‘They’re interesting to look at in some way’
David Szalay, Flesh
Jonathan Cape, 368pp, £18.99, ISBN 9780224099783
reviewed by Cosmo Adair
Back in the 60s and 70s, the male novel was cool: male writers, on male things, for a male audience. But by 1991 Britain’s laureate of masculinity, Martin Amis, was lamenting in the London Review of Books that ‘maleness itself has become an embarrassment. Male consciousness, male pride, male rage — we don’t want to hear about it.’ That remained speciously true until this latest so-called crisis of masculinity, when a few quixotic hacks determined that what young men really need is the candidly self-effacing, unsubtle, highbrow male novel — a Portnoy, a Rachel Papers: the novel as bludgeon to thrash the forces of darkness (the Tates, the Manosphere, toxic masculinity, etc). Such a long-awaited novel has appeared, and has been duly heralded for its maleness.
Flesh, David Szalay’s fifth novel, is different in style and voice to its male precursors: it is deft, subtle, never brash, and finds its power in the unspoken, inarticulate depths, which lie beneath its banal and seemingly artless surface. It tells the story of Istvan, a Hungarian heavy, from 15-years-old through to late middle age; we see him as schoolboy, squaddie, bouncer, bodyguard, and eventually billionaire. Through this all, he is a hostage to chance, his emotional and verbal limits, and — above all — his flesh.
This is not unfamiliar ground for Szalay, the Anglo-Hungarian novelist, born in 1974. He often writes about those beyond usual sympathy — the thoughtlessly masculine, the emotionally inarticulate — as they falter forwards in a world that’s out of their control. His first novel, London and the Southeast (2009), concerned the world of telesales; his third, Spring (2011), the dotcom bubble, UKIP, horse racing, and a ‘will they, won’t they?’ love affair. But his fourth, All That Man Is (2016) was his first truly male novel: a sequence of nine thematically-related stories, showing nine men (a philologist, an oligarch, a civil servant, etc.) in moments of crisis, caused by love, lust, money and mortality. In one of these, we see a young Frenchman called Bernhard on holiday in Cyprus. Doused in kebab juice, Bernhard sleeps with two fellow hotel guests: an obese mother, and her still more obese daughter, neither of whom he finds attractive. But the flesh stirs where the mind revolts: ‘There is just so much of her,’ he thinks. ‘A quantity of woman nearly equal, if that were possible, to his need to possess it.’
Much like Bernhard, Istvan’s body never defers to his mind and this is the case from puberty onwards. Facing the usual tribulations of adolescence (like being teased for wanking only ‘once or twice’-a-day) he embarks on an unlikely affair with his ‘old and ugly’ 42-year-old married neighbour. It starts with a kiss, soon followed by a pornographic fantasia. Typically, the sexual awakening of puberty is slower, its desires deferred, but Istvan quickly becomes aware of ‘the surprising new things the body wanted, and his inability to refuse it when it wanted them.’ So when he has to ‘refuse it’, once the affair ends, he breaks into her flat, kills her husband (possibly, an accident) and ends up in juvie. This shapes his life forever: he is unemployable, and so fights in the Iraq War and, later, moves to the UK.
Istvan is incapable of much thought or reflection; he lacks the toolkit for self-analysis. His only means of contemplation is a rather thoughtlessly sad post-coital cigarette, on a terrace or balcony, whilst his lover sleeps and his ambiguous thoughts are like the fuzzy blue-grey of the pre-dawn sky. Returning from the Iraq War, traumatised and decorated, he tries to speak to his mother about what happened there, but ‘he realises 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.’ James Wood once said that Szalay’s style is, like Knausgaard’s, ‘artless, prosy, cliched, embarrassingly banal’, but it lets Szalay evoke Istvan’s own inarticulacy, the rhythms of his thoughts and perceptions, so exquisitely that I can’t help being moved.
He moves to London where he starts as a bouncer, and then — after saving someone’s life — becomes a private bodyguard. Once he’s married his boss’s widow, Helen, he becomes needlessly rich, socialises with politicians, bankers, and art-dealers, but in spite of various business schemes, he can’t take life into his own hands; symbolised by the trust fund that is the source of his wealth which, ultimately, belongs to his stepson Thomas, who loathes him.
Sex — and life, for that matter — will rarely be comprehensible for Istvan, and meaning only glimpsed at. Courting his cousin, early in the novel, his only means of flirtation is to compare their respective body counts: his ‘embarrassingly small number’ versus her 23. His obsessive interest in coital statistics shows how, unable to compute his experiences, he can only accumulate them. Most people are the sum of their experiences, but Istvan is never able to add his up into a meaningful whole, or craft a story about who he is. Only towards the end of the novel, however, as he becomes aware of how time passes, and that his life — the good part of his life — is over: naturally, for a ‘male’ novel, this happens whilst he’s masturbating over his dead wife’s nude photographs. He feels ‘a deep immovable sadness’ as he reflects on time’s passing, on how she is dead, and thinks that ‘she would be happy . . . if she knew that he was still doing this, that he was still, at least, very occasionally, thinking of her in this way’.
It’s often tempting to look for an articulation of a novelist’s mission, buried in his novel. In Flesh, I found this on Istvan and Helen’s first date, at the National Gallery. Looking at the paintings, Istvan can only consider them on a photorealist level and so thinks that most of them are ‘pornographic’. Helen agrees: ‘Most of the things here are either devotional objects, or more or less pornographic, or social trophies, or some combination of those things . . . [But] what they all have in common is that they’re interesting to look at in some way.’
More than a male novel, then, Flesh shows us how everything — the pornographic, the devotional, the banal, the thoughtlessly masculine — are ‘interesting’ when you train the right lens on them. The old guard of self-consciously male writers would have found only the comic, the satirical even, in such a colossus of inarticulacy as Istvan; what Szalay finds, however, is something universal, human, serious, perhaps cynical, which shows all that man is in an unsparing, but ultimately sympathetic, way.
Flesh, David Szalay’s fifth novel, is different in style and voice to its male precursors: it is deft, subtle, never brash, and finds its power in the unspoken, inarticulate depths, which lie beneath its banal and seemingly artless surface. It tells the story of Istvan, a Hungarian heavy, from 15-years-old through to late middle age; we see him as schoolboy, squaddie, bouncer, bodyguard, and eventually billionaire. Through this all, he is a hostage to chance, his emotional and verbal limits, and — above all — his flesh.
This is not unfamiliar ground for Szalay, the Anglo-Hungarian novelist, born in 1974. He often writes about those beyond usual sympathy — the thoughtlessly masculine, the emotionally inarticulate — as they falter forwards in a world that’s out of their control. His first novel, London and the Southeast (2009), concerned the world of telesales; his third, Spring (2011), the dotcom bubble, UKIP, horse racing, and a ‘will they, won’t they?’ love affair. But his fourth, All That Man Is (2016) was his first truly male novel: a sequence of nine thematically-related stories, showing nine men (a philologist, an oligarch, a civil servant, etc.) in moments of crisis, caused by love, lust, money and mortality. In one of these, we see a young Frenchman called Bernhard on holiday in Cyprus. Doused in kebab juice, Bernhard sleeps with two fellow hotel guests: an obese mother, and her still more obese daughter, neither of whom he finds attractive. But the flesh stirs where the mind revolts: ‘There is just so much of her,’ he thinks. ‘A quantity of woman nearly equal, if that were possible, to his need to possess it.’
Much like Bernhard, Istvan’s body never defers to his mind and this is the case from puberty onwards. Facing the usual tribulations of adolescence (like being teased for wanking only ‘once or twice’-a-day) he embarks on an unlikely affair with his ‘old and ugly’ 42-year-old married neighbour. It starts with a kiss, soon followed by a pornographic fantasia. Typically, the sexual awakening of puberty is slower, its desires deferred, but Istvan quickly becomes aware of ‘the surprising new things the body wanted, and his inability to refuse it when it wanted them.’ So when he has to ‘refuse it’, once the affair ends, he breaks into her flat, kills her husband (possibly, an accident) and ends up in juvie. This shapes his life forever: he is unemployable, and so fights in the Iraq War and, later, moves to the UK.
Istvan is incapable of much thought or reflection; he lacks the toolkit for self-analysis. His only means of contemplation is a rather thoughtlessly sad post-coital cigarette, on a terrace or balcony, whilst his lover sleeps and his ambiguous thoughts are like the fuzzy blue-grey of the pre-dawn sky. Returning from the Iraq War, traumatised and decorated, he tries to speak to his mother about what happened there, but ‘he realises 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.’ James Wood once said that Szalay’s style is, like Knausgaard’s, ‘artless, prosy, cliched, embarrassingly banal’, but it lets Szalay evoke Istvan’s own inarticulacy, the rhythms of his thoughts and perceptions, so exquisitely that I can’t help being moved.
He moves to London where he starts as a bouncer, and then — after saving someone’s life — becomes a private bodyguard. Once he’s married his boss’s widow, Helen, he becomes needlessly rich, socialises with politicians, bankers, and art-dealers, but in spite of various business schemes, he can’t take life into his own hands; symbolised by the trust fund that is the source of his wealth which, ultimately, belongs to his stepson Thomas, who loathes him.
Sex — and life, for that matter — will rarely be comprehensible for Istvan, and meaning only glimpsed at. Courting his cousin, early in the novel, his only means of flirtation is to compare their respective body counts: his ‘embarrassingly small number’ versus her 23. His obsessive interest in coital statistics shows how, unable to compute his experiences, he can only accumulate them. Most people are the sum of their experiences, but Istvan is never able to add his up into a meaningful whole, or craft a story about who he is. Only towards the end of the novel, however, as he becomes aware of how time passes, and that his life — the good part of his life — is over: naturally, for a ‘male’ novel, this happens whilst he’s masturbating over his dead wife’s nude photographs. He feels ‘a deep immovable sadness’ as he reflects on time’s passing, on how she is dead, and thinks that ‘she would be happy . . . if she knew that he was still doing this, that he was still, at least, very occasionally, thinking of her in this way’.
It’s often tempting to look for an articulation of a novelist’s mission, buried in his novel. In Flesh, I found this on Istvan and Helen’s first date, at the National Gallery. Looking at the paintings, Istvan can only consider them on a photorealist level and so thinks that most of them are ‘pornographic’. Helen agrees: ‘Most of the things here are either devotional objects, or more or less pornographic, or social trophies, or some combination of those things . . . [But] what they all have in common is that they’re interesting to look at in some way.’
More than a male novel, then, Flesh shows us how everything — the pornographic, the devotional, the banal, the thoughtlessly masculine — are ‘interesting’ when you train the right lens on them. The old guard of self-consciously male writers would have found only the comic, the satirical even, in such a colossus of inarticulacy as Istvan; what Szalay finds, however, is something universal, human, serious, perhaps cynical, which shows all that man is in an unsparing, but ultimately sympathetic, way.