or vulgar with time. It’s because we keep watching. Is that propulsion or compulsion? Active or passive? Did I read Flesh, or did I consume it? And what, really, is the difference?
Like any great author—and I think now, with Flesh, such a title can be bestowed—Szalay knows about these questions; and with István, he seems to be asking them, too.
Take what I call the “therapy scenes.” There are a few of them. One is at the beginning of the eighth chapter, and starts with a verifiably Szalayic (Szalay-esque? Szalayian?) paragraph:
“He still doesn’t quite have the hang of this.”
After a few more one-liners, it becomes clear István is living in pandemic-era England (he vapes now, etc.) and trying to log on to a Zoom meeting with his therapist. But faulty tech isn’t the only obstacle of communication. As you might expect, István, a nightclub-security-guard-turned-real-estate-developer whose favorite words are “yeah” and “okay,” is not exactly the therapy type. (But aren’t those the people who need therapy the most?)
Yet István doesn’t really seem like the real-estate-developer type, either. Or the nightclub-security-guard type. Or the soldier type. Or the juvenile-detention type. In the first chapter, when he is a young teen, he seems like a character without any proclivities at all. He speaks only when spoken to. He goes only where he’s invited. When a very temporary friend asks him if he’s ever had sex, he says, “No.” When the older woman across the hall invites him in for a meal, he says, “Okay.”
Who is he, then? I’m back in my undergraduate fiction workshops. What does he want? What does he lack? What is he afraid of? “‘How are you feeling?’” the zoom-therapist asks when they finally connect.
“‘Yeah, okay,’” István replies.
For István, we need to ask different questions. Does he really want anything, or is he told what he should want? Does he lack anything, or does he only fail to meet the expectations of others? He joins the army because he can’t really find anything else. Is that a reason, a character motivation? He makes his way into the selective circles of the British financial elite due to an incidental late-night encounter. Is that a rising action, a turning point? Or has Szalay found an authentic way to depict elusive, oft-botched literary features: passivity, numbness, randomness, chance?
Maybe István isn’t the narrative or descriptive engine of his own life. Maybe he’s just scrolling through:
“He has this feeling, with women, that it’s hard to have an experience that feels entirely new, that doesn’t feel like something that has already happened, and will probably happen again in some very similar way, so that it never feels like all that much is at stake.”
In this way, Szalay had departed from (and hopefully grown out of) his previous male protagonists. One of the problems with All That Man Is, was—you guessed it—all the men: their attempt to articulate their flailing sexualities, their competitive, comparative friendships, their fixations with money and power. Each protagonist’s mind is a knot of contradiction; the women, by contrast, appear lightly sketched, like NPCs waiting to drive the plot or teach a lesson. But reading Flesh is an entirely different (and better) experience. István’s mind is not a pre-formed knot—and therefore readers don’t have to spend the novel untangling it. Put simply: I don’t really understand István. And neither does István.
Some of the novel’s most interesting moments come when István suddenly senses hierarchies of power—often, it is the novel’s other men who act condescendingly toward him, failing to see past his status as working-class or as an immigrant. Yet these moments also make me wonder about how different this novel would be, or how different its reception would be, if its protagonist (and its author) was not a white male. For a story so focused on exteriority, physicality, and the influence of others on the self, it makes almost no mention of race (nor will Szalay have to answer many questions on the subject). István’s whiteness, then, appears almost as a default, something to which he has little awareness.
But through him, one gets surprisingly intimate portraits of other characters. And for a novel that moves this fast, nearly all of these portraits are patiently drawn. Szalay’s ear for dialogue has become so extraordinary that even the most curt, short-lived conversations seem full of thematic meaning and characterization. And yet, as in life, no two relationships in the novel are alike. Readers often don’t know who will turn out to be a friend, an adversary, an employer, a lover—because István doesn’t know, either. And, yes: there’s something very absorbing, very gripping about this.
But there’s also something honest about it. Something palpable. Something true to the way it really is.
Trust me: you will feel it in your bones.
