Novelist David Szalay: ‘You can't write like Martin Amis any more'

Telegraph

24-02-2025

It's not long before a conversation with David Szalay, the British-Hungarian novelist, veers onto the subject of sex. Specifically sex from a male perspective and, invariably, sex that by turns is adolescent, unthinking, prodigious, loving and rather dreary. Such are the encounters in which his male characters frequently ­indulge, in novels such as the 2016 ­Booker-shortlisted All That Man Is, and there are a fair amount of them in his new novel, Flesh.
'I always want to depict sex as honestly as I can, which is something you can't, for instance, do so well on Netflix, because on screen there is only so far you can go,' he says. 'Of course, men engaging in casual sex is no longer allowed to pass without comment. There's no longer that sense that boys will be boys. So I expect the main character in Flesh to draw quite a bit of disapproval.'
I'm talking to Szalay in his Vienna apartment, where he lives with his second wife, a German-Hungarian academic, and their two-month-old son. Szalay, a genial 51-year-old, occupies an intriguing position as both a major British writer and one who stands apart from the British literary scene, ­having lived in Europe for nearly 15 years. He was born in Canada to a Canadian mother and a Hungarian father, but grew up in London and graduated from Oxford, moving to the Continent in 2010.
A box containing several copies of Flesh arrives during our conversation and he hoicks it up the many flights of stairs in his apartment block with ­evident delight. A few minutes ­earlier, we had been talking about an exchange between two characters in a proof copy, which contained the words 'elemental masculinity' and which Szalay has cut from the final draft. He could scribble it back in, I suggest. 'Perhaps. But I think I cut it out because the line felt a bit too obvious.'
It's tempting to regard Szalay's novels as some sort of disquisition on the state of modern man. The characters in the interlinked stories of All That Man Is – hormonal students, real-estate developers, ­suicidal Russian billionaires – are united by anxiety over their position in the world and by an overarching struggle for purpose.
A similar desultory restlessness feeds into Flesh, which follows, in colourless prose, the life of a largely monosyllabic working-class Hungarian man, István, as he stumbles from a calamitous teenage affair and a stint in the army into a relationship with the wife of his wealthy employer, great money and power, and an ultimately mutually destructive relationship with his stepson.
István, both fool and tragic hero, drifts through life rather than actively pursuing it, although such is Szalay's structural deftness that the novel's sly drip-feed of information forces us to reappraise repeatedly what we think of him. Often, it is left to the reader to decode the flattened surfaces and toneless ­dialogue. 'What happened?' asks István's mother, when he returns from a visit to the hospital. ''I told you,' he says. 'You punched a door?' 'Yes.' 'But why?' 'I don't know,' he says.'
Szalay resists the idea that his novels present a thesis. 'I'm just rep­orting what I see in the world, which tends to include men who lack a clear sense of what they should be doing and why.' If it's an identity crisis, it's not, he argues, a new phen­omenon. 'When I was writing Flesh, I'd been reading Lord Jim, by Conrad, which was ­published in 1900 and which is about the gulf that exists between images of masculinity that exist in the culture and the experience of men trying to live up to those images, and failing.'
Yet, surely, thanks to successive waves of feminism, those experiences and our ideas of what constitutes masculinity are more in flux than ever? 'Yes, but some things remain the same. I think the idea of violence in men, for example, is innate. We have a post-MeToo world, but I find it hard to imagine a post-violence world. In fact, in that respect, the world is going in the opposite direction. The strong ­warrior male is becoming much more a feature of modern politics.'
All the same, he thinks masculinity is risky territory for contemporary male novelists. The rules have changed, too, for novels that embody a certain machismo and swagger. 'You couldn't write like Martin Amis or Norman Mailer or Philip Roth now. But it's inevitable that our views of writers, thinkers and artists will shift and morph over time. Although there's a kind of absolutist fervour now about [our attitude to certain dead, male novelists]. I'm wary of making sweeping statements, but moral certainty is never a very healthy state of mind.'
As a young man, Szalay dreamt of becoming a writer, but instead he drifted into a job in telesales, an environment he describes as 'a shabby, shitty British version of Glengarry Glen Ross'.
'There was a very macho thing about being the hunter, this idea that you eat what you kill, and a kind of contempt for people on ­salaries who got given food whatever they did at work,' he says. 'I was in my mid-20s and, for a while, I was seduced by the whole ethos. But after a while, I got very depressed by it. Writing a novel was my unlikely escape.'
That novel, London and the South-East, which won the 2008 Betty Trask Prize, drew with a satirical sting on his telesales experience, and it was followed by the Cold War novel The Innocent, and 2011's Spring, which both dealt with the bleaker undercurrents within a romantic relationship. In 2013, he was named as a Granta best British novelist under 40. But it was the Booker nomination that changed everything. 'It made it possible to live and work as a writer,' he says, although he admits he can only afford to do this in Hungary (and now Austria), rather than Britain. 'The Booker is a precious thing.'
Characters in his novels share the rootless quality of his own life (few writers capture the anonymous globalised textures of contemporary Europe better than Szalay). He thinks his peripatetic experience, which has included periods living in France and, as a child, in Lebanon, has affected his writing for the better. 'You can see the downsides of staying fixed in the same place on modern American writers, for instance – the Brooklyn novelist has become such a cliché. There is an almost indistinguishable pack of them.' Pressed to name names, he demurs. 'It's a ­general sense that there are lots of writers in Brooklyn turning out tonally similar material.' It's tempting to assume he means writers such as Ben Lerner and Elif Batuman, whose hyper-literate novels share an ironic, at times overwhelmingly self-aware playfulness.
What about the British novel, is it similarly stuck? 'It's harder to define, isn't it? The first English novelist to win the Booker for some years [referring to Samantha Harvey, who won last year for Orbital ], and she set her novel in space!' Perhaps British novelists have become wary of saying anything definitive about Britain, as though nationhood has become a toxic subject? 'But you'd think this would be exactly the scenario that would be fertile ground. Although I can't write a British state-of-the-nation novel sitting in Vienna. That would be absurd.'
He's bullish about the future of the novel, although he hopes that Flesh is optioned for the screen. The c­ultural dominance of Netflix is, he argues, good for writers. 'It forces you to constantly think about why you are writing a novel and not for a TV streamer. You have to make a much more conscious effort not to just describe a TV show in your head.'