Book review: Why David Szalay’s Flesh is a gripping study of desire, violence and inner emptiness

Flesh is a rags-to-riches story about a young Hungarian named István. Without much time spent interrogating his own motives or desires, he moves through life impulsively, drifting across a series of odd jobs and uncertain choices. Eventually, this restless path deposits him in London, married into a wealthy household, seemingly cushioned by comfort. The novel also tracks the unsettling liaison between a virginal 15-year-old István and a married 42-year-old woman, a relationship that ends in a violent confrontation with her husband, landing him first in juvenile detention and then in military service. The experiences that follow shape his sense of resilience, or perhaps more accurately, his ability to endure without understanding.

To understand the novel’s peculiar force, it helps to know David Szalay’s own literary temperament. He is known for his restrained realist fiction with a distinctly international sensibility. His breakthrough came with All That Man Is, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016, although he had already published six books by then. Despite the Booker attention, Szalay has always remained slightly outside the mainstream. His subjects seem plain — sex, mortality, money, work — but he enlarges them through a prose style that reads “quietly monumental,” making the ordinary feel almost perilously alive.

In Flesh, the preoccupation is István’s pliability; his moral, emotional and psychological looseness. The novel hints at his naivety, but also at a deeper estrangement from his own bizarre urges. István seems unsure whether his behaviour signals a psychological disorder, a current of erotic and material desire beyond his control, or simply a life lived without reflection. As the title suggests, he exists in his body more than in his mind. His flesh bears scars; it moves, reacts, absorbs, yet rarely demands. Flesh becomes a narrative of motion rather than emotion, and Szalay himself has acknowledged the difficulty of sustaining such a gaze — the tension between depicting movement and withholding feeling.

The novel charts a man constantly at odds with himself, estranged both by circumstances and his inability to articulate what he wants. Later in life, he works in private security and eventually becomes a chauffeur for an elite London family. Through a twist of proximity and desire, he enters into an affair with the young wife in the household and eventually marries her. His step-son, in turn, demands a life that he believes he must control. Life comes full circle, though not with wisdom, rather, with a dull recognition of repetition.

Flesh is not an easy read, but it is gripping. It tests the reader’s patience in places, yet rewards it with a strange, quiet intensity. This is a book about how men are judged — for their loneliness, their muteness, and their masculinity — and about how a person can navigate seismic events without ever appearing to feel them. The prose is stripped down, almost clinical, refusing access to István’s interiority. Neither he nor the narrator tells us what he feels, even when events in his life are momentous. The novel’s gaze remains fixed at the level of the body: what it does, what it endures, how it reacts in the absence of introspection.

The story also exposes a broader literary tension between expression and access: who gets seen, who gets interpreted, who remains opaque. The Booker Prize, often called the “leading literary award,” undeniably shapes careers through its longlists and shortlists. Yet questions about diversity, readability and cultural gatekeeping persist. It also raises the pressing contemporary question: Does the award matter to a world with shrinking attention spans and relentless scrolling? Flesh sits in this tension; a book that demands slowing down, even as readers speed up.

Still, the novel exerts a pull that explains why readers return to it. It lingers in the psychological and social undertones of István’s life. Szalay emphasises that István exists in a body, but lacks the language to express longing or fear. Interestingly, István seems most energised during his time in the military. When asked how it felt to shoot a gun and kill, he says simply, “It’s okay.” The flatness of the answer raises its own questions: does the battlefield clarify death, or does it numb him further?

One could argue that the novel captures the long shadow of early trauma and the estrangement from self that follows. The narrative is most analytically vivid when it comes to sex, tracking transgression with nearly forensic calm. During his affair with his employer’s wife, István notes the heightened sense of wrongdoing, even though he does not find her particularly attractive. Again, Szalay underscores István’s inability to feel, or perhaps, his inability to know what feeling should look like.

By the end, readers may find themselves unexpectedly moved by István, despite his blankness, his passivity, his troubling decisions. Flesh remains deeply compelling, a quiet novel with an oddly magnetic protagonist, rendered through Szalay’s disciplined, almost disconcerting realism. It is a novel about the numbing strangeness of being alive, and how a life can unfold entirely in the flesh when the mind remains elusive.

Flesh confirms Szalay as a restless, probing writer whose work continues to challenge the limits of realist fiction. It is absolutely worth the time, not because it is obvious or comforting, but because it insists on a truth we rarely admit: sometimes we live without knowing why, and the body keeps going long after the mind has checked out.