Survival Mode

One of the thrills of reading a novel is the feeling of getting inside someone else’s head, particularly when it’s the mind of an outcast. The contrast between their outward detachment and their inner eloquence affirms a deeply held belief: that our inmost selves are more genuine and complex than what we present to the world.

With his sixth book, Flesh, David Szalay challenges this notion. The Montreal-born author asks if, instead, a monosyllabic exterior might reflect a deeper, self-reflective inarticulacy. The story follows István, a Hungarian émigré, from his troubled teenage years in 1990s post-Soviet Hungary, through his deployment in Iraq, and into a period of reinvention in England. With stripped-to-the-studs realism, Szalay constructs an unflinching portrait of how trauma can obfuscate access to one’s interiority.

Flesh is conspicuously devoid of the pleasures that omniscient narration and metaphor afford. István’s disconnected...