In David Szalay's ‘Flesh,' a reminder of the body's betrayals

Boston Globe

25-03-2025

István echoes trivial details of a couple of characters from 'All That Man Is,' particularly the Hungarian tough working in London, but where the two novels truly complement each other is thematically, their protagonists chafing at the course of lives that have proven disappointing in genuinely significant and peevishly trivial ways. But while the men in the earlier novel fixate on what they could be doing or, as they grow older, should have done differently, István never questions the life he's been given or expresses a desire for change. He's aware of feeling dissatisfied, but the only way he acknowledges the helplessness that emotion engenders is by lashing out in anger, which invariably catalyzes changes that he never sought.
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We first meet István in the late 1990s when he's 15. He and his mother have newly relocated to a prefab, concrete apartment block on the outskirts of a southern Hungarian city similar to Pécs, where Szalay, who grew up in London, lived for several years when he started writing. István runs errands for a 42-year-old married neighbor woman who grooms him then initiates an intense sexual relationship. The boy soon believes he's fallen in love, but she dismisses such childish notions, triggering an outburst that lands István in a juvenile institution. We next see him as an aimless 18-year-old with 'an aptitude for fighting.' He's helping transport drugs from Croatia until his new crush, Noémi, rejects him despite her 'reputation' for getting around, sending István into a spiral of self-pity and the open arms of the army. His five-year tour, including service in Iraq, saddles István with PTSD. He answers questions with the fewest words necessary and observes the world around him without imposing himself upon it. 'It's like he's waiting for something else to find him. Or not even that. He isn't really thinking about the future at all.' He's in a rut, but instead of crawling out, he punches a wall and breaks his hand.
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Something else does find him two years later, in London, where he has been working the door at a strip club. Heading home from work, he interrupts a robbery, rescuing Mervyn, who briefly becomes the Henry Higgins to István's Eliza Doolittle. Under Mervyn's tutelage, the Hungarian learns to 'fit in' among people 'with serious money,' soon landing a live-in job driving for 60-something Karl Nyman and his much younger wife, Helen, with whom István begins an affair. István's interest in Helen is not something he clearly understands. Except for Noémi, he never physically desires the woman he sleeps with, including the neighbor who abused him, who he saw as 'someone old and ugly.' Of Helen, she's not 'particularly attractive, [and] he doesn't even particularly want to have sex with her.' István is merely acting on compulsions that first arose as a boy when he discovered 'the surprising new things his body wanted, and his inability to refuse it when it wanted them.'
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István and Helen's relationship plays out in fascinating and unexpected ways over the bulk of the novel, and as he takes on the trappings of this world of privilege, of posh London addresses and sprawling country estates, of Tom Ford suits and Cartier perfume, István changes on the outside but remains at heart that ex-soldier who punched a wall, a representation of, per the Nymans' teenage son, 'a primitive form of masculinity.' But István is not the clichéd cad who sleeps his way through life. He is unquestionably tied to 'all that burgeoning physicality' that emerged early on, but he sees it as a weakness. It 'is held within yourself as a sort of secret, even as it is also the actual surface that you present to the world, so that you're left absurdly exposed, unsure whether the world knows everything about you or nothing.'
Some may knock István as a passive participant in life, but Szalay portrays him with such compassion that I sympathized with almost every move he made. Near the end of the novel, István remarks that 'There's something terrible about the way normality asserts itself.' If you've ever woken up to the realization that your life has become something you never planned for, anticipated, or desired, you'll likely find 'Flesh' all too human.
FLESH
By David Szalay
Scribner, 368 pages, $28.99
Cory Oldweiler is a freelance writer.
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