2025 Booker Prize winner David Szalay, a Hungarian, Canadian, English author now living in Vienna, and generally unknown in this country, has delivered in Flesh, his sixth novel, such an original, compelling work of fiction that when it’s over, there’s regret as well as sustained admiration. In fact, the chair of the Booker Prize committee said that “the judges had never read anything quite like it.” What he meant, probably, was the book’s unusual structure and style to express the protagonist’s lack of engagement with the world.
Flesh is an odd take on the genre of the bildungsroman – a novel about coming-of-age, and beyond, as the narrative follows 15-year-old István, a poor Hungarian youngster who hangs out on the streets or watches TV in his mother’s tenement apartment, and who has nothing to say about anything to anyone. His only concern is sex: how to do it. He’s diffident, embarrassed. He’s in a new school, where he feels himself an outsider. He drinks, does some drugs, smokes incessantly, and dutifully carries out chores for his mother, one of which is to assist a neighbor nearby with groceries.
Eventually, the woman starts an affair with him. He “goes along” – a phrase that might describe his life – but finds himself moving from routine to obsession. In a heated confrontation with the woman’s husband, he inadvertently causes the man’s death, which gets him sent to a juvenile prison for three years. He drifts into menial jobs, joins the army, does something heroic but suffers from PTSD, and then, through a chance encounter one night in a back alley, sees an older man being beaten up by thugs and saves his life.
His instincts are good, his introspection limited. But it doesn’t seem to matter. The man whose life he saved insists on rewarding him with a pricey security job, which includes looking after the man’s younger wife and child. Yes, she will make moves on István. There is something at his core which others sense, particularly women and powerful men. He’s honest, trustworthy.
But he just goes along with the advantages that come his way, coasting where others might exploit, passively content when he becomes rich, seeking nothing more. He’s a loner who drifts, but cares for his mother and family. His impulses prompt him to do the right thing. In this regard, Flesh is tragic in a contemporary way: Unlike heroic Hamlet, say, who unintentionally wreaks havoc while attempting to cleanse Denmark of evil, István’s listlessness reflects a world where good deeds don’t matter, where money, power, and violence rule, where sex is a matter of flesh, not affection.
The book’s structure and style reinforce István’s distance from his own life. Chronological chapters end suddenly, explained in subsequent chapters. Throughout, his dialogue typically consists of “Yeah” or “Okay” – strings of repetitive monosyllables that descend on the page as a kind of litany of noninvolvement. These abbreviated responses contrast with the book’s overall third-person point of view that does reflect what István sees around him, as at the end:
“The dry petals of chestnut flowers fall onto the path. They move on the asphalt with a papery sound, and when the wind stops, they lie still. He watches them for a while. Then he stands up and walks back to the apartment. After that, he lives alone.”
The anomie that permeates this observation depicts our current world. Described, here, however, with great sensitivity and motive to think about the Istváns around us.
