We All Inhabit This Small Planet

Heather Cass White considers David Szalay’s latest novel, “Flesh.”

By Heather Cass WhiteApril 21, 2025

• Fiction

THE PUBLICATION OF a new novel by David Szalay is an event for anyone who cares about fiction. He is one of a handful of writers who seem to have been born whole as novelists, arriving equipped with insight, wit, curiosity, and an unmistakable voice. He is Zadie Smith good, Eleanor Catton good. Like them, he won the UK’s Betty Trask Prize for first novels by Commonwealth writers under 35, for London and the South-East (2008). He has not yet, like Catton, won the Booker, but, like Smith, he has been a finalist for it, with All That Man Is (2016); the book’s title is an accurate gauge of Szalay’s ambition.

Anything that pertains to human experience is of interest to Szalay. He is a shape-shifter, persuasively inhabiting the skins of men and women anywhere on the globe. He is also a world-builder, creating an ever-growing cast of characters whose lives intersect in unexpected ways. He is interested in the past and future of Europe, the local effects of a globalizing economy, sex, every kind of work people do to support themselves, the rewards and costs of intimacy, and the mechanics of power.

But the subject that really calls forth the poet in Szalay is male failure. Wherever a man lets down the people who depend on him, refuses to face the truth about his own life, or fails to live up to even his lowest standards, Szalay is there. A precise and relentless anatomist of male fecklessness, violence, opportunism, addiction, self-interest, and vanity, Szalay can be bitingly hilarious on these subjects, but chooses not to be in his most recent novel, Flesh (2025). Composed in a newly lean style that forgoes most of the author’s signature fireworks, Flesh tells the story of Hungarian-born and -raised István, whose life as a character is synonymous with his maleness. The novel’s risks, in plot and style, pay off to mixed degrees, but nevertheless show how serious Szalay is, six books in, about keeping his art alive and growing.

Flesh begins when István is on the verge of his first sexual experience and ends with the conclusion of his last significant attachment to a woman. In between, he undergoes wide swings of circumstance, traveling up and down the ladders of money and class, moving back and forth between Western and Eastern Europe, and playing in sequence the parts that make up most human lives: child, lover, worker, spouse, parent. But before he is any of those things, he is a man who embodies what a bitter rival calls “a primitive form of masculinity” and what women at nearly every stage of his life experience as an elemental pull. His life, in each of its phases, is neatly segregated by gender. Home means women: first, the mother who raised him, then lovers and wife. The world outside of home means other men, primarily in the Hungarian army—with whom he serves in Iraq (accompanied by, delightfully, Balázs, one of the few likable guys in All That Man Is)—and later in a succession of jobs that rely on his ability to intimidate strangers and reassure allies.

István’s charisma is a departure for Szalay, who delights in repellent male bodies and minds, like those of recurrent character Murray Dundee, who, in All That Man Is, wears “white shorts that fall to just below his knees, overhanging his violet-veined and hairless lower legs which in turn taper down to dark office socks and large white trainers.” The view from inside unemployed, friendless, womanless Murray is even less enticing: “He has heard this shit [about global warming] before, and he won’t have it. […] He feels, somehow, that he and ‘the oil companies’ are on the same side. That is, they are the successful ones, the winners of this world.”

Szalay’s chosen instrument as a stylist is the declarative sentence. It is to him what the sledgehammer was to John Henry, or the whisk to Julia Child: a simple tool from which he gets awe-inspiring results. In London and the South-East, he is wincingly funny with it: “One of the buttons of the Pig’s white polyester shirt has come undone and, as he sits, a shape of colourless, hairless flab pours heavily through the gap.” (It is typical of Szalay’s savage tact to observe that the fat makes a shape while declining to specify what that shape is.) He frequently uses his declaratives to give his characters just enough rope to hang themselves. Here is the moment when London’s protagonist, the alcoholic, utterly unskilled Paul Rainey, having been booted with extreme prejudice from the shady sales job he has done badly for years, plans for the future: “He does not want a job, he thinks—pleased with his precise semantic distinction—so much as work.”

London is about men who deceive and destroy themselves, but both here and across his works, Szalay is attentive to the accelerant effect of the systems in which they must participate. He is never more sympathetic to Paul than when Paul considers and rejects the possibility of simply abstaining from the business of getting and spending: “And while, standing at the window, he is thankful to be inside, out of the weather, this is tempered—more than tempered, almost entirely undermined—by the depressing, inescapable sense that he is a prisoner, unable to walk out, and stay out.”

Szalay’s second novel, The Innocent (2009), put humor entirely aside to look directly at the dilemma of the good-enough man in a terrible system. It considers Aleksandr, a former KGB agent who, in 1972, reflects on his role in condemning a music historian to an early death in 1948. Surrounded by the ruins of the Soviet ideology on which he was raised, Aleksandr tries to sort out the issue of his own innocence. He did not recant his beliefs to save his own skin in the wake of Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech.” Was that an act of moral courage, or a missed opportunity to reckon with his complicity? Aleksandr does not know, and Szalay will not say. Maybe the most impressive thing about this generally impressive novel is how lightly it wears Szalay’s formidable research in modern Russian history. If the reader can relax into absorption in Aleksandr’s dilemma, it is because Szalay unobtrusively nails the details of his surroundings.

Part of Szalay’s uncanny ability to sketch a character, or an era, is his understanding that people are more alike than they are different. The more electric his work is with the details of variable experience, the more clearly it reveals Szalay’s radical artistic empathy. Nothing that is human, he all but says novel by novel, is foreign to him as a writer. He put that principle to the test in Spring (2011), with his first extended creation of a female character, Katherine, a restless thirtysomething engaged in an uneasy love affair with real estate agent James.

Szalay perfected it in Turbulence (2018), an elegant, ingeniously constructed novella that hops lightly between continents and characters of all kinds with the agility (minus the showiness) of Italo Calvino in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979). Never shy about giving his novels a thesis statement, Szalay has the last character in Turbulence encounter a framed JFK quote: “For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

Between those books came All That Man Is, the novel that exceeded the promise of everything that came before and may yet cast a shadow on what comes after. Each of its nine sections focuses on a different man, always 5–10 years older than the man before. Among them are James from Spring, now a sleek property developer; Murray Dundee; and Aleksandr’s freshly bankrupt oligarch nephew. Together, the sections form an arc of disappointing male life, from callow youth through venal adulthood to old age that has accumulated years without wisdom.

The prose in this, his most celebrated work, is gorgeous. Szalay creates whole worlds in the space of sentences, as when the reader first meets a pair of traveling teenage Britons: “There is some discussion, as they eat, of how much more expensive everything is than in Poland (they did Warsaw, Kraków, Auschwitz) though the higher prices are justified, is their feeling, by the superior quality of everything in Berlin.” Other writers need chapters to establish character as firmly as Szalay’s single parenthesis does, with its meticulously chosen verb, “did.”

In Flesh, by contrast, we get next to no authorial commentary. The narrator’s point of view is so closely tied to István’s that the nearest thing it offers to a physical description is a single moment when, young and seething with sexual frustration at a woman who has turned him down, István looks in the mirror. He is left “wondering in all modesty why she wouldn’t want to have sex with him as much as he wants to with her.” (Although their novels are nothing alike, my guess is that Szalay paid close attention to Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy and its unnerving commitment to defining a character entirely by what happens around her.)

István, neither stupid nor insensitive, is capable of introspection but proceeds, as the book’s title suggests, by action first, thought later. His body knows things his mind doesn’t. The people around him know things about him that he doesn’t know about himself. Only once his body responds to others, or once he notices others responding to his body, do his thoughts begin to catch up. István’s perceptiveness grows over time, but he never wholly rearranges the order of events in which he experiences an early crush:

He seems drawn to the place [where she works] and he starts to wonder what that’s about.

Then he understands.

He’s sort of in love with her.

For István, it is always flesh first, mind second, and his speech is as reactive as his thoughts. He rarely initiates conversation, and most of what he has to say consists of variously inflected repetitions of “yeah,” “I don’t know,” and, above all, “okay.” Flesh is nearly as long as All That Man Is, but its page count is misleading. Large chunks of Flesh fly by in slender columns of dialogue like the one where István speaks with a man training him to be a bodyguard:

“I want you to be very still.”

“Okay.”

“Keep your hands by your sides.”

“Okay.”

“Do you have a lighter?” Mervyn asks.

“Yeah.”

“Yes,” Mervyn says.

“Yes,” István says.

Szalay’s writing in Flesh is remarkable for how much of his native firepower it withholds in order to keep pace with István. Here is James, in Spring, having sex with a woman on top: “From where his head lay he was able to peer in a haze of pleasure over the hairless plain of his torso, over the low hillock of his stomach with its one winding path of hair, to the site of that impossibly exquisite prehension.” István, in the same position, simply “lies there while she moves her hips and makes quiet noises. He can’t really see her in the near-darkness with the shutter down. A few moments after he comes she stops moving.” Szalay loves to deploy a Latinate derivative, to stick the landing at the end of a tricky bit of hypotaxis; the sacrifices he makes in rendering István’s mostly monosyllabic monotone are palpable.

The result of Szalay’s abstemiousness is a spare portrait of a man bemused at his own life and hobbled largely beyond help by its traumas. The rare moments when István comes articulately alive, and when a bit of the old Szalay zip enters the writing, involve István’s interactions with the only two fellow males to whom he is lastingly attached. The first attachment, a negative one, is to his stepson, Thomas. They quickly recognize one another as enemies, and Szalay has them wage several battles. An early one involves tennis, at which Thomas always loses, with increasing carelessness:

It was like he was trying to undermine the value of winning itself with his indifference, so that it was almost as if there were two different games being played, one in which the aim was to win at tennis, which István himself was still playing, and another in which the aim was to mock and devalue that objective, to deny its validity as an achievement, which Thomas was playing, and it seemed obvious to István that the reason Thomas was playing that second game was that he had no hope of winning the first one.

In battle, even a symbolic one, István is fully attuned to and ready to name the smallest nuance.

That is true also in his attachment to his own son, Jacob, whom he loves. Reflecting on Jacob’s nascent sexuality, István silently embarks on the novel’s most eloquent sustained passage, in which he reflects on the power of sexuality to make us simultaneously newly connected to and alienated from our physical being, and the capacity of sexuality’s privacy to leave us feeling paradoxically exposed, unsure of how much of what we feel other people can see just by looking. The passage marks a moment of understanding that any child would be lucky to have in a father, and marks how deeply fatherhood has brought out what is best in István. István’s relationship with his son’s mother Helen, by contrast, is neatly summed up in the next moment, when, seeing him lost in thought, she asks what he is thinking about. Szalay’s irony, here less funny than tragic, is at work when István answers, simply, “Nothing.” There is not much to relish in this particular male failure.

Such exceptions aside, Szalay denies himself, and thus his reader, an insider’s knowledge of István’s puzzlement and pain. It’s a chilly choice, one that risks disappointing a reader who prefers a less strictly disciplined version of his gifts. It also makes it all the more distressing when, right in the middle of the book, Szalay several times breaks his own rules, briefly inhabiting István’s stepson’s point of view and then Helen’s.

Szalay is too particular a craftsman to have done this unintentionally, but even so, the choice weakens the structure of the book and shakes the reader’s trust. By the time these switches happen, nearly 200 pages in, the terms of our contract with Szalay are clear: we see what István sees, know what he knows, and draw our conclusions accordingly. Except suddenly, we don’t. The rupture is not interesting so much as baffling.

Nevertheless, the final sections of the book are beautiful. Szalay’s favorite narrative shape has always been the circle, and the subtlety with which István finds in his end his beginning is something to see. The novel’s last line is a killer, and squarely earned. Future books will show whether the deprivations of Flesh are a cul-de-sac or a path forward for Szalay. In either case, he bears close watching.