Parataxis and ellipses: in his novel Flesh, winner of the 2025 Booker Prize, David Szalay’s writing unfolds through halting rhythms and profound voids. The author follows a man who understands the world through his body before he can make sense of it through language. From its opening pages, the novel follows existence at its most physical, where instinct consistently outruns reflection and action arrives before interpretation.

We meet the protagonist immediately, as a teenager. His name is István, he is Hungarian, he lives with his mother in a working-class neighborhood of a small town to which he has recently moved, and he does not seem to know quite how to behave towards a girl introduced to him by a schoolmate.

• István’s Adolescence and the Illusion of Choice
• Literary Brutalism in David Szalay’s Flesh
• How David Szalay Uses Language in Flesh
• István Silence in Flesh
• When the Body Thinks Before the Mind
• Why Flesh Became a Book Club Favorite
• Can a Novel Be Too Readable?
• The Power of Ellipsis in Flesh
• Is István a Passive Character?
• Beyond the Crisis of Masculinity
• Virility and the Replacement of Fathers
• Absent Fathers and Patriarchal Power
• In the Name of the Father
• Why David Szalay’s Flesh Stays With the Reader

István’s Adolescence and the Illusion of Choice

This episode, the novel’s first, evokes a certain tenderness. Instead, it poignantly highlights certain recurring themes in István’s story. This awkward adolescence is simply the first of a long series of turning points that the boy crosses without ever quite choosing to do so. Or, perhaps, always choosing: in such an inert way, so far removed from any manifestation of will that it makes it seem like fate.

A few pages later, fifteen-year-old István begins a relationship with his neighbor, a forty-two-year-old woman who seduces him and introduces him to sex. He doesn’t look at her. He stares at the floor and the frayed edge of the carpet. If he looked at her, he would see that she is smiling at him. But he doesn’t look at her. He doesn’t want to see her. He feels shame and even a kind of horror at the thought of having done what he did with an old, ugly woman like her.

Something in him seems to want it.

Why Flesh Became a Book Club Favorite

The novel’s formal economy also helps explain another aspect of its extraordinary success. In an age increasingly shaped by messaging apps and fragmented forms of communication – an age defined by ellipses and paratactic speech – Szalay’s novel hardly feels resistant to contemporary reading habits. On the contrary, its prose often mirrors them. Short sentences, suggestive gaps, dialogue reduced to its essentials: Flesh speaks a language that is strikingly familiar to the twenty-first-century reader.

It is therefore unsurprising that both the novel and its author have reached a remarkably broad international audience. The book has become a staple of reading groups and benefited from enthusiastic online recommendations.

Can a Novel Be Too Readable?

One of the most common – and perhaps most revealing – responses to Flesh is that readers describe having “devoured” it. The novel is often said to be consumed in a matter of days, sometimes even hours. Such remarks are typically intended as praise. Yet they also raise an intriguing question. What happens when literary value becomes increasingly associated with the speed of consumption?

The danger reflects a broader cultural tendency to evaluate reading through the logic of efficiency and performance. A book’s quality risks becoming intertwined with how quickly it can be finished.

None of this diminishes the novel’s achievements. Yet the novel’s extraordinary readability remains a feature worth examining alongside its literary ambitions.

The Power of Ellipsis in Flesh

Critics have described one of Szalay’s central narrative techniques as a form of knife-plunge storytelling.

The comparison is apt. Like a horror film that cuts away at the precise moment a knife is about to strike, Flesh repeatedly withholds decisive scenes. Events occur offstage. Climactic moments are displaced into ellipses. Readers are asked to reconstruct what happened from fragments and consequences.

Szalay himself has openly embraced this approach:

I enjoy books made of free-standing units of writing that are somehow in dialogue with one another, where what happens in the gaps is as important as the chapters themselves.

The result can be remarkably effective. By refusing to show everything, the novel actively recruits the reader’s imagination. Part of what distinguishes Flesh from the great social novels of the twentieth century is precisely its preference for subtraction over accumulation. Yet there are moments when one wonders whether the narrative becomes not merely suggestive, but elusive. Whether certain emotional or psychological developments are left so far beyond the frame that the novel occasionally sacrifices depth for ambiguity.

The gaps are undoubtedly productive. They are also, at times, frustrating. Perhaps that tension is part of the novel’s design.

Is István a Passive Character?

The question of omission connects to another recurring observation about the novel: István’s supposed passivity.

Many readers have interpreted him as a man who simply allows life to happen to him. With his endlessly repeated “okay” – a word that appears roughly 184 times throughout the novel – he has frequently been compared to figures such as Kubrick‘s Barry Lyndon or Camus‘s Meursault.

Certainly, his habitual response can feel defensive, even evasive. It often seems to signal a desire to avoid conflict, to surrender to circumstances rather than confront them. Yet this reading risks oversimplifying both the character and the novel.

There are numerous occasions on which István demonstrates a clear sense of purpose. Once he gains access to the Nymans’ fortune, for example, he proves surprisingly decisive in matters of business and investment. Earlier in life, he appears perfectly capable of recognizing and pursuing his impulse, as his attraction to Noémi makes clear.

To describe him simply as passive, therefore, feels inadequate. More fundamentally, the category itself becomes questionable in a world so thoroughly shaped by contingency and historical forces beyond personal control.

What Flesh repeatedly suggests is that agency occupies a far smaller place in human life than we often like to believe. István’s ‘okay’ may express resignation. It may equally express recognition of a reality that exceeds individual intention. In this sense, István is less a passive man than a profoundly exposed one: someone continually confronted with the limits of his own capacity to shape events.

Beyond the Crisis of Masculinity

Much has been said about Flesh as a novel concerned with a contemporary crisis of masculinity.

It is certainly a story about a man and a male body. As the years pass, István becomes increasingly imposing, and he often benefits from it. Helen herself describes him as possessing a kind of primitive masculinity.

Yet there is a risk of mistaking what the novel seeks to explore for what, in the current cultural moment, is most useful – or most marketable – to discuss. István’s story is first and foremost the phenomenology of an existence. It unfolds within a specific historical period, through a specific body, and according to a set of deeply rooted cultural paradigms. To read the novel primarily through the lens of “toxic masculinity” or “male incommunicability” would be to reduce its vision of reality to a single interpretative framework, however important that framework may be.

Szalay himself addressed this issue in an interview with The Irish Times on 14 November 2025:

“No, I wasn’t trying to put forward a certain vision of maleness. There was absolutely no agenda, in that respect.”

He later added:

“The book is about other things for me: time, and fate, and the physicality of experience, which isn’t only a masculine thing.”

Virility and the Replacement of Fathers

There is, however, another aspect worth considering. As a teenager, István begins a relationship with a married woman whose husband, a factory worker, has been severely injured in an accident. Years later, he becomes Helen’s lover while her husband Karl is dying of pancreatic cancer.

The pattern appears strikingly similar.

In both cases, István replaces husbands whose bodies have been weakened by illness or injury. From the limited and deeply masculine perspective through which the young protagonist understands the world, these men appear diminished: impotent and therefore useless.

István, by contrast, is young and physically strong. His presence enters these households as a force of substitution. One might therefore argue that he acts according to a deeply primordial conception of virility.

Absent Fathers and Patriarchal Power

What makes this pattern even more intriguing is that István’s father is never truly present in the novel.

The replacement of these older husbands – hierarchically superior paternal figures – by a young man whose own father remains absent can hardly be accidental. István is, in a sense, a parricide in absentia.

Indeed, it is precisely this paternal absence that may have driven him towards an unconscious desire for fulfillment, whose trajectory ultimately converges with a system of masculine power.

Unlike these aging husband-fathers, István embodies youth and vitality. He becomes the archetypal expression of physical presence and security. It is as though, by replacing these weakened paternal figures and appropriating their power through possession, István sought to affirm his own accession to the roles of husband and father. This pattern invites a patriarchal and even Freudian interpretation.

In the Name of the Father

Taken together, the murder of the first husband and the gradual appropriation of Karl Nyman’s social position take on the unmistakable shape of a desired parricide.

Both men, moreover, had shown István a mixture of authority and generosity. The first invited him to share a drink at a moment when genuine social connections were rare in his life. Karl introduced him to affluent English society and gradually integrated him into the Nymans’ domestic and familial world.

They function, in many respects, as welcoming and initiatory father figures. Having won the first man’s wife – a woman only slightly older than his own mother – and eventually inherited Karl’s position, property, and family, István is finally able to reclaim the missing paternal role by becoming himself both husband and father.

Even his relationship with his mother begins to acquire a different resonance. Particularly in adulthood, it occasionally assumes the contours of an alternative marriage, one that quietly parallels the life he later builds with Helen Nyman.

Why David Szalay’s Flesh Stays With the Reader

One could describe Flesh as the trajectory of a young man growing up in a particular historical moment, in a reality that decays and absorbs every residue, offering no genuine possibility of purification.

It is, above all, a profoundly human story. A tragic one, perhaps, if we choose to see it as the story of a life repeatedly surrendered to fate.

What remains after finishing the novel is the sensation that it extends beyond its printed pages. Perhaps this hermeneutic openness is one of the sources of its success: both within a mainstream publishing industry increasingly eager for novels that invite interpretation and among readers who recognize in Szalay’s silences the mark of a literary voice capable of enduring.

As the novel reminds us:

There is something terrible in the way normality insists upon itself. In the way summer keeps returning. In the way the chestnut trees blossom. In the way Wimbledon arrives.