In a decisive shift for contemporary literature, David Szalay's novel Flesh has claimed the prestigious Booker Prize, challenging a decade-long dominance of female-centred narratives in literary fiction.
A Bold Departure from Literary Trends
For nearly ten years, the literary landscape has been defined by intimate explorations of female interiority. Writers including Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh captured the inner lives of young women with striking freshness, their work resonating powerfully with the #MeToo era. During this period, similarly compelling stories focusing on young men became increasingly scarce.
This week, the Booker prize committee recognised a work that boldly counters this trend. Flesh, by British-Hungarian author David Szalay, presents an unflinching portrait of masculinity, tracing the life of István, a working-class Hungarian immigrant, from the late 1980s to the present day.
The Radical Exteriority of Flesh
The narrative primarily follows István through acts of casual sex and violence. His world is one of simple actions—eating, smoking—and sparse dialogue, often limited to repetitions of "Okay" and "yeah." The novel represents an exercise in radical exteriority; readers are denied access to István's physical description, thoughts, or feelings. Often, it seems, the character himself shares this lack of self-awareness. This approach pares the realist novel down to its most essential bones.
During his Booker acceptance speech, Szalay openly discussed the formal, aesthetic, and moral risks he undertook with Flesh. He identified the most significant challenge as writing about sex from a male perspective in the current climate. As Szalay noted, the literary style of authors like Martin Amis, Norman Mailer, or Philip Roth is no longer viable today.
This does not mean novelists have abandoned themes of desire. Sally Rooney, for instance, has been celebrated for her writing on sex, while Miranda July's 2024 novel All Fours, which explores midlife sexual awakening, was a major success. However, the subject had become a virtual no-go area for many male writers. With Flesh, Szalay demonstrates that this need not be the case.
Subverting Expectations and Confronting Taboos
Szalay replaces the swagger and snigger of an earlier era's literary machismo with a scrupulous matter-of-factness. The novel cleverly subverts traditional power dynamics by consistently positioning István as the objectified figure, with power residing instead with a succession of female characters.
In a move that echoes Ian McEwan's 2022 novel Lessons, Flesh opens with a deeply unsettling account of a teenage boy's seduction by an older woman—a subject rarely explored in fiction. Both novels proceed to illustrate how their protagonists' lives are fundamentally shaped by this early abuse, alongside broader historical forces.
By engaging with themes of migration, money, and masculinity, Flesh speaks directly to our contemporary moment. It also reveals that boys and men have grappled with identity crises long before the emergence of "incel" culture.
With its accumulation of personal catastrophes and pervasive emotional numbness, the novel could be viewed as the literary equivalent of doomscrolling. Its frequent use of one-line paragraphs might appear to cater to digitally fragmented attention spans. Yet, beneath its surface banality, Flesh operates on an epic scale. Szalay imbues his everyman protagonist with Homeric significance by confronting the most fundamental question: what does it mean to be alive?
A Contrast in Booker Winners
Last year's Booker winner, Samantha Harvey's Orbital, invited readers to look upwards and outwards from the International Space Station, contemplating our weightless, tiny existence within the cosmos. In stark contrast, Flesh compels us to look inwards, to focus on our physical selves. As The Guardian's review memorably phrased it, the novel forces us to ask "what, if anything, it means to amble through time in a machine made of meat."
Where Orbital serves as a wondrous love letter to our planet, Flesh offers a merciless atomisation of the body. Both novels, however, ultimately remind us of our shared humanity in its most sublime and ugliest forms, transcending gender. Framing novels solely through the author's identity has its limitations. The true power of reading, after all, lies in the temporary inhabitation of someone else's flesh.
