FLESH, by David Szalay
In his indispensable book of political reportage, “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72,” Hunter S. Thompson wrote that the only objective journalism he’d seen was on “a closed-circuit TV setup that watched shoplifters in the General Store at Woody Creek, Colo.”
Thompson’s comment came back to me while reading “Flesh,” the new novel from the uncommonly gifted Hungarian-English novelist David Szalay. To read this cool, remote book — among its primary subjects is male alienation — is to feel you are eyeballing the action on a bank of surveillance cameras. There will be no conspiratorial glances at those cameras, no metafictional winks. “Flesh” is the sound a writer makes when he has lined up and shot his darlings as if they were the Romanovs. In terms of his style, a better title would be “Bones.” The novel works because Szalay’s simplicity is, like Hemingway’s, the fatty sort that resonates.
This book is the rags-to-riches story of a diffident and lonely young man, Istvan, who grows up with his mother in a housing estate in Hungary. A lot happens to Istvan: As a virginal teen he will commence a clandestine affair with a much older woman; he will be held accountable for her husband’s death; he will serve time in juvenile detention and alongside Norwegian soldiers in Iraq. He will learn that he can handle himself in rough situations.
He is invited into security work and becomes a chauffeur in London for a family of one-percenters. He insinuates his way into this family without quite meaning to; he’s a proletarian penetrating the conquering classes. Before long he’s wearing Tom Ford suits, flying on helicopters and private jets, dining at the River Café and schtupping the callow wife.
Istvan advances toward the redoubts of privilege, yet he remains coarse, inarticulate and boorish. Dark impulses lurk in him; he seems like a bystander to his own experience; he has the detachment of a survivor. He comes off like one of those guys who hits the “door close” button six times in every elevator he enters. Yet Szalay lets us feel his inchoate longing for meaning, for experience, for belonging. He is more easily wounded than he lets on. You sense in him the muffled sadness of Eastern Europe.
Time moves with an uncanny fluidity in “Flesh.” Szalay slides the action forward, sometimes years at a time, in a manner that is seamless but unremarked upon in the text. The novel’s tone can be reminiscent, if bleakly so, of Frank O’Hara’s “I do this, I do that” poems. Here is Istvan upon getting home from work:
He looks in the fridge.
He smokes on the balcony.
He watches TV — the news, or some quiz show.
He pours himself a glass of Coke.
His mother makes them some food.
And then it’s the next morning again and he’d standing in front of the building waiting for the old red Citroën to arrive.
Szalay (pronounced SOL-loy), who was born in 1974, is hard to pin down as a writer. His five previous novels share little in common except a certain melancholy and an interest in masculinity under duress. He is best known for “All That Man Is,” which was a finalist for the Booker Prize in 2016. The one that has most stuck with me is “Turbulence” (2019), a series of linked stories that tweeze us into the lives of air travelers.
Istvan is not described, physically, in “Flesh,” yet this novel is driven by his irresistibility to women. So many cannot wait to confer their bodies upon him. He appears to be what Lorrie Moore once called a “dunk”: “half dork, half hunk.”
When he’s a teenager, he gratefully accepts sexual favors from the older woman while staring down into her gray roots. (Mrs. Robinson alert: She is all of 42.) Later, he sleeps not only with Helen, the married woman he is hired to drive around, but the family’s young nanny.
The plot gains momentum in its second half when the family’s son turns against Istvan, who along with Helen has been siphoning off his enormous inheritance. Here is Helen, reporting on her son’s comment about Istvan: “He said you exemplify a primitive form of masculinity. He said he was surprised that I ever found that attractive.”
There is no one to root for, morally, in “Flesh.” You wonder if perhaps the plot will come down, to borrow the title of an Anthony Powell novel, to a question of upbringing. But extremes meet here: Rich and poor seem equally empty and meretricious. We are living in a world that lacks moral champions, and Szalay’s book makes you feel their absence like a physical ache.
I admired this book from front to back without ever quite liking it, without ever quite giving in to it. Sometimes those are the ones you itch to read again. Sometimes once is more than enough.
FLESH | By David Szalay | Scribner | 353 pp. | $28.99
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade. More about Dwight Garner
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