Flesh: the return of the male gaze

David Szalay’s latest novel, Flesh, is a confident signal that politics isn’t the only arena to be experiencing a ‘vibe shift’. It is the best sign yet that, after years of literature skewing female and being dominated by identity politics, themes of class and masculinity are back on the literary menu.

Flesh opens in 1980s Hungary, where the rap music of MC Hammer reaches an awkward adolescent arriving at sexual maturity. In sparse prose and showing a careful attention to detail, the novel follows the life of István, from aimless youth to mournful middle age, all the while navigating the confusing class structures of modern Europe and England.

Class is a theme that Szalay is uniquely placed to explore. Born to a Hungarian father in Canada and educated at Oxford, Szalay worked for years in London in sales roles before pursuing his literary career in Hungary, where he now lives. His varied life affords him a deeper knowledge of the class spectrum – something today’s more establishment writers distinctly lack. Flesh has it all: Qatari investors, Italian hedge-fund managers, eastern European doormen, down to an Iraq veteran unnerved by his Hamlet-reading stepson. The scenes, too, chart the highs and lows of modern life, ranging from soldiers on speed to expensive dates, featuring wagyu beef and champagne.

But it is masculinity – namely, the question of what it is to be a man in the modern world – that gives the book its tension. István, the protagonist, typifies the kind of man that is of little use in a dematerialised economy and digital age. He wiles away his time wandering around the house, staring into the fridge, smoking on the balcony and watching the news. To the extent that he thinks about the future, it’s seldom beyond a temporary job. He doesn’t pursue goals, but drifts through life.

Young men with lots of time on their hands will probably spend much of it thinking about sex. István is no different. Indeed, the writing is at its best when it deals with sexual urges and experiences – particularly at their most unspeakable and revealing.

Among a group of sunbathing women, István deliberately takes a lounger ‘at some distance from them’. He is polite yet intimidated, not only by the ‘tipsy female laughter’, but the ‘feeling of not being allowed to look’. Of course, he does look – ‘without seeming to’ – and quietly logs who has the nicest breasts. While not impressed by the sagginess of some, István nevertheless ‘finds himself sincerely admiring’ the ‘unselfconscious willingness to show them’.

All the usual difficulties of young manhood, particularly emotional and sexual development, are given their due attention by Szalay. István is nervous with expectation, plagued by hesitation, and often surprised at the intensity of his feelings of rejection. In a clumsy attempt at courtship, István frets about requesting to share a single room in a hotel with a girl, and ultimately decides on the one room with twin beds. While the description of some affairs leaves something to be desired (one sentence a girl stands up, the next István is fucking her from behind), Szalay’s observations are mostly shrewd, and his sympathy is broad. Sex in Flesh is by turns adolescent, transgressive, tender, familiar, drunken, numb and violent. It is always sex from the male perspective, but it is sex that is written without any attempt to impress or seduce. We’re just given the facts.

Szalay’s sensitivity also makes him the perfect candidate to take on another thorny topic: love in the digital age. One woman István is having an affair with hadn’t ‘sent him messages like this until now’. The messages ‘definitely imply the existence of a new situation between them’, and ‘he’s aware that if he sends her something similar it will have the effect of signalling his acceptance of that new situation, undefined as it is’.

Szalay has parallels with postwar novelist John Braine, and the ‘angry young man’ movement he represented. Like Braine, Szalay has an eye for women and wealth. But he is the more globe-trotting storyteller. István is a man buffeted by forces beyond his control – he bounces between beds and countries like a pinball propelled by our globalised world. In other words, he suffers from that mysterious affliction we hear so much about today: the ‘crisis of masculinity’.

Flesh is the kind of book that will change how you reread early Philip Roth and Kingsley Amis. It exposes their juvenile temperament, and their schoolboy desire to say the most ridiculous thing in the slickest possible way. There’s none of that in Flesh, nor any acrobatic prose. The terse sentences are loaded with intensity and desperation. And while the protagonist in Flesh may be a passenger in his life, this novel has confidently put masculine literature back in the driving seat.

Bradley Strotten is a freelance writer based in London. Follow him on X @BradStrotten.