Most Men Are Losers
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Flesh, David Szalay, Jonathan Cape, 2025, pp. 368, £18.99
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A fifteen-year-old boy moves into a new block of flats with his mother. One day, the woman who lives opposite asks whether he can help with her shopping. The boy is reluctant, but his mother insists, because the building has no lift and the woman’s husband is away. So, he visits the shops with his neighbour, carries her bags upstairs and then eats a snack in her kitchen. When the boy has finished eating, the woman asks if she can kiss him. When he does not answer, she brushes her lips against his.
The boy’s name is István. He’s living in a provincial town in Hungary and struggling to make friends at school. The neighbour is the same age as his mother, and to begin with he feels a confusing mix of desire and disgust. All the same, a clandestine relationship develops, until the hours they spend in bed together are the only moments that matter in István’s life. Yet when he confesses his love, she ends the relationship, and this leaves a lasting injury. He becomes a handsome but uncommunicative young man, with a fatal attraction to married women. Over the following years, he serves in Iraq and works as a bouncer, until a chance encounter catapults him into a job in personal security and a world of wealth and privilege, ‘a world from which he has always been excluded until now’.
Flesh, the new novel by David Szalay, charts István’s rise from provincial Hungary to Prime Central London, and the fall that takes him back again. The book’s plot recalls a nineteenth-century novel, with an ambitious chancer scaling the social ladder. At times István resembles Georges Duroy, the protagonist of Guy de Maupassant’s Bel Ami, a penniless provincial soldier back from Algeria, whose good looks and lack of morals enable his climb through Parisian society. But István’s psychology belongs firmly in the twentieth century, with its familiar mix of apathy, confusion and alienation, each time the wheel of fate spins his life in an unexpected direction.
Flesh suggests that the moments which shape our fate are often small, arbitrary or seemingly insignificant.
This sense of alienation is made more powerful by the narrative style. The story is told in close third person with resolutely plain prose. István struggles to express any feelings, or even recognise them in himself, which means occasional insights are all the more powerful. These passages are hard to quote, because the effect comes largely from the author’s restraint, sustained over several pages – and then interrupted with moments of reflective lyricism. For instance, returning home from the war in Iraq, István travels by train through a darkening landscape:
The last daylight flashes from the standing water on the fields and then instead of the dusky landscape it’s his own face in the window, or a transparent, shadowy version of it.
He realises that the things that are so important to him – the things that happened, and that he saw there, the things that left him feeling that nothing would ever be the same again – they just aren’t important here.
Those things have no reality here.
That’s what it feels like.
Despite the simplicity of the language, Szalay is no casual writer. He skilfully manages the length of each sentence and arranges his paragraphs with the care of a poet. This means he can quicken and slow the narrative pace, or create tension through the build-up of terse, declarative statements. Often the epiphanies go unspoken, lying half-hidden in the space between each line, such as the moment when István injures his hand after punching a door. The doctor who bandages his hand was at school with István, and because the two men have not spoken since, their encounter is unsettling:
From the same starting point, this enormous space has opened up between, is how it feels.
They seem to be on opposite sides of some fundamental divide now.
The plaster is already starting to dry, at least on the surface.
It looks chalkily matt in places.
His hand feels trapped in it.
Szalay has a rare sensitivity to this kind of negative space, as well as the outline of absent things. Waking after an unsettled night, István notices: ‘Mild air arrives from the window and also something like light, or a sort of thinner darkness anyway, something that makes the space of the huge room around him palpable without quite being visible.’ The same sensitivity can be seen in the book’s structure: the plot related at intervals, with gaps between each major event. This gives his chapters the compacted pressure of a short story, with dramatic incidents taking place off-stage, forcing the reader to guess at their impact.
The meeting with the doctor inspires Istvan’s departure for London. There, after a few disappointing flings, he starts a relationship with Helen, the wife of the wealthy financier who he works for as chauffeur and bodyguard. Again, he experiences a confusing ambivalence in the early stages of the affair: ‘In other words, the fact that he doesn’t particularly want to have sex with her somehow makes the sex more intense and exciting.’ Nonetheless, the relationship grows more serious over time, until Helen’s husband becomes ill and István has a chance to enter the class he serves.
While toxic figures with millions of online followers dominate the cultural conversation about masculinity, Szalay’s novels offer a more honest account of male experience.
None of this is deliberate. Rather, István is carried forwards by a mix of chance, instinct and current affairs. His path is made possible by Hungary joining the EU and sending troops to Iraq, yet historical forces matter less than the quirks of experience: a failed romantic weekend prompts István to sign up; a humiliating encounter with a former schoolmate sends him to London; and a fling with his employer’s wife propels him into the upper classes. Flesh suggests that the moments which shape our fate are often small, arbitrary or seemingly insignificant. Sex is the best example: the proof that we are not authors of our own lives, as István recognises when he becomes a father and discovers his almost adolescent son trying to hide a porn magazine: ‘Perhaps it’s at that age, he thinks, that you first have the sense that you and your body are not entirely identical, that you occupy the same space without being quite the same thing […] and it starts to make sense to talk about it as if it was something slightly separate from yourself, even while you seem more powerless than ever to deny it whatever it wants.’
In a Christian context, flesh is the source of both sin and salvation. István’s physical encounters are often taboo, yet they connect him more closely to other people and craft the man he eventually becomes. Long after Helen has left his life, István realises: ‘It just never occurred to him then, during those first months when they started having sex, that she might end up playing such a significant part in his life. He’s not the same person he would have been if he had never known her. The way he thinks about a lot of things is her way of thinking about them, and his memories of a lot of other things are inseparable from memories of her.’
Szalay touched on this idea in his third novel, Spring, which explored chance, gambling and the relentless contingency of romance, set against the backdrop of two thirty-somethings falling in love. Meanwhile, his fourth novel, All That Man Is, contained nine different men at nine different points in life – from a French teenager on a solitary holiday, to an ageing billionaire alone on his yacht – in each case reckoning with the gap between the life they expected and the life they have. Though Szalay’s early novels were written with an Amis-like satirical exuberance, this has given way to a controlled, Carver-esque naturalism. His male characters drift between the need for sex, money and status, and while the author recognises their absurdities, he refuses to pass any judgement. While toxic figures with millions of online followers dominate the cultural conversation about masculinity, Szalay’s novels offer a more honest account of male experience. In short, most men are losers. If they are over-represented at the top of society, they are over-represented at the bottom as well. In both cases, they rarely feel mastery over themselves, let alone the course of their lives. Yet they struggle to articulate their daily disappointments, hiding each humiliation behind a posed machismo.
In the case of István, fate deals more than his fair share of hurt, and if he does not deserve his triumphs, he does not deserve his tragedies either. However, the novel’s ‘wheel of fortune’ plot contains its own moral message, because when István does the wrong thing – violence, infidelity and corrupt property deals – he rises up through the world, yet when he does the right thing, he ensures his downfall. Despite all the distance István travels, he ends up back where he started, having a relationship with another married woman. This is less a circle than a spiral, but whether winding up or down, it’s difficult to tell. Sometimes the difference between success and failure is simply a question of perspective.
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Image credit: Martin Figura
Guy Stagg is the author of The Crossway, an account of his ten-month walk to Jerusalem. It won the Edward Stanford Travel Memoir of the Year 2019, as well as being shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2019, the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2019 and the Somerset Maugham Award 2019. His next book, The World Within, about the role of retreat in creative careers, was published in July.
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