Andrew Chan
Portrait of a tormented nowhere-man: a potent new page-turner by David Szalay presents a distinctively complex depiction of modern masculinity.
Flesh, by David Szalay,
Scribner, 353 pages, $28.99
• • •
David Szalay’s books are so breathtakingly sad, they seem to have been composed under the world’s darkest cloud. There’s much to praise in the Montreal-born, Vienna-based writer’s craftsmanship, not least the precision of his pacing, which allows him to generate an improbable amount of suspense from static moods and predominantly passive characters. Yet, as much as I recognize his gifts, I feel uneasy about how much I admire his work. As can be inferred from the portentous title of his 2016 breakthrough, the Man Booker–shortlisted All That Man Is, Szalay has taken it upon himself to examine the crisis of modern masculinity. He executes this task without recourse to an ironic wink or any apparent anxiety about risking essentialism (in a recent interview, he describes his project as being a candid look at “what it’s actually like to be a male body in the world”). With few exceptions, his most persuasively drawn characters are straight white European men crumpling under the weight of their unarticulated emotions. Even if you acknowledge Szalay’s subject as worthy and urgent, it’s hard not to wonder if you’ve been invited to a pity party for a notoriously privileged demographic.
In his latest page-turner, Flesh, Szalay wastes no time casting the protagonist, István, as a tragic figure. When we first meet the character, in his teenage years, he and his mother have just moved to a desolate town in Hungary; no details of their earlier life are disclosed, giving the impression that this hapless kid has emerged out of thin air into the nightmare of adolescence. He struggles to adjust at his new school, but does make one friend, a proudly lecherous classmate who “masturbates four or five times a day” and, upon learning of István’s sexual inexperience, plans to get him laid—an arrangement that results in rejection and shame. Soon after, a forty-two-year-old married woman living in István’s apartment complex takes advantage of his isolation and docility to groom him for sex. Like every destabilizing event that takes place during the five decades chronicled here, this encounter is presented in flashes of graphic detail through a steely gaze that imbues all manner of shocks with an eerie neutrality. Taciturn and emotionally paralyzed, István regards his world from a distance, letting outside forces have their way with him. At the same time, he remains conscious enough to question himself moment to moment, never finding the right words to describe his feelings.
The years pass, dragging István through war in the Middle East, the underground drug trade in Eastern Europe, and a Pygmalion-like ascent into London’s billionaire class. For much of the book, he is swept along by fate, molded by people savvier and more aggressive than he. Eventually, though, he begins to exercise some agency, as the promise of wealth ignites a competitive drive. Halfway into the novel, he marries the widow of a former employer, learns the ways of the British élite, and settles into a high-risk career as a property developer. It’s in this section that Szalay allows us to imagine what it would look like for István to overcome his troubled background. But the grave mistakes that he ends up making, including a public act of violence involving his new stepson, are framed as inevitable outcomes. Part of what makes Flesh such a queasy read—especially in light of the deterministic views of gender that fuel today’s increasingly influential manosphere—is how it entertains the possibility that masculine barbarity and rage are immutable facts of life, and that men who cause harm are simply victims of their own hardwired instincts.
Flesh unfolds in the third person, and yet it grants such intimate access to István that you might plausibly read large swaths of it as his own dissociated narration. As in All That Man Is and its slim but potent follow-up, Turbulence (2018), the prose is unnervingly lucid, with a preponderance of punchy, one-sentence lines designed to draw our eyes down the page. Szalay has spoken about contemporary readers’ shrunken attention spans as a challenge for fiction writers, which may explain his ruthlessly manipulative approach to storytelling, apparent in everything from his white-knuckled use of the present tense to the cliff-hangers that end many of the book’s chapters. Though billed as novels, Szalay’s two previous works are really collections of narrative sketches, each focusing on a different character. Because Flesh devotes itself to the consciousness of one protagonist, the simplicity of Szalay’s language takes on new resonances, sustaining a push-pull dynamic with István’s tortured relationship to speech. The narrator’s frequent repetition of stock phrases (“that’s how it feels,” “he isn’t sure”) mimics the hero’s own reliance on clichés—chief among them being “it’s okay,” which appears in the text thirty-eight times. Conversely, Szalay’s often brutal directness stands in contrast to István’s habits of avoidance.
This portrait of a tormented nowhere-man reminds me of two novels that have achieved cult popularity in recent years: John Williams’s Stoner (1965), a minor classic that has enjoyed a resurgence of interest since its most recent reissue in 2006, and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015), one of the ugliest and most sadistic books to ever become a reading-group phenomenon. Like them, Flesh is obsessed with male victimhood and appeals to our twin desires to stoically accept life’s cruel arbitrariness and to swoon at the grandeur of our own private anguish. What distinguishes Szalay’s work is the way it takes one of the most pathologized hallmarks of modern masculinity—emotional repression—and helps us see its utility and rationality from the vantage of someone who has learned to rely on it as a self-defense mechanism. Every time István starts to interrogate his inner world—his sexual urges and anxieties, his capacity for both tenderness and destruction—he glimpses the sheer unknowability of the self and the contradicting realities it can never reconcile. How else to preserve one’s sanity but to leave such irresolvable mysteries unexamined, to numb oneself to them? By the end of Flesh, we are so deeply embedded in István’s weary mind, it seems naive and unfair to assume he could have made something different of his life.
From a certain angle, Szalay’s gender fatalism might seem like a cop-out, a way of reducing men’s plight to a problem of unprocessed trauma and uncontrollable impulses. But even as the book fails as sociology, it succeeds as a character study, giving us a hero too vivid to write off, and bringing us into close contact with a soul that would rather be out of our reach. Such a feat is hard to ignore at a time when the discourse surrounding toxic masculinity revolves around a set of contemptible caricatures—the deadbeat, the douchebag, the fuckboy, the incel. If István intermittently resembles a few of these types, he also forces us to acknowledge something human within them. His sorrow is ancient and commonplace, a melancholy born of knowing that so much of our existence is inescapably painful, burdensome, and unfree.
Andrew Chan is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of Why Mariah Carey Matters, published by University of Texas Press.