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 perspective floats at the surface, mirroring both his lack of conviction and his inability (or unwillingness) to contemplate his behaviour:

The narrator’s omission of all emotion creates a container to experience consciousness as István does. Following him feels almost anthropological; the reader is forced to study the reality he inhabits moment to moment. There’s a refreshing honesty in this sparse, quiet approach. In the spaces between the disturbed young man’s fumbling attempts to navigate life, the author traces an elusive aspect of human nature in survival mode.

Like Szalay’s All That Man Is, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016, Flesh is a tapestry of discrete narratives. As a loner in high school, István finds solace in a clandestine affair with his much older neighbour, which quickly escalates to an untenable intimacy. Shortly thereafter, he lands in juvenile detention, where he gets involved in the drug trade. Tragedies accumulate and, as time passes, their impacts fester in the silence that encases István.

The third chapter, a version of which was published in The New Yorker in December, encapsulates Szalay’s style. We find István at the end of his gruesome tour in Iraq. As he and his comrades await transport home at a Kuwaiti hotel, the restrained prose soars. Wavering squares of light wash across the pool deck, and gentle dissociated birdsong and voices drift into the sun-drenched courtyard. “Usually in the afternoon a sort of sleep light comes,” the narrator says. “Sounds in a spaceless world take on an abstract quality.”

Back in Hungary, István seeks treatment for a broken hand after, in a sudden action that he considers “as purely physical and involuntary as throwing up,” he punches the door to his bedroom. As the physician applies a plaster cast, the two men realize they went to high school together. The juxtaposition is apparent even to István, who reflects on how, from similar starting points, this man has “turned himself into a doctor” while he has just become “whatever he is.” His own misfortune bewilders him. Just as he perceives his physical impulses only at the mechanical level, he understands the events of his life as external, immovable facts. This view imbues István with a tragic passivity, while also releasing him from responsibility. His violence escalates far beyond a benign outburst, but his self-avoidance remains the same. When a therapist asks if he feels responsible for an army friend’s death, his muted reply “comes out as a sort of throat-clearing sound.” In one of the few passages that acknowledge his PTSD, he admits it is “strange to think that it’s some chemical in his brain that makes him feel how he does about things” and accepts a prescription for an antidepressant.

As the book progresses, however, the premise wears a little thin. István moves to London, becomes a millionaire’s private driver, and falls into a perilous romance with a married socialite. What begins as a stark consideration of numbness devolves into a plodding story of class ascent. The probing explorations of interiority and culpability, free to breathe in the earlier sections, get lost in the narrative cacophony that emerges. Szalay remains a keen observer of life’s rhythms and contradictions, particularly how innocuous details — an open closet door, a lapsed daily game of tennis — come back to bite. But István’s existential paralysis grows increasingly implausible given the stakes of his new world. Would a man involved in high society and consequential financial deals not be capable of explaining himself and his motivations?

István’s life is painful and profoundly lonely. He is a damaged body in space — both his mind and his muscles react thoughtlessly to his shifting environment — and we have little evidence of any existential searching. Regardless of the circumstance, “his own actions are hard for him to understand.” In Flesh, Szalay rightly doubts our capacity for genuine self-insight and growth, especially where trauma muddies the psychological waters. What he may miss is our overriding urge to seek the protection and salvation offered to us by a well told story.