Like writers of The Michigan Daily Book Review past, our fearless reviewers are once again tackling the Booker Prize Shortlist. Every year, six English-language books published in the UK and Ireland are nominated, and six Daily reviews follow. Join us as we make our way through this year’s list over the next couple weeks, and, before the announcement Nov. 10, tune in for our final predictions piece, where we will share who we think will win (and who we think should).
— Cora Rolfes, Senior Arts Editor, and Alex Hetzler, Books Beat Editor
Readers of David Szalay’s “Flesh,” shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, should not be fooled by its simple prose — it is a complex, frustrating and gripping story of exploitation, masculinity, class mobility and how both natural urges and random chance can change our lives in ways we do not expect. Reading “Flesh” feels like watching protagonist István’s life through a security camera. Like we shouldn’t be there to see it, but we can’t stop watching either.
The plain, ambiguous style of the novel amplifies István’s personal characteristics. His passivity, which began when he was groomed as a child by his older female neighbor, is shown through his short responses and the lack of narration about his emotions. His passive nature also makes small words and phrases feel charged with anxiety and uncertainty. Before reading “Flesh,” I never realized how horrifying the phrase “yeah okay” — István’s characteristic response — could be. As he is exploited by others and transformed by their needs and expectations, the lack of actual information about him and his emotions makes readers complicit in the narrative; we impose our own perspectives and biases onto him, just like those in his life do.
“Flesh” is organized into vignettes from István’s life. The novel encompasses his time as a teenager, the aftermath of his time in prison, his military service and his unlikely rise (and fall) from wealth, jumping across long periods of time between each. Beyond István’s passivity, a common thread running through these vastly different experiences is his lack of control and the random nature of the most influential moments in his life. From helping his neighbor out with groceries to hearing the shouts of a man getting mugged in an alley, random and sometimes mundane moments are pivotal in István’s story.
Because so little information about István’s feelings is given to us, we are left to determine his emotions based on his interactions with others, people with whom he rarely shares more than a few words. We get the sense that István thinks, as we do at the beginning of the novel, that his life is meant to be totally unimportant, and that he only becomes elite, rich and notable by chance. He was meant to stay in his unnamed Hungarian town, or die in the army, or stay a bouncer for a strip club — a forgettable worker like dozens of others from the former Iron Curtain in the early days of the European Union. But once István comes to believe that he actually deserves this improbable life, it all comes crashing down. We have little control over our own destinies, Szalay seems to tell us — it’s arrogant to think that we ever did.
As István grows older, he seems to stop having any actual wants, a progression of the passivity instilled in him from his youth. All of his actions are driven by either survival or compulsion, and so are his relationships. Other people want things from István, but he seems to live on the surface of his own life, with no plans or dreams beyond the next day, or night, or weekend at the beach.
That is until, like countless other driftless middle-aged men, someone comes along in his life whom he cares about very, very much. But even still, he finds he cannot control the fate of his relationship; István has no control over even the most cherished thing in his life, the way he’s had no control over anything this whole time. Whether István is an especially passive person or whether we all have less control than we’d like to think, Szalay leaves us to figure it out.
Szalay’s greatest strength in “Flesh” might be his ability to fluidly transition between these different Istváns. We read as István matures from a lonely teenager into a wealthy man without losing a sense of who he is on the inside. Despite receiving little detail about István’s inner world, we understand his feelings of isolation and shame as he navigates masculinity and his compulsion toward his carnal desires. István tries to figure out what makes someone masculine — violence, strength, desire, fatherhood — but never really can, and we watch him cycle in and out of self-destruction as he vainly searches. At the same time, we watch him love and lose intensely, which Szalay manages to portray as both István’s attempt to find control and a deeply personal, human journey that feels bitingly real.
“Flesh” is a portrait of a man’s life that is both painfully intimate and stubbornly opaque. Because of the lack of detail, much of the story is left to be imagined by the reader, just as István and the other characters imagine things about each other. By the end of “Flesh,” what lingers is not any single moment in István’s life but a haunting sense that we have glimpsed something true about human life and futility. “Flesh” captures how we move through the world, often half-seeing ourselves and others. Szalay’s unsettling, clear-eyed perspective on life, isolation and modern masculinity makes “Flesh” stand out as a strong contender for this year’s Booker Prize.
Daily Arts Writer Claire Rock and Daily Arts Contributor Elias Simon can be reached at rockcl@umich.edu and elmsimon@umich.edu, respectively.
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