2 hours ago
4
Novels of female interiority have dominated literary fiction for nearly a decade. Writers such as Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh captured the inner lives of young women in a way that felt almost shockingly fresh and real, and chimed with the #MeToo moment. Similar stories about young men have become hard to find.
This week an unapologetic portrait of masculinity won the Booker prize. Flesh, by the British-Hungarian novelist David Szalay, follows the rise and fall of a working-class Hungarian immigrant called István from the late 1980s to the present day. We mainly see István in acts of casual sex or violence. He eats, he smokes. He says “Okay” and “yeah” over and over again. The novel is an exercise in radical exteriority: we do not know what István looks like, thinks or feels, and often he doesn’t either. This is the realist novel pared down to the bone.
In his acceptance speech at the Booker ceremony, Szalay talked about the risks – formal, aesthetic and moral – that he took with Flesh, the biggest of which was writing about sex from a male perspective. As he has pointed out, you cannot write like Martin Amis, Norman Mailer or Philip Roth today. Clearly, novelists haven’t stopped writing about desire: Rooney, to paraphrase Muriel Spark, is famous for sex; Miranda July’s novel of midlife sexual awakening All Fours was a hit last year. But it has become a no-go area for many male writers. Szalay proves that it need not be.
He has replaced the swagger and snigger of Amis-era literary machismo with a scrupulous matter-of-factness. Flesh cleverly turns the tables so that István is always the objectified one, the power resting with a succession of female characters. Like Ian McEwan’s 2022 Lessons, the novel opens with a deeply unsettling account of a teenage boy being seduced by an older woman, something infrequently touched upon in fiction. Both novels go on to show how the protagonists’ lives are shaped by this abuse, as well as by the forces of history.
Taking on themes of migration and money, as well as masculinity, Flesh speaks to our moment. But it also shows that boys and men have struggled with their identity long before “incel” culture. With its accumulation of catastrophes and emotional numbness, the novel may seem to be the bookish equivalent of doomscrolling, its one-line paragraphs a sop to our digitally compromised attention spans. But for all its surface banality, Flesh is fiction on an epic scale. Szalay invests his everyman with Homeric weight because he is writing about the biggest question: what does it mean to be alive?
Last year’s Booker winner, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, set on the International Space Station, encouraged us to look upwards and outwards, to feel ourselves weightless and tiny. Flesh, it would seem, forces us to look inwards, to pay attention to our physicality, to ask “what, if anything, it means to amble through time in a machine made of meat”, as the Guardian review unforgettably put it. Orbital is a wondrous love letter to the planet; Flesh, a merciless atomisation of the body. Both remind us of our shared humanity, at our ugliest and most sublime, regardless of gender. Framing novels through the author’s identity can only go so far. Reading is, after all, to inhabit someone else’s flesh for a while.
