It’s an atypical story. The boy, callow, helps the neighbour with her shopping bags. The woman, “old,” kisses him, post many weeks of tepid exchange over bowls of unsuspecting food. Almost inevitably, they have the standard affair. She is married, but he is in love, so the husband dies, not so inevitably. David Szalay’s narration is in a hurry.

Like the brooding Victorian man, Flesh is teasingly laconic, but unlike him, bereft of garrulous vocabulary. The narration and narrator are one, sexy as they come, withholding, almost noiseless. He lulls you into staid comfort with undemanding prose, sentences monotonous, clipped, (“He hasn’t told anyone. He has no one to tell. And even if he did, what would he tell them?”) only to make a word like “ugly” assume unprecedented heft (“That he’d kissed someone old and ugly like her?”).

Whatever imperils the universalised, neoliberal man – loneliness, the endless urge to optimise one’s socioeconomic status, indictments of “primitive masculinity” – finds itself sequestered in Flesh, contained in a language that is wholly utilitarian. Szalay is an editor’s writer; there is no excess in his prose.

The mechanical man

If form is assumed to follow function, though, Szalay extends no generosity to István, a protagonist the conservative coteries adore, although belatedly. Generosity, after all, is what we’re expected to afford the maligned man. In Flesh, this man is mechanical; Szalay never lets István spiel. He neither does, nor is able to, justify himself. It is almost as though the novel claims that no one but the man is to blame for his fate.

Unlike Szalay himself, who is Oxford-educated and a novelist of numerous books, István doesn’t imagine the possibility of educating himself. After his stint at the young offenders’ institution, the setting arrives to us modestly: “It’s a time of economic depression and there aren’t many jobs available.” Such pockets of undisruptive announcements inundate the novel. Although there are few, if any, markers of place and time, you’re never displaced from it; surprising, since the protagonist doesn’t try to absorb.

It is then, perhaps for our sake, that Szalay harries István. Sleep eludes him often. He never seems to stop smoking. And never does he ask anything of you, the reader, or of the woman he beds. If it weren’t for spurts of abrupt, brisk violence, he might be mistaken for a mindless wisp.

After István’s first affair with an older woman, Szalay spends no time perorating on the vampiric ilk of the bloodless age-difference dalliance, instead shuttling him to the institution. There, István “discovered” he “had an aptitude for fighting.” This gets him, a man with no prospects, some jobs. When there are none left, he joins the military, shuttled now to Kuwait, where again there’s no pontification on the war, except for allusions to the bought sex he might’ve had (“He and Norbi are sharing a room. Most of the prostitutes in Kuwait are from Southeast Asia.”). On homecoming, there’s, of course, more swift sex. (“Nice body,” István says after a while, feeling again that someone should probably say something. “Thanks,” she says without looking at him. A minute later, she’s sucking his dick while Norbi fucks her from behind.”) You should know, this is only one-fourth of the novel.

It turns out that an atypical story can spare room for some serendipity. When István moves to London for work, he meets a generous billionaire, Karl Nyman, who hires him as a chauffeur/security. Nyman, who will soon enough die, changes István’s life forever. Here, István tangos with his employee’s overlooked wife. Helen, often vexed with both her aloof husband and his reticent employee, marries one when the other dies. István, for whom McDonald’s was once a treat, now “saw[s] agitatedly at his steak,” an A5 Wagyu, with matchstick potatoes, no less.

The inarticulate man

On István marrying Helen, the novel’s structure ripens, growing more introspective. We see him think as things happen to him. (In fact, things happen to him more than he makes them happen, the only real plausible deniability Szalay rations to his character.) He pauses when aroused by his wife’s hapless friend. (And leaves.) He wonders how he should broach his son. (And doesn’t.) He suddenly wants to succeed more than ever before. (And forsakes.)

No surprise that Thomas, Helen’s son from her previous marriage, cannot stand her new husband, a foil to her last, even if he is the novel’s protagonist. When he discovers that his mother has been funnelling loans from his trust fund to pool capital for her stripling, he lashes out, only to be punched by his loathed stepfather in public. He becomes estranged; István’s future is all the more precarious; it is Thomas’s money, and once he turns 25, he could throw them all out.

As the rags-to-riches prophecy would have it, fate kills István’s wife and puny young son, already falling short of his father’s expectations. We see István retreat to his home in Hungary. This time, a failed homecoming.

What do you make of the writer’s intention when he creates a character who cannot impart self-description? The apparent answer is the contemporary novelist’s tired project of the universal novel, decidedly conventional and, above all, repeatable, as Sally Rooney has pulled off multiple times. Instead, Szalay seems drawn to the finitude of language. In disciplining it, he exposes its internecine struggle, its self-undermining incapacity to spackle the cleft between consciousness and action. For his character, language itself is a villain he cannot best. István fails to articulate himself, and it is within this failure, one that is perhaps moral, that Szalay has cauterised him forever. Through the svelte form of his novel, Szalay imagines what the modern man should do. Perhaps it is that he should articulate, and for once, truthfully.

Flesh, David Szalay, Jonathan Cape.

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