Why I Picked It Up
It feels to me like a lot of the large-scale political conflicts in the world today stem, in part, from a kind of crisis of modern masculinity. Over the past century or so, we've seen a gradual shift away from a predominantly patriarchal culture toward one that's much more diverse and inclusive, and for some men that shift has created real insecurity about how to be a man in the world today — insecurity that, for some, has pushed them toward more reactionary positions. We can see that reflected in certain political leaders, who are themselves reflective of large swaths of men in the population. It seemed to me like a good way to start working through and understanding this is to understand what it actually means to be a man: to inhabit a body with all its attendant desires, and to inhabit masculinity in the world today. Flesh by David Szalay is a novel that gave me a lot of insight, meaning, and poignancy on exactly that front, even though I myself have inhabited a man's body my entire life.
Premise
The novel follows one man, István, who is born in Hungary, and we follow him from adolescence and the onset of puberty through many different stages of his life: prison, war, fatherhood, and entering the upper echelons of high finance and business, all the way into his later years. Following him through these stages really tapped into what it means to inhabit a body in this way, to be a man — and I found it fascinating, especially because I think what Szalay does here is deceptively simple.
István comes across, on the surface, as very straightforward and in many ways very passive — things just seem to happen to him. But gradually he develops a lot more agency, and even though his exterior stays simple and straightforward, his personality reveals far more nuance, complexity, and interior richness the further we follow him. The novel moves through his life in distinct sections, with gaps in between that go unnarrated — spaces we have to imaginatively fill in ourselves. I read an interview with Szalay where he described wanting to give readers the sense that they'd read one great, big epic life, as if the book were a thousand pages long, even though instead we get these discrete sections and the book itself is only around 350 pages.
Surface Simplicity, Interior Depth
Part of why István seems so simple on the surface is that a huge amount of the dialogue in this book is monosyllabic — someone will ask him a question and he'll just say "okay," "fine," "fine, okay." Those are many of his actual responses. But there's so much more going on underneath which is gradually revealed over the course of the narrative, along with the varying degrees to which he actually has agency in his own life: sometimes he finds himself in circumstances that spiral beyond his control, and sometimes he takes a very active part, for good or bad. That contrast makes him a genuinely complex character despite his straightforward demeanor.
This is something I think we often see when looking at adolescent boys generally — that there may not seem to be much going on under the surface, especially through the stages of puberty, when so much is driven by sex and desire. But Szalay shows that the desires attendant to inhabiting a man's body aren't only about sexual desire and libido; they're also about a desire for power, respect, and control, and the novel shows that playing out differently across each stage of István's life. This gradually builds toward a much larger understanding of his whole being.
Fatherhood and Looking Back
One of the most powerful sections for me is when István becomes a father and starts to view his own adolescent son, seeing and understanding things about himself through his son that he didn't necessarily understand when he himself was becoming a man — when he was simply thrown into that experience and carried along by what his body demanded of him. There's a striking passage where, reflecting on his own adolescence from the vantage point of fatherhood, István describes “Eleven, twelve, thirteen... the surprising new things his body wanted, and his inability to refuse it when it wanted them... And all that burgeoning physicality is held within yourself as a sort of secret, even as it is also the actual surface that you present to the world, so that you're left absurdly exposed, unsure whether the world knows everything about you or nothing, because you have no way of knowing whether these experiences that you're having are universal or entirely specific to you.” I found this way of looking at the gap between interior and exterior life — between what people project onto him as a "typical man" and what he's actually struggling with inside, unsure if any of it is universal or entirely his own — genuinely fascinating.
Comparisons with Other Writers
I'd previously read Szalay's earlier book, All That Man Is, and really enjoyed it — it's a collection of interlinked short stories about many different men, also exploring masculinity across a range of examples, and I remember thinking that any one of those stories could have been expanded into a full novel of its own. Flesh feels like exactly that: taking one life, István's, and giving it the same episodic, section-by-section treatment. There's real drama in what's revealed in the story's twists and turns, but there's also so much subtlety and shading to his interior life gradually surfacing alongside it.
This novel reminded me of a lot of great literature exploring manhood. There's something of Dickens in it — a coming-of-age story of someone from humble beginnings rising into the upper echelons of society, and charting both that rise and his eventual fall. There's also something of Dostoevsky's gradual moral inquiry into the choices people make and the agency we have to enact change in our own lives and the world around us. And in its use of dialogue, it reminded me enormously of Cormac McCarthy's The Road — there's a great deal of dialogue in Flesh, but not much is actually being said, and what is said is simple and plain, yet becomes so charged with emotion, and with everything left unsaid, that I don't think I've encountered dialogue used quite that way in a novel since The Road.
Flesh also builds a powerful sense of place: István never quite feels he can naturally inhabit either Hungary, where he grows up, or London, where he eventually moves, and there's real discomfort in both physical spaces. So much of the novel becomes about where he might find a sense of home — through his relationships with women, but also in a literal, physical sense of home, alongside inhabiting this sense of manhood itself. That also brought to mind a more recent novel, Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu (translated by Sean Cotter), which explores a very similar border between an interior and exterior life for a man — there are lines in Solenoid about the mind and body, and about how the army shapes a young man's isolation and introversion rather than simply "making him a man," that felt like they could have been lifted straight from Flesh.
Verdict
Overall, I think this is a genuinely extraordinary novel. On an initial read it might feel deceptively simple in what it's doing, but it left me with a lot of questions to keep turning over, and it has a real haunting quality to it — following the life of a man who seems fairly ordinary, and who vacillates between wanting to be the hero of his own story and falling back into a kind of insubstantial, anonymous ordinariness. I think the way it explores that tension is fascinating and very well done.
I'd love to know if you've read this and whether you agree or disagree with me, or if you've read anything else by Szalay — so far I've only read this and All That Man Is, but I want to read much more of his work now, because I think he's an incredibly talented author of a similar stature to the writers I've mentioned here.
Since I recorded my original thoughts on Flesh it went on to win the 2025 Booker Prize, making David Szalay the first Hungarian-British writer to win the award: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJ05mayaISU
