...this collection is of the highest standard among younger British authors that I’ve come across ... let me urge you to read him since, on this evidence, he is one of those rare writers with skill in all the disciplines that first-rate fiction requires ... these nine stories about very different men are replete with richly observed humanity, caught on the page as if in the midst of lives that extend backwards and forwards beyond the time we spend with them.
The publisher calls All That Man Is a novel, but there’s very little explicitly interlinking its separate narratives. The stories cohere instead through their single project: an investigation of European manhood ... The risk of heaviness in the symbolism is nearly always avoided by Szalay’s prose, which is frequently brilliant, remarkable for its grace and economy. He has a minimalist’s gift for the quick sketch, whether of landscapes or human relationships.
The effect is something like emergency writing for our times: intense, direct, daring, and also somewhat limited and repetitive. The men’s slightly different crises are united in being crises ... Despite Szalay’s wariness about conventional fiction-making, he has an admirable fearlessness for swiftly entering invented fictional worlds ... His book is also bracingly unsentimental about male desire and male failure. Because he writes mostly from inside his characters’ heads, in jagged bursts of free indirect style, he can present his reduced and impaired men without judgment or commentary ... Put aside the absence of female leads; it would be a welcome gift if the male ones just achieved joined-up thoughts. Their limitations set limits on the complexity of the book.
David Szalay writes with voluptuous authority. He possesses voice rather than merely style ... This cosmopolitan author is not overtly funny; his humor seeps organically to the surface, like a rising water table ... Mr. Szalay’s own stream of perception never falters in its sensitivity and probity. This book is a demonstration of uncommon power. It is a bummer, and it is beautiful.
[Szalay] writes clean, unshowy sentences that move easily between the diction of casual speech and a more distanced tone. And he’s able to hold a reader even when there isn’t much going on, relying on assured storytelling rather than busy plotting ... Happiness isn’t much of a subject for a storyteller, and although the stories largely turn on depressing insights they aren’t ponderous or gloomy in the execution ... the book resembles a novel mostly in not having the kind of page-by-page density associated with short stories. But it’s part of Szalay’s appeal that he’s more interested in getting at the texture of experience than he is in stuffing it into elegant packaging.
What does unite Szalay’s segments, however, is his rigorous scrutiny of masculinity and consistently arresting prose ... Szalay shows he is skilled at depicting human transactions — get-rich schemes, sexual relationships — and exposing vanity, stupidity and ruthless self-interest ... Szalay does so much and so well that we come to view his snapshots of lives as brilliant, captivating dramas.
Despite Szalay's piercingly descriptive prose, this series of short pieces makes for grim reading. It includes scenes that, if you saw them in real life, you'd avert your gaze and maybe feel nauseated. He captures men often at their worst, with women, friends, careers and their children ... The male animal has seldom been portrayed with such bleakness and unhappiness. Abandon all hope, ye who read All That Man Is.
The stories begin in medias res, often with an unidentified 'he' who slowly comes into focus, and break off without resolution. Short sentences and one-line paragraphs create an effect that is collaged, not choppy ... The Brexit moment gives passage[s] extra pathos, but it hardly needs history to have an impact. What captivates Szalay is a hopeless attitude unmoored from any circumstance.
powerfully melancholic fiction ... in creating characters from a wide range of classes and nationalities Szalay provides a curiously unified portrait ... If this sounds bleak, well — the settings often are, and yet these closely observed, untitled accounts are unnerving and compelling, and have a haunting cumulative effect ... Dark though it is, Szalay’s work is paradoxically consoling, as he allows his characters, even in the midst of their failure and alienation, unexpected moments of connection ... In this remarkable book, Szalay pursues an essential truth, important to recognize in our globalizing times: The geographies change, yet the self remains.
That David Szalay’s latest novel, which was shortlisted this year for the Booker Prize, manages to pull off even half of what it sets before the reader in a schema like this is remarkable. In fact, the Budapest-based British author manages much more, and with far greater feeling than such a taxonomical approach might threaten ... The novel’s most significant achievement is one of mimesis. Through these leaps into the minds of progressively older protagonists, Szalay succeeds not simply in describing but enacting the dreadful rubbernecking feeling of a life rushing past ... The author limits the scope of his novel to a survey of traditional, individualistic masculine norms, and to examining the associated myths of sexual conquest, professional esteem, and personal legacy.
If the first stories are testaments to the squirmy vitality of youth, the later stories become decidedly more grim and existentially despairing ... One of the more impressive things about the book is Szalay’s range of portraiture and ventriloquy. He is just as adept at portraying a loafing youth on holiday in Cyprus, as he is a wheezing, alcoholic Scotsman, or a tender, muscle-bound bodyguard. Equally impressive is Szalay’s ability to convincingly describe specific fictional milieus...So why then, I wondered, as I read the book, given Szalay’s clear versatility and range, are his female characters so flat? The clichés and stereotypes are so abundant as to seem almost absurd...given the outsized role women play in these stories, it begins to seem odd, if not downright problematic, that Szalay’s female characters should so consistently be characterized as something far less than their richly drawn male counterparts ... a little more complexity and nuance would have been nice. Because otherwise, this is among the best books I have read all year.
