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By Molly Young
Dear readers,
In a startling break with tradition, we’re examining two new (not antique) books today, both of which happen to offer glimpses into the male psyche. Feeling frisky and contemporary as summer approaches! We’ll be back to regular programming in coming editions; in the meantime, please enjoy this detour into the present.
—Molly
PS: Read Like the Wind will be on hiatus for the next few weeks, but will return in July.
“Flesh,” by David Szalay
Fiction, 2025
After finishing “Flesh” in under 48 hours I tried to figure out how it worked, why it moved so quickly, what it was doing. Came up with a few possible answers but nothing conclusive, and would welcome any hypotheses from readers who felt similarly catapulted through its pages.
“Flesh” is the story of a Hungarian man born in (probably) the early or mid-1980s, with each chapter excavating a meaningful period in his life. Then the chapter ends and a silence is imposed, and the following chapter picks up a few years later. A reader interpolates what has occurred during the elided time.
The man is named István; he is alluring and violent. As a young man he enlists in the army, fights in the Iraq War as part of the “coalition of the willing,” and moves to London, where he experiences a vertiginous rise and — well, I won’t say whether or not István falls.
Szalay’s use of line breaks is extravagant and peculiar. There’s a lot of dialogue, much of it consisting of the word “OK” — which turns out to have more shades of meaning than I supposed. “Flesh” occupies one of my favorite categories of fiction, which could be described as “novels about the ways in which history acts upon an ordinary person.” Recent history, in this case: accelerated globalization, Hungary’s entry into the European Union, the intrusion of social media into life, the pandemic.
Read if you like: The David Cronenberg film “Eastern Promises,” Hernan Diaz’s “Trust,” Katie Kitamura.
Available from: A good library or bookstore.
“The Passenger Seat,” by Vijay Khurana
Fiction, 2025
This is the opposite of a “promising” first novel, if “promising” suggests an implicit but unfulfilled talent. “The Passenger Seat” is structurally ingenious, rendered in unusual and fine colors, buffed to a shine. A perfect debut novel, explicit in its excellence!
The plot involves a pair of disturbing teenage boys who set out on a road trip through the Canadian wilderness, but if you’re not grabbed by the above nouns, I would still encourage you to seek out the book, as it handles topics of universal interest — identity formation, alienation, power, loneliness — with daunting originality. Unlike a lot of so-called psychological thrillers, it is psychologically thrilling.
Khurana is also very good on adolescent friendship, capturing the way that young people can unwillingly influence each other/merge personalities at precisely the moment they are trying to become discrete selves.
Read if you like: Denis Johnson, the curious phenomenon that is the ‘manosphere’, Charles Willeford, driving.
Available from: Biblioasis or a good bookstore.
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The post Molly Recommends 2 Very Male New Novels appeared first on New York Times.
