The Plankton-Man
A review of David Szalay's "Flesh" (2025)
When his mother leaves the room to answer the phone, a young man named István peels an old postcard from the fridge. He had mailed the card to his home in Hungary while stationed in Kuwait, but now “he looks at it with the feeling that it was written by someone else.”
István is the protagonist of David Szalay’s recent novel Flesh, which won the 2025 Booker Prize for fiction. His internal monologue can itself feel as though it was written by someone else. The novel opens when István is 15 and lives with his mother on a housing estate in Hungary. Ever quiet and restrained, István does what is asked of him with little contemplation. He smokes cigarettes when they’re offered. He fills his mother’s vase with water. He has strange and dispassionate intercourse with the middle-aged woman living next door. “He just lies there while she moves her hips,” Szalay writes.
As he grows up, István only becomes more distant from himself and his body. He joins the Hungarian army and comes home psychologically scarred. One day, he punches a door, so hard he breaks his hand, but he doesn’t know why and doesn’t even feel it until later. Most disconcerting are István’s sexual thoughts, which he renders with an incredible emotional emptiness. At one point, he catalogues the breasts of four women who are out suntanning in the nude. One has an “unfortunate, saggy pair” while another has “almost nothing there at all.” The description is neither impassioned nor acquisitive, but instead unfeelingly evaluative, like an auditor crunching numbers on a balance sheet.
Along with István’s detached narration comes a sense that his decisions no longer belong to him. He recovers from the war and moves to London. The reader never learns why he moved, except that when pressed, he says he “knew … some people who already lived here.” He is offered a job as a private security guard and decides to take it, unenthusiastically, for no better reason than the fact that he can. In fact, István’s decisions rarely seem like decisions at all; they are more a disinterested acceptance of some predetermined fate.
The question of free will crops up throughout Szalay’s body of work. His first book, London and the South-East (2008), follows the life of a salesman who feels trapped both by his melancholic professional existence and his private alcoholism. In 2011, Szalay published his novel Spring, which documents the seemingly inevitable decline of a marriage and the unbridgeable distance that seems to follow. Szalay’s clearest exploration of male agency appears in his Booker-nominated short story collection All That Man Is (2016). He depicts nine men of varying ages, several of whom deal with the possibility that freedom expires with age. Their jobs, investments, and relationships fall through, revealing a harsh determinism at the bottom of it all.
Flesh is Szalay’s sixth book, and its themes fit neatly into the author’s thematic arc. Yet István represents a new extreme of male passivity. Szalay’s other protagonists tend to experience some flashes of introspection and passion, even if they are mostly despondent. István, by contrast, mostly resembles a human plankton.
István’s lack of conviction is not an accident of the text. In an interview with the Guardian, Szalay said Flesh hoped to convey what he sees “in the world, which tends to include men who lack a clear sense of what they should be doing and why.” That much is successfully communicated, and to great value. Too many novels construct elaborate and perfectly logical reasons for their protagonists’ every decision, forgetting that few people experience so much agency and self-knowledge in the real world.
The problem is that this view of masculinity—where men float disinterestedly through time, not thinking particularly hard about the people they hurt—has a vaguely exculpatory quality. Halfway through the book, István begins sleeping with Helen, a married woman whose husband is dying from cancer. Does he do this out of affection, lust, boredom? He doesn’t say, and perhaps doesn’t know himself. Could he have chosen not to sleep with her? Certainly not: he’s just doing what he’s told. After marrying Helen himself, István builds up a lucrative real estate empire—or rather, the empire builds itself up around him—through a series of ethically and legally questionable decisions. Can the reader really hold him liable? He wasn’t thinking very hard about it.
This abrogation of choice is expressed in the book’s synopsis on the Booker Prize website, which says that István is “carried upwards on the 21st century’s tides of money and power.” Are people like István merely carried upwards by forces outside their control, or do they make a choice? It’s true that István receives unlikely advantages: his job as a private security guard is attained more or less by chance, and gives him access to elite social circles; he marries Helen, who is much wealthier than him, and begins gradually siphoning money from the trust of Helen’s son into his real estate business. But chance isn’t entirely effacing of human will. There are moments where he could have said no.
The truth is, it’s hard to say whether István is a lost, fragile soul or a dedicated financial criminal. The job of a novel isn’t to judge its characters, nor is it to shove an ethical agenda down the reader’s throat. But a good novel leaves room for the possibility of moral conviction: it gives us enough data and emotion to make our own judgments about a character’s innocence or guilt, if we are so inclined. In Flesh, glimpses into István’s interior life are few and far between. He has few flights of introspection. He often speaks only one syllable at a time, usually to agree with people around him: yes, sure, okay, thanks. Some readers fare well with this sort of emotional rationing: they are vividly imaginative, and enjoy filling in the gaps for themselves. Other readers need more.
When István puts the postcard back onto the fridge, and his mother finishes answering the phone, the two of them talk. She asks him what happened in Kuwait, and he doesn’t tell her. He doesn’t think she’d understand something fundamental about his experience. “The strange thing,” he thinks, is that “he isn’t exactly sure what that something is, the thing that she wouldn’t understand.” I’m not exactly sure what that thing is either, and I would have liked to know.