Flesh

i went into this not entirely sure what to expect. i had not read Szalay before and the Booker Prize is not always a reliable guide to whether a book will actually work for me personally. but i picked it up and i did not put it down, which was not what i anticipated from a novel described by almost every reviewer as spare and detached and cool.
the story begins with István at fifteen, living with his mother in a housing estate in Hungary, a quiet and somewhat isolated teenager who has not quite found his footing yet. a woman who lives across the hall begins asking him to help with things around her apartment. the relationship that develops between them is handled with almost no comment by the narrator, no moral framing, no signposting of what you should feel about it. it just happens, in flat declarative sentences, and then it ends badly and István goes to prison and that is the end of his childhood.
what follows across the rest of the novel is a life that does not so much progress as accumulate. István moves through Europe, through different jobs and different women and different social worlds, never quite belonging to any of them, never quite choosing his next direction so much as being pointed into it by circumstance or by other people who see something in him they want. he ends up on the edges of serious wealth in London, working for a rich family, and that section of the book is where i think Szalay is most interesting because he refuses to make the class transition feel like arrival. István does not become a different person when he enters a wealthier world. he stays the same person in different rooms and that is its own kind of sadness.
the thing the Booker judges said that i keep thinking about is that Szalay leverages absence. we never get a physical description of István. we never get direct access to his thoughts. we know he cries at one point because someone tells him not to. we know he is balding because he notices another man's hair. everything is oblique, seen through behaviour rather than stated, and the result is that by the end you feel like you have spent a long time with someone real in a way that more explicitly emotional novels sometimes fail to achieve. the book trusts the gaps to do their work and they do.
i want to say something about the ending, which i will not describe in detail, but which brings a second major tragedy into a life already shaped by one. what Szalay does in those final pages is very quiet. there are passages near the end with almost no words at all, just white space on the page, and that choice lands harder than anything he could have written there. it is the kind of ending that makes you close the book slowly and sit with it for a minute before you do anything else.
it is not a book for everyone. if you need warmth or a character you can root for in a straightforward way, this will frustrate you. István is not sympathetic in any conventional sense and the book does not try to make him so. but if you are willing to meet it on its own terms, which means accepting the distance and the flatness and the refusal to explain, you will come out of it having read something that does not feel like anything else. i would give it four and a half out of five, with the half point off for a stretch in the middle that tests your patience a little more than it needs to.