David Szalay’s Flesh breaks from a decade of female-centred interiors and reopens a genre many thought closed to men
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ovels of female interiority have dominated literary fiction for nearly a decade. Writers such as Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh captured the inner lives of young women in a way that felt almost shockingly fresh and real, and chimed with the #MeToo moment. Similar stories about young men have become hard to find.
This week an unapologetic portrait of masculinity won the Booker prize. Flesh, by the British-Hungarian novelist David Szalay, follows the rise and fall of a working-class Hungarian immigrant called István from the late 1980s to the present day. We mainly see István in acts of casual sex or violence. He eats, he smokes. He says “Okay” and “yeah” over and over again. The novel is an exercise in radical exteriority: we do not know what István looks like, thinks or feels, and often he doesn’t either. This is the realist novel pared down to the bone.
In his acceptance speech at the Booker ceremony, Szalay talked about the risks – formal, aesthetic and moral – that he took with Flesh, the biggest of which was writing about sex from a male perspective. As he has pointed out, you cannot write like Martin Amis, Norman Mailer or Philip Roth today. Clearly, novelists haven’t stopped writing about desire: Rooney, to paraphrase Muriel Spark, is famous for sex; Miranda July’s novel of midlife sexual awakening All Fours was a hit last year. But it has become a no-go area for many male writers. Szalay proves that it need not be.
