Teenaged István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. Shy and new in town, he is a stranger to the social rituals practiced by his classmates and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbor—a married woman close to his mother’s age, whom he begrudgingly helps with errands—as his only companion. But as these periodical encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that István himself can barely understand, his life soon spirals out of control, ending in a violent accident that leaves a man dead. What follows is a rocky trajectory that sees István emigrate from Hungary to London, where he moves from job to job before finding steady work as a driver for London’s billionaire class. At each juncture, his life is affected by the goodwill or self-interest of strangers. Through it all, István is a calm, detached observer of his own life, and through his eyes we experience a tragic twist on an immigrant “success story.”
Mr. Szalay instills his characters with almost no inner life. The descriptions of each scene are ruthlessly pared back and the dialogue is almost comically minimalist ... These reductions can feel exaggerated—Mr. Szalay pushes his flat, desiccated writing style to some eye-rolling extremes—but the effect is hypnotic ... Taboo for so long, the female body has become a subject of celebratory interest in contemporary novels; meanwhile, explorations into the male sex drive have been tacitly proscribed. Mr. Szalay turns a cold gaze on those urges and makes no promises that we’ll be comfortable with what he sees.
A gentle yet deeply affecting novel about a taciturn man who overcomes abuse and loss early in life to stumble into transitory contentment — if not quite true happiness — as an adult ... Fascinating and unexpected ... If you’ve ever woken up to the realization that your life has become something you never planned for, anticipated, or desired, you’ll likely find Flesh all too human.
Unbookish straight men are a Szalay specialty. He writes with great formal rigor about the foot soldiers of contemporary blokedom ... István’s is a masculinity reduced by various kinds of violence—a huddled masculinity, diffident and uncertain even in its rages, its predations. The narrow compass of his interiority summons a narrow prose. Blunt one- or two-sentence paragraphs. A limited word hoard. (The novel is very easy to read.) ... Flesh has been praised for its originality ... But, I thought when I had finished it, it is like several things I’ve read before. To begin with, it’s a saga: ups, downs, rags, riches, rags again; finds love, child dies, loses love. The deep structure of the book isn’t a million miles removed from that of something like Gone with the Wind. And in many ways Flesh quite closely resembles Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (which, like Flesh, won the Booker): the repressed man, submitting to a social order he cannot truly understand, all the weight of loss and love carried in and by the unspoken … There is a sense in which Flesh is comfortingly familiar, an old-school weepie that is gratifyingly easy to read ... The achievement of Flesh is that it will withstand a lot of this kind of critical reflection. This is partly because a great deal of rigorous thinking about how to represent men’s minds and men’s bodies has been left implicit in the book, and partly because of the care with which Szalay has brought his angry, innocent, constricted hero to life. Szalay is an accumulative writer. This is the realist’s secret tactic, the realist’s secret wager: Add enough small instances of precision and the whole will, in the end, stand clear, will live. The short, bland sentences remorselessly add up, like life. István lives. Even if, in the end, he isn’t really okay.
