David Szalay’s 2025 Booker Prize Winner has all the makings of a sharp and unflinching examination of one man’s immigrant life. So why was I left cold?

If Szalay’s 2016 All That Man Is sought to capture the stages of man’s life through nine separate but interlinked stories, Flesh does so through the life of only one: István, a working-class Hungarian-turned-London émigré working among the elite.  To those unfamiliar with the half-Hungarian short-story master, his first official novel may, on the surface, appear to contain all the moreish vicissitudes that come with the great rise-and-fall narrative.  But this is Szalay, after all, master of realism and staunch eschewer of cliche. Abandon hope all ye who enter here, for any of the quixotic glee and momentum we might expect from a Gatzbyian tragedy is not to be found here.

In fact, it is brutally exsanguinated from the book’s veins. What’s left is a dry husk of a novel that flatly and unceremoniously charts its hero’s troubled upbringing in a small Hungarian town right up to his doomed sejour among London’s elite—through it all remaining, inevitably, the detached teenage boy of his Hungarian home town we meet at the beginning.  Yet while Flesh begins as a promising and refined analysis of one man’s lost life, Szalay, midway through, steers the book into dull and tedious plot directions that drain his relentless style of force and collapse the book’s potential to mean anything worthwhile.  

We meet István as a fifteen year-old reserved creature living with his mother in a block of council flats.  When he reluctantly agrees to help his forty-odd-year-old neighbour with her shopping, István finds himself the underage object of her sexual desires.  Repulsed yet strangely propelled—these are his first sexual experiences after all—he goes along with what quickly grows into an affair.  As István continues to visit her, the affair increases in intimacy with each visit to her flat, encounters depicted with unflinching Szalayian frankness that grimly reduces body parts to ugly morsels of flesh.

Their routine trysts come to an end, however, when István inadvertently kills her husband during a scuffle.  He’s sent to juvie, and though he gets off relatively lightly, the altercation—coupled with the affair itself—sets in motion a life of aimless ambling, of listless living.  That’s if we hadn’t, somehow, gauged István’s passivity already from the first page, rendered plainly in his barely fleshed-out language—a dialect largely reduced to numbly compliant Okays and Sures, a form of threadbare communication hardly bettered by the unemotive language of the people in his life.  Buffeted by the forces around him, István experiences life as though travelling aimlessly down a cold, winding river, drifting into and becoming lodged in bankside foliage at whim before dislodging and moving onto the next.  

Chief among such forces, in the absence of strong but emotionally equipped male figures, are the women in his life.  Flesh begins, in fact, with István’s rendezvous with a girl, arranged by a male friend and intended to be his first sexual encounter, which fails humiliatingly when she’s put off by István’s inability to take charge.  When not with his predatory neighbour—itself unknowingly initiated by his mother—István is unmoored, not living almost: “The important part of life happens with her.  That’s how it feels.”  The clandestine component of their union is echoed later when, post-juvie, István grows closer to Noémi, a girl his age working at the local Tex-Mex diner of his home town who, he eventually learns, is seeing an English guy.  Shortly after, perceiving her son’s lack of direction, István’s mother presses him into finding work for the first of several occasions, telling him simply, “You need to get a job”—a command immediately undercut, with brutal Szalayian deadpan that seamlessly renders the cause-and-effect authority women hold over István, by the line, “And a few months later, still unable to find anything, he joins the army.” 

Predictably, back from the forces, István is adrift once again and scarcely able to decide anything for himself: “It’s like he’s waiting for something else to find him.  Or not even that.”  Following a brief, drug- and sex-filled stint in Budapest with a fellow soldier—living out the sort of life he is expected to as a squaddie popular with women—István gravitates back home to his mother, who, again taking charge, finds him casual work and sets him up with a (female) therapist.  Their work together helps him address the traumatic loss of a friend in the war, and things seem to look up before we’re jarringly transposed, a mere page later, to the streets of London in a blunt leap forward in time.  

The results of this move are predictably bleak: Working (unofficially) as a bouncer, István spends his nights fending off central London’s ugly, booze-emboldened nightlife.  Things look up, however, when, after a shift in Soho, he happens across the victim of a mugging—the older, demonstrably wealthy Mervyn.  Saving his life, István is taken under Mervyn’s wing and offered the role of bodyguard to “VIPs” before eventually becoming a personal chauffeur to the family—an extremely wealthy clan with ties to the upper-echelons of the London art scene.  

Yet far from affording István the autonomy he so lacks, rubbing shoulders with the elite only confirms István’s inevitably servile role in a city designed to serve the rich.  Working for Mervyn, István enters his employer’s home through the door marked “Tradesman” precisely because there’s a place for the Mervyns in this world and a parallel one for those like István whose background determines they must live in service of the former. 

This, Szalay suggests, was inevitable.  In the post-communist Hungary of István’s youth, all signs point to the West, apparent in Szalay’s many references to many tokens of anglophone culture—shopping malls, Tex Mex restaurants, proficiency in English, American cigarettes.  Imbued with a mystic lure, such phenomena, for István and his peers, epitomise vague notions of a superior life in the Western world—one many may enter but only in their capacity as outsiders.  Even Hungary itself, with its proximity to the Balkans, reads like a conduit to the West, a servant of its capitals; post-juvie and searching for work, István runs drugs in what he guesses to be Croatia one night having been taken to an undisclosed location in the Balkans—one of the largest corridors to supply Western Europe with heroin—with the naive excitement of filling out his reputation as a fighter he gained in detention.  

István’s London is a shadow city of immigrants propping up the wealthy London elite, made explicit by the fact that the first responder to arrive at the scene of Mervyn’s attack is—a page or two into his sejour in London—Hungarian.  Less a world of opportunity, the capital is a commercialised non-place, hence Szalay’s pointed references to soulless branches of ubiquitous chains found on every street corner of the city.  On shift, for instance, early in his days of bodyguarding, István kills time in Caffe Neros and Prets.  Earlier in one passage, on the phone to a recovering Mervyn days after his mugging, he lingers outside a Shoe Zone—automatically evoking the orange and blue shopface synonymous with the joylessly named franchise at the heart of any moribund British high street while wryly hinting at István’s inexorably “lower” status in life.  

These sad, uniform establishments stand out for their being almost too commonplace—too real—to warrant mentioning in a novel.  For Szalay, however, such spaces, often propped up by anonymous private equity firms, contrast profoundly with the stubborn image of a free, lucrative West that brought him there to begin with. 

Thus whether bouncing doors or serving VIPs, this sense of propping up the West—of himself being a conduit distinct from those he serves—remains. A ghost of his teenage self, István does only what he knows to do.  When the high-powered arts aficionado Helen, wife to Mervyn, strikes up a secret affair with István—one she crudely initiates by drunkenly exploiting his lower class for an ego boost—he finds himself again at the behest of an unavailable woman.  Yet despite her initial treatment of István (seemingly the product of an unhappy life), István, true to form, passively, detachedly finds himself in a relationship with her.  Once more, a woman in his life is calling the shots, dictating when and how they might meet and the parameters of their affair, the parameters of his life.  

Through his relationship with Helen, which grows stronger as Mervyn’s health declines, István becomes gradually acquainted with a life of luxury—maintained when Helen begins dipping into her son Thomas’ trust fund (much to the chagrin of the disgruntled young stoner).  Growing closer to Helen and her world, István enters a lucrative but, again, shadily established career in the venal world property development—gravitating once more towards illicit, doomed ways of being.

But while appearing to move somewhere interesting, it’s here that Flesh loses its path, veering down a rabbit hole into his relationship with Helen, her contacts, friends, and family.  In the process, the book’s (intentionally threadbare) momentum grinds to a halt, while István is lost in a dull, protracted digression through British elitedom and family drama that offers nothing new about the uber-rich or István himself—facts worsened by Szalay’s decision to dedicate a significant portion of the section to the life of Thomas and his struggles with accepting István’s place in the family.

With nowhere else to go, Flesh defaults to a tedious onslaught of misery—dragged out in an oppressive and now defunct style—in lieu of something organic, of something we were owed. Felt most lacking is the book’s seeing out of István’s progression from immigrant to money-minded socialite, a missed opportunity to put forward genuine socio-economic commentary on masculinity and wealth. István is instead slowly eroded by Szalay’s now-defunct and tedious style—lacking the purpose and force it earlier possessed—to the point that he is all but dissolved into a sombre nothingness. 

Where collections of intertwined short stories—Szalay’s most successful format—can enter and leave worlds at whim, indulging a misanthropy made fresh by each shift in perspective, the more focused form of the novel rarely permits such freedom. All That Man Is thrived on this broader, freer scope, capturing the lives of starkly different men with, somehow, a fleeting precision. Flesh strains awkwardly towards a similar multiplicity, a move mirrored in both the book’s naturalistic and universalising title and its proponents who consider Flesh‘s central theme a shared, dispositional “male alienation” found in men.

If this were the case, women would have a great deal to answer for. Indeed Flesh is less a novel about alienated or “lost” men than it is the account of one man’s working-class immigrant experience whose misfortune stems predominantly from the women in his life. But without a true commitment to the novel as a form—an authentic plot direction, a way forward in some shape or form for István—it’s almost impossible to know who or what, like the book itself, he truly represents.