The furtive ghost of Philip Larkin haunts the English novel—the English novel, at least, as written by men. Early in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Folding Star (1994), for instance, the narrator, a bookish, inexperienced private tutor named Edward Manners, enters the “one gay bar” of a small Flemish town and flirts with a tattooed stranger. When Edward strokes the stranger’s arm and says, “I don’t want to read books all day,” the stranger asks, “Why not?” Edward hesitates, and then says, “Books are a load of crap.” The stranger is unimpressed: “You’re a teacher. Books are your life.” And then “he walked away from me, leaving me with nothing but the private and lonely satisfaction of my quotation, which perhaps proved his final point.”
Edward’s quotation, “Books are a load of crap,” is the final line of “A Study of Reading Habits,” a poem from Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings (1964). The poem is about the decline of reading in the life of a disappointed man. When the speaker was a boy, he says, books “cured most things short of school” and offered “ripping times in the dark.” But now, as age advances, “the dude/Who lets the girl down before/The hero arrives, the chap/Who’s yellow and keeps the store/Seem far too familiar.” The closing lines offer some bitter advice: “Get stewed:/Books are a load of crap.”
The Folding Star is partly about the encounter between a bookish mind—Edward’s—and the intractable realities of mature experience. When Edward quotes “Books are a load of crap,” he is really asking if life—sex, love—will indeed measure up to literature. The tattooed stranger offers a lesson: it’s all a bit more complicated than that.
David Szalay’s sixth book, Flesh, is partly about the encounter between a definitively unbookish mind and the intractable realities of experience. A male mind, crucially. And a hetero mind: this too is relevant. Unbookish straight men are a Szalay specialty. He writes with great formal rigor about the foot soldiers of contemporary blokedom.
The unbookish straight man at the heart of Flesh is István. The novel follows him from the age of fifteen, when he lives with his mother in a provincial Hungarian apartment block, until roughly retirement age, when he lives with his mother in a provincial Hungarian apartment block. In between, a rise and fall: István becomes a petty criminal, then a soldier, then a bouncer at a London strip club, then (after a Good Samaritan intervention in a mugging) a bodyguard to “VIPs, celebrities, and high-net-worth individuals,” then a full-time “security driver” for a wealthy couple, the Nymans, then a property developer during the Cameron–Clegg coalition government, then—after various calamities personal and financial—a security guard for Media Markt, a shop in the mall near his mother’s apartment back in Hungary.
István isn’t what you’d call highly verbal. What he says, chiefly, is “Okay.” The book contains 340 okays—roughly one per page. István is also prone to lighting cigarettes. I don’t remember the last time I read a novel in which people lit so many cigarettes. (When times change, he switches to a vape.) Lighting a lot of cigarettes, in fiction as in life, is something you do when you don’t know what else to do. István often doesn’t know what else to do. Does Szalay? Given that one of the very few books we ever see István reading voluntarily is a business guide called Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, we might not expect his life to be haunted by the poetry of Philip Larkin. But it is.
At the age of fifteen, István is seduced by the “lady” who lives “in the apartment opposite.” Szalay’s brutally reduced prose supplies no explicit judgment of this seduction. The lady’s dialogue is almost as starved as István’s: “It’s okay.” “Are you okay?” Szalay never editorializes. He works instead by a kind of cinematic cutting. In her apartment, the lady gives István a blow job. Then “she takes his hand and puts it between her legs,” inviting him to stimulate her. István “keeps doing it until his arm gets tired.” She thanks him. End of scene. After a section break, we get this: “On Sunday his mother takes him to lunch at McDonald’s in the new shopping mall.” All the queasiness, all the wrongness, of the affair is felt in the cut. His mother, McDonald’s: we see how young István is. We are shocked.
The affair is only part one of István’s originary trauma. The lady is married. Rejected by her at last, István bangs on her door and wrestles with her husband. The husband falls down the stairs of the apartment block and dies. It may or may not be István’s fault. But he spends the rest of his adolescence in a “young offender’s institution,” emerging into a late-1990s Hungary beset by recession. Adrift, he dabbles briefly in smuggling drugs. “And a few months later, still unable to find anything else, he joins the army.” He’s just in time to fight in the Iraq War, where more trauma awaits.
The novel offers no direct account of István in Iraq. Instead, we meet our man of few words again on his way back to Hungary from Kuwait. He has refused to reenlist, although his colonel tells him, “You’re a brave man.” In Budapest, István and his fellow soldier Norbi pick up two young women in a nightclub. A grim sort-of-foursome takes place in a hotel room jacuzzi. “A minute later she’s sucking his dick while Norbi fucks her from behind”: István has a lot of sex, and the language in which it’s described is often affectlessly pornographic in this way.
The next day István takes a train to his hometown, in the process briefly and unwittingly passing through Larkinland: “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.” In the smoking car István sits beside “a rough blue curtain with an ingrained smell of cigarette smoke.” The faint, even ghostly allusion here is to a specific Larkin poem: to the hothouse that “flashed uniquely” as the poet looks at it from the window of a train in “The Whitsun Weddings,” to that poem’s “reek of buttoned carriage-cloth” and “canals with floatings of industrial froth.” These nods to Larkin make proper sense only a few pages later. On “the Pentecost long weekend in late May,” István is lying in bed smoking. “He doesn’t know why he does what he does next…. There’s a surprisingly loud noise and the door has a splintery dent in it now.”
In the emergency room István has the bones reset in his hand (by an old school acquaintance who has been wiser or luckier in life) and gets a psychiatric referral. A therapist asks him if he knows what PTSD is and prescribes Seroxat. When the therapist asks him about losing his friend Riki in Iraq, “he tells her in detail what happened.” We get the detail—a water convoy blown up and ambushed, a treasured friend who dies in István’s arms. But the speech is given in summary rather than quotation marks. Even in therapy, we don’t hear István say much more than “Yeah” and “Sort of.” “He shrugs.”
“Whitsun” is of course another word for Pentecost, the feast day that commemorates the entry of the Holy Spirit into the disciples of Jesus. Larkin’s poem is about “all the power/That being changed can give.” As Christ’s disciples were changed, so the newly married couples in “The Whitsun Weddings” have been changed, in their own homely Pentecosts. István’s Pentecost may be about all the damage that being changed can do. What spirit has entered into him, this Whitsun? Maybe it’s the other way around. Some spirit, some human essence, has gone out of him. Seroxat and therapy aren’t enough to put it back.
All those okays, all those cigarettes, all those brief, affectless accounts of sex: 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.) Yet the implicit presence of “The Whitsun Weddings,” the precise dating of István’s wall-punching to the Pentecost weekend—these things tell us that while the prose may be on starvation rations, the novel itself is not. Flesh is an attempt to write richly about a hollow man, in that hollow man’s own impoverished language.
István is neither Szalay’s first hollow man nor his first unbookish hero, and Flesh is not Szalay’s first visit to Larkinland. Paul Rainey, the protagonist of Szalay’s first novel, London and the South-East (2008), has his own occluded relationship with Larkin.
Rainey is an alcoholic. He is also a salesman, though of a postmodern kind. He sells advertising space in pseudo-real publications like European Procurement Management, of which only a few token copies are ever printed, and he does it over the phone and under false names. Like European Procurement Management, Rainey’s job is a pretext. Really what he does is go to the pub.
Halfway through London and the South-East there is a flourish of comic-realist prestidigitation: a comprehensive list of “the various pubs” of Paul Rainey’s “sales life.” The list occupies a full page of text. Rainey has gotten stewed
in the Duke of Argyll, in the Greyhound, in the Prince Albert, the Windlesham Arms, the Red Lion, the City Darts, the Ten Bells, the Seven Stars, the Gun, the Crown, the Golden Heart, the White Hart, the White Swan, the Perseverance, the Nag’s Head, the Devonshire Arms, the Punch Tavern, the Captain Kidd, the Coach and Horses, the Prospect of Whitby, the Old Bell…
This absurd, virtuoso catalog eventually gives way to Rainey’s reflections on the impossibility of “leaving the pub” after lunch, and on how “the first post-two o’clock pint produced an immediate sweet easing—a sudden luxurious expansion of time, ‘all sense of being in a hurry gone.’ (A phrase he remembers from somewhere.)” The phrase is, of course, from Larkin. It describes the feeling of settling into a train journey, and appears in the first stanza of “The Whitsun Weddings.”
Rainey is far more palpably a denizen of Larkinland than István, who gets around quite a bit, in both the geographical and sexual senses. Rainey’s middling life is made up of pubs, commuter trains, grim obligatory offices, and a domestic partner he resents, when he condescends to notice her at all. (“He married a woman to stop her getting away/Now she’s there all day”—from “Self’s the Man,” also in The Whitsun Weddings.)
Nonetheless the novel in which Rainey appears is comic in spirit—is in some respects an old-fashioned English comic novel, full of set-piece family parties, blurry drunken mishaps, an ambient feeling of decline and fall. The prose is luxuriantly literary (“Darkling, mortified, his memory feels its way”). There is a plot: Rainey incompetently schemes to escape his telesales job for a better one; fails; ends up working the night shift at Sainsbury’s (a bucolic interlude); returns in a lurch of doomed circularity to telesales at novel’s end. London and the South-East is poignantly attentive to the defeats of the status-seeking male in a bland world of bullshit jobs. It generates a giddy, melancholy sense that London is rife with men such as these: paunchy middle-aged telesales jocks drifting from frowsy office to frowsy pub, commuting home to disappointed partners in drab exurban hinterlands, somewhere becoming Rainey.
It is also a novel that pushes delicately against the limits of realism. That catalog of pubs is both a virtuoso bit of notation (they are all actual pubs) and a parody of the kind of thick description familiar from a multitude of realist novels. The old-fashioned realist, in search of what Barthes called the reality effect, might go about it thusly: “The environs of Kingsway were prodigal with pubs, among them the Duke of Argyll, the Greyhound, the Prince Albert…” Szalay mocks thick description by thickening a banal list until it becomes comic, then, inexorably, tragic.
In Szalay’s fiction, detail is always present not as furniture but as the texture of the experienced world. Paul Rainey, tensely awaiting a dodgy business deal in an Indian restaurant: “The sitar music, though almost inaudible—or perhaps for that reason—had long been playing havoc with his fragile nerves.” Flesh represents the outermost limits of this method in Szalay’s work so far. Nothing is noted that doesn’t impinge on István’s curbed consciousness. Kuwait: “In the evening there’s the sound of the mosques or whatever.”
I’m making Szalay sound like a modernist, or a fundamentalist of free indirect style. But he isn’t quite either of these. For one thing, his books are appealingly eventful. They are full of sex, lies, travel, car crashes, financial wipeouts, shifts in social status, sudden deaths. They move swiftly. Turbulence (2018) economically links disparate characters through the gimmick of connecting flights: sections are titled “LGW–MAD,” “DEL–COK,” et cetera. All That Man Is (2016) is about nine different men, each one at a different stage of life, from adolescence to old age. These framing notions are, perhaps, not entirely unkitsch, not entirely unmiddlebrow. It is chiefly Szalay’s rigor as a stylist that makes the books work, and, in the case of All That Man Is—a more original book than Flesh, though it was Flesh that finally won Szalay the Booker—work brilliantly.
Szalay leaves many of realism’s deeper structures standing. In a 2016 interview with the online magazine Mandatory, he said, “As I see it, the purpose of writing fiction isn’t to have original ideas, but to express platitudes—that is, ideas that almost everyone would accept as true—in an imaginatively compelling way.” As a way of thinking about fiction, this is itself a platitude. Szalay is clearly interested in platitudes of various kinds, from phatic speech (“Okay”) to the bromides of love, politics, and business (Playing to Win). In his remark about platitudes, we can hear Szalay’s loyalty to the realist tradition, with all of its permissions and limitations. His books tend to march in orderly sections under the banner of familiar themes: mortality, love, social climbing, betrayal, money.
Early in Spring (2011), Szalay’s third novel, two lovers named James and Katherine go to Ghent to see the Van Eyck brothers’ altarpiece (“One of the Masterpieces of Western Art,” as James puts it to himself). James finds the central picture of the sacrificial lamb “very strange.” Katherine tells him that
what made it seem strange…was the way it was painted. The familiar symbols of medieval art had been painted as if they were real things. That was what made them seem strange. The sheep looked like a real sheep, like a photo of a sheep.
The figures in the painting are “escapees from a world of symbolic and stylised art.” James and Katherine, we are meant to understand, are also escapees from such a world. (When the contemporary novel wants to tell you what it’s up to, it sends its characters to an art gallery.)
Spring presents itself as a love story. But it thwarts our expectations in subtle ways. Both James and Katherine are in their thirties yet remain stuck in a drifting, preparatory zone of late youth. Katherine works as a manager in a Park Lane hotel. James, an entrepreneur, was at one point an Internet start-up millionaire. Drained of ambition and focus by the dot-com crash, he now “just wants things to be okay.” But “he is worried that things are not okay…. Something is not okay, has not been okay since Monday.” “Okay,” it gradually becomes clear, is James’s private shorthand for not having to think too hard about Katherine, with whom, over the course of Spring, he has a fitful, mutually uncomprehending love affair.
One by one, Spring deploys the tropes of romance. The lovers meet. They misunderstand each other. Katherine goes back to her ex, before realizing that she doesn’t love him. Crucial moments are casually underreported (“They met at a wedding…. They exchanged phone numbers”) or afforded a scouring scrutiny (Katherine’s grim weekend at a Scottish hotel with Fraser, her ex, is recounted at length). The novel ends with a downbeat, not-quite-conclusive breakup. The tropes have not added up as they usually do. Much time has been spent with Simon, a Home Counties stable owner who ends up poised to become a figure in UKIP politics. What’s he doing there? (Telling us that love always happens in a particular time and place, for one thing.) Moreover, James and Katherine are lovers who do not come to know each other, or themselves, through love. They are lovers who do not end up together. Their needs and histories are intractably personal. They do not really know why they are together, or why they can’t stay that way.
In other words, Spring is a love story done in the mode not of romantic optimism but of depressive realism. The traditional subject matter (two lovers in a modern city) remains, with many of its narrative lures intact. It works extremely well. But the pessimistic love story risks indulging in its own version of kitsch. Here, as in the later books, it is Szalay’s faithfulness to his characters’ interiority, rather than his storytelling as such, that seems original.
The project to redeem realism is one that Szalay has partly inherited from Alan Hollinghurst. In interviews, Szalay has often cited the older novelist as an inspirer; asked to name a favorite Booker winner for a Q&A on the prize’s website, he nominated The Line of Beauty. Like Hollinghurst, Szalay belongs—as Henry James said of Turgenev—“to the limited class of very careful writers.” Szalay has obviously learned a great deal from Hollinghurst’s care with language. The Line of Beauty gives us the “gleaming slippage” of newly printed books in a window display; Szalay gives us water “pecking” at a shower curtain (Flesh) and “a shocked-looking, marble-eyed baby” (Spring). These small moments of realist precision are one of the great pleasures of Szalay’s prose.
What Szalay has perhaps learned most deeply from Hollinghurst is the value of mingling the nineteenth-century realist’s interest in society and status (the phrase “the social order” appears in the first paragraph of Flesh) with a softened—you might call it a gently Jamesian—modernism. It was Henry James, of course, who argued for the single perceiving consciousness as both the best method for and the true subject of realist fiction. For James, as he grew older, plot became increasingly a pretext for the study of consciousness. Szalay, too, has come to view plot with a jaundiced eye—or at least to say that he has. “What’s a novel?” he asked The Paris Review in 2016, speaking about the writing of All That Man Is. “You make up a story and then you tell that story. I didn’t understand why or how that would be meaningful.” Never mind that All That Man Is does quite a lot of storytelling (one section, about a journalist exposing a politician’s affair, is practically a thriller). For Szalay, perhaps, the traditional realist novel resembles a swimming pool mentioned in Flesh: “The gray-greenish water sways in the pool, trying and failing to reflect the proper forms of things.”
Szalay is deeply interested in the effort to reflect the proper forms of things. His second novel, The Innocent (2009), is set in Soviet Russia. The narrator, Aleksandr, is that mythical figure, the “good” Soviet secret policeman. Part of the novel is composed of a memoir he is writing to try to make sense of a specific case (it is the case, naturally, that shaped his own life). In 1948 Aleksandr was dispatched to a remote psychiatric clinic to suss out whether a patient, Anatoly Yudin, had been faking the symptoms of a severe head injury in order to escape punishment for being “a Nazi sympathiser” during the war. The clinic director, Lozovsky, explains that Yudin “had the back of his head blown off” and that this caused
injury to one part of the brain, while leaving all other parts intact…. In Yudin’s case the injured part had several important functions. Notably, taking sensory information and forming it into a meaningful whole, and playing an essential, if little understood, part in the use of language.
The result is that Yudin is unable to perform the most basic functions of consciousness. Like a blocked or thwarted novelist, he cannot take sensory information and form it into a meaningful whole. He is also a version of Aleksandr, writing the partial and blinkered account of his life that makes up much of The Innocent. In his memoir Aleksandr quotes from the exercise books in which Yudin has tried to make sense of his experience (“I want to write about my life. What my life is like… When I start I realise it’s impossible because I can’t remember the words I need”). Yudin is a damaged man helpless before the spectacle of an unrepresentable totality—his life. He is a kind of mascot for all of Szalay’s characters, a presiding figure.
Szalay has remarked that The Innocent was drafted before London and the South-East, though it was published afterward. Perhaps expectably, then, The Innocent is Szalay’s least typical novel. But some of the base elements of his fiction are already present. Men, his recurring focus. Unconsoled men, men who fail or who do not even try to understand their own motives; men who drift through life, often in positions of power or privilege, but knowing no more about that power or privilege than they know about themselves. Aleksandr does not quite know why he arranged to have Lozovsky sent to the Gulag so that he could have an affair with, and eventually marry, Lozovsky’s wife, Irina. “The innocent” is what he wants to be—and, ironically, in his lack of self-knowledge, what he almost is.
While women appear in these books, they rarely attain the status of a Jamesian subjectivity. Katherine in Spring is an exception, and some of the short pieces in Turbulence attend to female protagonists. But in general Szalay’s is a man’s world. It’s István’s world. What his men have in common is a historical condition. The frictionless borders of Europe in the early years of the twenty-first century, the decline of religious faith, the collapse of old ideas about becoming a “family man,” the provincial towns in the fraying hinterlands of social democracy, the planes, the trains, the nightclubs and downmarket Tex-Mex restaurants, the hypermarkets, the offices, the abstract swerves of money and power: What does it mean to be a man, in such a world? Szalay has noticed that if men are, as everyone says, in crisis, the nature of that crisis has to do with agency. Men used to have it. Increasingly, and for complex reasons, they don’t. Or at least they feel they don’t. How to represent this?
Szalay is himself a twenty-first-century man. He’ll turn fifty-two this year. He was born in Montreal to a Canadian mother and a Hungarian father (the surname is pronounced “SOL-oy”). He spent part of his childhood in Beirut; the family moved to London after the Lebanese Civil War began. He attended the Sussex House School, a fee-paying institution in Chelsea, and studied English at Oxford before spending a chunk of his twenties working in telesales in London, “selling ad space in business magazines”—the occupation of Paul Rainey in London and the South-East. His life since then has been peripatetic, and included a long spell in Hungary. (He now lives in Vienna with his wife and young child.) This has led reviewers and journalists to call him, and his fiction, cosmopolitan. But that isn’t right. Szalay writes a mobile, not a cosmopolitan, fiction. His characters are rarely sophisticates. When they travel, they notice what they would notice, rather than what is there to be noticed. In All That Man Is, Simon, a teenager and aspiring sophisticate, looks at euro banknotes: “He likes the font the designers have used, plain, unornamented”—and those last two words, appearing on the first page of the book, tell us about Szalay’s own design. Often his men travel in search of sex. (Several sections of All That Man Is are about sexual encounters.) Often sex is the arena in which his male characters come face-to-face with their own agency, or lack of it.
István’s life, in Flesh, is punctuated by sex. It is the asymmetrical affair with his neighbor that shocks him more or less permanently into his state of stolid passivity. And it is an affair with the one-percenter Mrs. Nyman, and the convenient death of her husband, that permits him to enter London’s elite during the Cameron–Clegg years. Even long after he has lost the fragile family happiness he built with Helen Nyman (both Helen and István’s son, Jacob, are killed in a car crash; the first word that Jacob speaks in the novel, by the way, is “Okay”), the aging and depressive István has an affair with a barmaid, Bori, and masturbates over nude photos of his late wife: “His dick has shrunk to almost nothing now, has almost disappeared into the tangle of his pubic hair, which has definitely started to turn white.”
What does István want, apart from sex? He pursues things fitfully. He is opportunistic, uncertain. He both rises to the condition of protagonism and refuses it, or he simply fails, because of his emotional damage, to think of himself as an actor in his own life. This, in Szalay’s fiction, might be what it means to be a twenty-first-century man.
Increasingly, Szalay’s books seek ways to outwit the novel’s native hunger for story. He has developed a fictional form that stresses hints, clues, implied connections. His more recent books progress in discrete sections. Each section tends to be longer than a short story and shorter than a novella. They are not quite chapters. Szalay told The Guardian, “I enjoy books made of free-standing units of writing that are somehow in dialogue with one another, where what happens in the gaps is as important as the chapters themselves.”
But plot and its clichés have crept in again through the back door. His search for new forms has increasingly succeeded in keeping something of the old kitsch forms alive, whether he means to or not. Flesh has been praised for its originality. Lisa Allardice, writing in The Guardian, said it is “unlike anything you have read before.” 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.
It also recycles some hoary old ideas of the strong-men-also-cry variety. István’s deepest connection is with his son, Jacob. When Jacob dies, at the age of ten, the event is followed by a four-paragraph chapter of short sentences (“You don’t know what to do when something like that happens”) and three blank pages. Like István’s experience of war, his experience of grief is given to us retrospectively and metonymically: about thirty pages later, István weeps uncontrollably in a used car lot. At this point you might remember how swiftly and easily István opened up in therapy, after his self-inflicted Pentecostal injury. You might also begin to wonder if what you’ve been reading isn’t basically our old friend the trauma plot, not so much reimagined as simply reused. We find trauma plots moving because we desperately want them, in their explanatory neatness, to be true. All of our suffering might have its source in a simple wound. But wounds are never simple. We should be suspicious of such neatness, in novels as in life. Lurking beneath the spare flesh of Flesh might be the same mushy heart that sent Frederic Henry back to his hotel alone in the rain in the closing words of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.
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.
English (US) · 