Flesh, David Szalay’s most recent novel, was described by the Booker Prize committee as a “propulsive, hypnotic novel about a man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp”, who awarded it the top prize at 2025’s awards ceremony. The novel is a sparse and chilling narrative that traces the life of Istvan, a young Hungarian man whose life takes him from his homeland to the upper echelons of British society before returning him right back to where he started. The novel is told in a series of events, dropping the reader in media res into various situations and locations in his life, all of which he seems to maintain a strange distance from despite the often dramatic circumstances.
When we first meet Istvan he’s a teen who’s been coerced into an affair with an older (42 year-old) woman in town. The woman slowly grooms him into sexual maturity, and his initial disgust at her aging body becomes a dependence on their trysts. A series of disturbing events leads him into a juvenile facility and then into the military where his adolescent alienation and complicated relationship to sexuality is cemented as he enters adulthood. The novel drops in on Istvan at various points in this journey, as he ends up in England, working in security, before a series of events that seem to happen to him more than he makes them happen, eventually land him in a marriage to a super-wealthy English socialite.
Throughout his life, very little of Istvan’s inner psyche is revealed—it’s mostly a mystery how he’s handled the violence and mistreatment that beleaguered him in his youth, and basically no description of how the events that are playing out around him are affecting him. His conversational responses almost entirely comprise the words “yeah”, and “okay”—he reveals nothing to anyone, including the reader. The novel has this fascinating sort of distance from its subject, mirroring the distance he has from his own life.
It’s tempting to psychoanalyze Istvan: he’s created a detachment from the circumstances of his life due to all of the trauma he’s experienced. But Szalay’s writing defies that interpretation, Istvan’s alienation comes from a much deeper place and more complicated place. Of Istvan’s blasé attitude to sexual relationships, Szalay writes:”He has this feeling, with women, that it’s hard to have an experience that feels entirely new, that doesn’t feel like something that has already happened, and will probably happen again in some very similar way, so that it never feels like all that much is at stake.”
Flesh is a sometimes baffling but wholly unique novel that takes on isolation, class, and relationships. Istvan is a protagonist that is often difficult to grasp but will certainly stick with readers in his singularity of affect. Szalay has achieved the very complicated task he set for himself to build a novel around the haphazard life of an ordinary man who experiences a wide breadth of the human experience without pathologizing him in any way. A fascinating exploration of loneliness and solitude.