More often than I’d like to admit, on a Friday night, I’ll turn on the Sportsball, and enjoy some bubbles and a packet of potato chips for dinner. Compelling eating – once you pop, and all that – but ultimately nutritionless, completely bad for me.
I consumed Flesh over the course of a late afternoon, all in one sitting, not unlike those potato chips. I walked away feeling the same dearth of depth and sustenance. I’m struggling with how to approach reviewing it, because I have mentally shelved it with American Psycho and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – I can see the intent, but there’s nothing for me to latch onto in the narrative that makes the journey meaningful to me.
Like Patrick Bateman, Istvan is the sort of protagonist who numbs the reader to the emotional impact of his actions. Instead of translating his lack of agency into violence, Istvan just detaches; it’s a very deliberate choice to have him use the word “Okay” something like 500 times over the course of the novel. From the first pages, he meets all he encounters with the same lack of affect – sex is okay, being in the army is okay, highs are okay, lows are okay.
Though his story hits all the proscribed beats of the Hero’s Journey, there’s no wisdom won by the end. The last line, “After that, he lived alone,” hit with the emotional heft of a mass-produced Christmas card from a local realtor. Istvan describes himself as “not a very nice guy,” but it’s difficult to even develop dislike of him. He doesn’t so much actively make bad, cruel, or nasty choices as he allows himself to be swept along with the narratives of those surrounding him.
My initial complaint about the novel to my sister was that it was more a series of loosely connected vignettes across Istvan’s life, rather than a narrative. I’m not sure if that’s right – there’s an arc, through hardship, trials, triumph, and, inevitably, a fall. I just couldn’t invest emotionally in a character that seemed to have no agency (and I can invest emotionally in a commercial for lamb chops, so…). I felt like I’d consumed content with no value beyond the intellectual exercise.
So then I come, again, to the question of what makes a book, or a story, successful. Is it successful if it depicts the characters authentically enough that I feel what the characters feel? Is it successful if it doesn’t depict the characters in a way that makes me feel any of their emotions are authentic, but nevertheless makes me feel something? Because I definitely feel something, something I’m struggling to express. I am annoyed at the whole thing. Am I annoyed at what it says about modern masculinity, that this numb, strive-free-zone of a character in a narratively predictable novel is being held up as a triumph?
I’ve stream-of-consciousness written about it until my hand hurts, and when I sat down to officially review it, I was still unsure how to explain why it felt so hollow. I mean, nice one – Szalay’s accurately depicted the hollowness of a life, I guess? Why is this so much of a fail for me? Why are we saying that the experience of reading Flesh is a joy, when (to me) it’s unequivocally not? Compare this to the lushness of the writing of Margaret Atwood, AS Byatt, and Salman Rushdie, or the depth of Hilary Mantel or Yann Martel – this is not a book I would shelve with any of those past winners. It’s not writing of the same calibre, which is perhaps exclusionary of me, but ffs, let me experience a book that’s at least worth the reading of it, in terms of exquisite use of language, if not in terms of narrative.
In an article from NYMagazine (link) regarding what literary trends we should retire in 2026, an agent was quoted as saying we should jettison “[m]oody, vibes-based books: craft a plot around which to put your beautiful sentences. Nobody wants to write narrative anymore, but that’s where the fairy-monster-sex books are running laps around the litfic authors.” Nobody wants to write narrative any more; craft a plot. I thought of this when I read Flesh – it’s a large part of what went wrong, for me. The narrative itself felt like an afterthought, not quite ready to hatch from its cocoon of well-turned phrases.
I just couldn’t come at it. Even the bits that attempted to pull my heart strings didn’t land, because I could see their approach from miles away. I mean, I expect to get schooled in what I missed, since this was clearly a super big win for 88% of people who read it. I understand what it’s doing, I understand what it’s saying. But like Maureen lifting her arm (yep, that’s a Centre Stage reference), I don’t want to see the effort in the execution. I don’t want to emotionally invest if you’re not going to make the main character engaging. I just didn’t enjoy reading it. Thank you, next.