Flesh

Some thoughts on a great book

I read Flesh by David Szalay recently and I loved it. I thought I would write about it a little here. This is not a book review, just some things I was thinking about while I read it. The writing in Flesh actually reminded me of my own fiction. He is much more famous than I am, but if you are here you may like my fiction and not have heard of him. So this is to say that if you like the writing in my fiction, I think you will like the writing in Flesh.

If you are here because you find me really annoying but sort of feel compelled to keep track of what I’m doing anyway then don’t let that put you off. Just pretend I didn’t say that. You should read Flesh anyway.

Recently this man came up to me and asked if I was Rachel Connolly and I went: “Yes I’m Rachel Connolly”. And he sort of squeezed his face up and frowned at the same time to alert me to the fact that I was about to be insulted and then he said: “Oh you wrote a novel?” And I said: “Yes I did.” Then he wagged his finger at me and said: “Oh I didn’t read it. I don’t like Irish fiction. Fiction by Irish women. I don’t like Sally Rooney’s books.”

I don’t know what the wagging was for. I mean I know I was being scolded but what for? For having written a novel? For being Irish? For being a woman? For the success of Sally Rooney? Not things I can do much to change really. And my work never seems to get counted as Irish fiction when that would benefit me. But anyway, I suppose I will say that if you are here and you have never read my fiction but you have always assumed it is a certain way based on other people’s work, then you might be surprised by what it is actually like.

Now enough about me, on to Flesh. The book follows an emotionally reserved man named István from his teenage years in Hungary. As a 15 year old he is manipulated into a sexual relationship by a woman in her 40s and this changes the direction of his life. This is told in an admirably unsensational manner and Szalay avoids putting a more sophisticated understanding of power dynamics or abuse on to this situation than 15 year old István would have. There is no lecture or speech delivered to the woman at any point about the harm she has done. There is also (and throughout the whole book) a lot of interesting writing about the intersection of disgust and desire (also a theme in my work).

Then we see István in London working as a bouncer, then we follow him on to his tenure as a security guard for extremely wealthy families and (this is not a spoiler, it is predictable and not intended to be a twist) into the bed of his employer’s wife. Once there he gradually joins the ranks of the ultra rich for himself. I did not read the plot summary before I read Flesh or I would not have read it, because I have never liked Triangle of Sadness type “a wickedly funny satire of the wealthy” films or books and from the summary I would have assumed this was one of those. It is not like that at all.

There is just something so two dimensional and pandering about all that stuff. I don’t like feeling like I am being spoon fed messages. And I don’t like reading things where it is obvious what you are supposed to think of all the characters. Flesh does not feel like that at all. And I did find it to be funny actually. Whereas “wickedly funny satire of the wealthy” stuff tends to evoke that uncomfortable sensation of knowing which things are supposed to be funny but also knowing they are not.

I loved the dialogue. There are a lot of stunted exchanges which convey an excellent sense of István as an emotionally inhibited person. And also as a person who is constantly in situations where he feels he has no map for how he should behave, and assumes everyone else does. The very first page of Flesh spells this out as central to his self conception. He moves to a new school and feels every friend group has formed already. Of course some children would see moving to a new school in their mid teens as an opportunity to reinvent themselves. (It is actually fairly common to do so for this reason I think.) But István does not have an entrepreneurial spirit or a sense of strategy. As we see from the start, he goes along with the things that happen to him and rarely anticipates the consequences.

The writing is not excessively decorative or ornate. But I want to avoid calling it stark because to me that signals cleanness or a pristine quality and one of the best things about Flesh, to my mind, is how coarse and vulgar it is. When I think of stark I think of hospitals and surfaces scrubbed clean but also language like describing things as “avocado green” and Flesh is not like that. The writing is not decorative or lavish, but there was something about it that felt, and I mean this in the most positive way, kind of dirty. Maybe rugged is a better word, but I feel slightly loath to use that because it brings to mind that very gendered way that books are written about. You know that “this is a real proper book, a book about men’s stuff” thing which, for obvious reasons, I hate and consider to be anti intellectual. You have to trust me when I say I would describe a woman’s writing as rugged too.