How to Be a Man

On the Booker-Winning David Szalay

Matta, Years of Fear, 1941, Oil on canvas

A few weeks ago, on one of the busy, sticky, spectacularly unpunctual trains for which my country is justly famous, I sat next to a young man around my age. He looked put-together, ambitious, very London; he was wearing a nice, clean polyester suit and had an official-looking work pass dangling round his neck. What impressed me most, though, was the intensity, the care, with which he was reading his book. He kept flicking back and forth, underlining things, taking out his phone to make additional notes.

This struck me as a very good thing. Young men should read books; you may have noticed that there have, in the last year or so, been one or two essays on Substack agreeing with me on this point. Clearly, I decided, the logical next step was to check if he was reading my book — so, feigning a lost earphone, I leaned forward and chanced a peek at the cover. He was not reading my book. Instead, he was reading a book on business strategy by Robert Greene. “LAW 12,” read the line I surreptitiously glimpsed over his shoulder: “USE SELECTIVE HONESTY AND GENEROSITY TO DISARM YOUR VICTIM.”

In the long and delay-riddled train ride that followed, I began to descend into some kind of minor but very real mental crisis. I am a novelist; my entire professional existence is wagered on the idea that language is a decent analogue for consciousness, and that the more original, surprising, virtuosic a writer can be in language, the more faithfully he or she can render the mysteries of the inner life. But was that really true of this guy? It struck me that the better I got at this writing business, the further I would stray from the kind of mind that encounters The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene and thinks to itself, “Wow, this is great. Does anyone have a pen so that I can start underlining?” I looked around the train: it was all young men dressed like him, reading things on their phones. Perhaps, I began to wonder, there really was a grain of truth in some of the recent hand-wringing about men and fiction. Whatever the language in which men my age are parsing their inner lives — workplace KPIs, political compass memes, online IQ scores — it doesn’t look much like literature. Literary virtuosity or authentic masculinity: pick one.

There was, fortunately, an antidote to my depression. It was administered that evening, when I arrived home and saw that the Booker Prize — the U.K.’s most prestigious literary accolade — had been won by David Szalay. Szalay, I gather, is still little known in the U.S. — his name, for the uninitiated, rhymes with “Molloy” — but over on this side of the Atlantic has spent the last 20 years quietly cultivating a career as one of the English language’s most promising young novelists. His subject, moreover, is exactly the kind of male philistinism over which I had worked myself up that morning: his first novel, London and the South East, was about alcoholic London telemarketers; his second, The Innocent, about an apparatchik of the Soviet police state; his third, Spring, about a washed-up dot-com entrepreneur in London; and his fourth, All That Man Is, about a whole cast of male malcontents and failures drifting through the clean, sterile landscapes of turn-of-the-millennium Europe. Together, his books amount to a kind of hymn to the psyches of all those men who do not read, or write, or sometimes even think much at all. If anyone could wrench me out of my careerist despondency, it was him.

London and The South-East recounts the travails of a telephone advertiser called Paul Rainey, a name that is both pretty evocative of the general tone of the novel, and exactly the kind of name that people really do have in the U.K. Rainey shambles around pre-Brexit London in search of clients to whom he can hawk a few column inches in a trade magazine, all the while trying to stave off the quiet despair of the salesman who knows that nothing he is selling has any value. Alcoholism rears its head. In quick succession, he loses his job, then ruins his marriage, then topples down the social ladder into jobs as a shelf-stacker and a street-sweeper, where, at last, like Job at the end of his tribulations, he achieves a kind of serenity.

London and the South-East is still recognizably a piece of satire, even if it is satire of a particularly bitter type. The humor — and this is, make no mistake, a very, very funny book — comes from the slight whiff of authorial judgment surrounding every description of Rainey’s state of mind. Like in Nabokov’s Pnin, there is something cruel and haughty in the third-person narration, a sense that Szalay himself is a real artist, while his creations are only ever allowed to be artists hopelessly manqués:

His style, as a salesman, is modernist – that is, he is almost an anti-salesman, scrupulously avoiding any of the formulaic patter, the importunate over-sincerity still taught in the training room. From the start, he had felt his way towards a more subtle style – offhand, low-intensity. It is a style that has served him well; though in truth, less and less so in recent years.

In this respect, London and the South-East seems to sprout rather naturally from the tradition of late-20th-century British comic fiction. There are all the usual trappings of British literary cruelty: well-deployed similes, usually a little too eloquent for the characters whose judgements they relate (“The house is still listening — mildly, like a mental-health professional”), and lovely little evocations of the faded tastelessness of London: the “muted ragu tones” of one London boozer, the “burgundy honeycomb” ceiling of another. There are also plenty of Amisian made-up names (besides Paul Rainey and Dieter Flossman and Elvezia Buonarroti and Eddy Jaw, there is an antidepressant called “Felixstat”). At one point Rainey reminisces about the many pubs he has spent time in during his career in telesales. The list of names is almost a page long.

There are also, however, glimpses of another, stranger, sparer type of writing in London and the South-East — one which seems to anticipate the blank, affectless fiction of the 21st century rather than simply harkening back to the verbosity of the 20th. It comes through particularly well in Szalay’s use of the present tense, a technique that he uses in all his novels. When stories are told in the past, timelines become supple: background information can be drip-fed in without the ostentatious shift in grammar. Reading London and the South-East, one has the sense that Szalay knows this, and that the grammatical awkwardness is somehow Rainey’s awkwardness: he is a man unmoored from time, incapable of coming to terms with his past or planning his future, rattling round a London that is still scarred from the big white-elephant projects — the Wobbly Bridge, the Millennium Dome — that were meant to mark the End of History.

By his third novel, Spring, Szalay seems to have realized that this bleaker, stranger type of writing was his true métier. Spring recounts the story of another casualty of the white-collar world: James, who has been rinsed by the dot-com bubble and is now living in a poky flat with a huge St. Bernard and a gambling addiction. But whereas the drab horror of Paul Rainey’s predicament was conveyed through perfect phrasemaking, plus the occasional stab of eloquent Victorian interiority (“If only it were possible to smother himself in sleep again — to sink into insensible fathoms with his eyes stuck shut,”) James’s condition is realized only negatively, through an inability of characters to say what they mean:

He is worried that things are not okay. When he phones her, standing in the stale silence of the flat, it is only because he wants to know that things are okay. On that question he is insatiable.

“We had such a lovely time on Friday,” he says.

“Yes.”

“Why was that so lovely and yesterday such a fucking disaster?”

She laughs. “I don’t know. Why?”

“I don’t know either.”

Spring, published in 2011, is still something of an apprentice-piece – a transposition of Szalay’s early concern with booze and business and banality into this new, sparer mode. Szalay’s next novel, however, was entirely original. When All That Man Is was shortlisted for the Booker in 2016, there was much anxious pearl-clutching about whether it should even qualify. Was it really a novel? Or was it, in fact, simply nine short stories, whose sole claim to unity came from the fact that they were arranged in rough order of their protagonists’ ages, from adolescence to the cusp of death, like a latter-day “Seven Ages of Man”? In a sense, though, disunity was the whole point: in interviews since, Szalay has expressed a certain dissatisfaction with the idea that novels can ever present “a unified story” with “a single narrative about a single set of characters.” Sure enough, insofar as All That Man Is has a unifying theme, it is the sheer, entropic force that governs most lives, the way we are all yanked around by desire and ambition and duty, and never end up quite where we had imagined.

The working title for All That Man Is was apparently Europa, and it is clear that one of the things Szalay wanted to do in this novel was expand the rather provincial sense of anomie and repression of novels like London and the South-East and Spring across an entire continent. There are episodes in Prague, Frankfurt, Zagreb, Larnaca, and on a yacht in the middle of the Mediterranean, but characters never quite escape the sense that they are inhabiting a slick, Taylorized monoculture, where uprooted citizens flit from train station to train station, airport to airport, motorway service to motorway service. Ballard and Houellebecq are clearly influences, and as with both of these writers, cars take on a particular importance — “muscular black Audis,” “waxed and frowning BMWs,” particular makes and models, all laden with socio-cultural significance. One character, coming to after being beaten up by locals in a tourist resort, remembers, with horror, that he was finally knocked unconscious by the hubcap of a Toyota Yaris. Such details constitute an important new technique in Szalay’s emerging poetics of repression. Characters no longer feel things outright; instead, they simply notice details, into which meaning is encoded. “BMW” means wealth, status, success. “Yaris” means failure, dejection, humiliation. This, to Szalay, is simply what it is like to be a man caught in the great, Baudrillardian web of 21st-century Europe.

With this illustrious back catalogue in mind, then, it is little surprise that Szalay’s most recent novel is being heralded as an innovation for the masculine in fiction. Flesh tells the story of István, a Hungarian immigrant whose life takes on a classically tragic arc: an illicit affair with an older neighbor that ends disastrously, a purgatorial period serving in Iraq, an opportunistic journey to London, a dizzying rise through the British class system, and a massive, melodramatic fall. The first chapter reads like a rehashing of some of the scenes in All That Man Is: a young man from continental Europe is talked into sex by an older woman, by whom he is simultaneously aroused and slightly repelled. But whereas in the earlier book such scenes are played for laughs (“Her legs do not quite have the overwhelmingly vertical quality of a normal leg — they have a definite and assertive horizontal dimension too”) in the later book, Szalay, steadfastly, even militantly, refuses to subject the scene to irony. Instead, he simply inhabits István’s repulsion: “She shows him her breasts. The nipples are weird — surprisingly big, and brown, and with these little things like warts on them.” Then we are given dialogue, positioned in the ambiguous space where the universal threatens to spill over into the banal:

“I love you,” he says to her, the next day. They’re lying on his bed.

“Don’t say that,” she says.

“Why not?” he says.

“You don’t know what that means,” she says.

“Yes, I do,” he says.

“You don’t,” she says, stroking his hair.

There is something very affecting about the way Szalay uses these little disjunctures to signal a basic incommensurability between what Istvan feels and what he can put into words. Feelings do not so much sprout predictably from a seedbed of comprehensible interests and concerns; instead, they blaze through him, erupt out of him in outright violence. He is always surprised by what he does. In this respect, Flesh reminded me of Dostoevsky — or at least the Dostoevsky of Mikhail Bakhtin, whose characters are distinguished by their “unfinalizability”, their capacity to “outgrow, as it were, from within and to render untrue any externalizing and finalizing definition of them.”

There have been many think pieces about Flesh in the U.K. over the last few weeks, many of which have focused in, as I have, on Szalay’s treatment of men and masculinity. Most of them, though, seem to treat Szalay’s main triumph as one of representation, as though what were really interesting about Flesh were the fact that it is about a man — a triumph of content rather than a triumph of form. Such criticism essentially aims to apply the familiar identity-political rubric to a new corpus of texts: finally, it proclaims, a book by a man, for men, about a man who is somehow paradigmatically manly because he is violent and repressed and ambitious and Hungarian.

But is that what is truly interesting about Szalay’s prose? Or might it be the case, in fact, that what is really so bracing about novels like Flesh is the way they conjure — in stark contrast to the polite little autofictions of the last decade or so — the rhythms of minds that are far less literate, cultured, and respectable than their authors’, and yet also manage to convince us that these minds are no less human for it?

About two thirds of the way through Flesh, István is perched on a lounger with his new, rich wife, Helen, and her bohemian house guests. He has made it, by any reasonable standard; he has a house and millions in the bank and a baby on the way. Still, however, we have the sense that he does not quite belong. It is a moment of wonderful, hidden pathos: here is a man of few words and virtually no conventional education, who has managed to stumble into vast wealth, and is now looking to change his mind to fit his circumstances. He wants to be wise, dependable, responsible, successful; he wants, in other words, to be a man. It is freighted with real sadness, nobility, desperation — and, it almost goes without saying, serves as a perfect rebuke to the little internal rant I had a few weeks ago on that train:

“What are you reading?” Helen’s friend asks him, across the unoccupied loungers between them.

He looks at the cover of the book as if to remind himself. “It’s called Playing to Win,” he says.

“What is it?”

“It’s about strategy.”

“Is it good?”

“Yeah, it’s quite good,” he says.

Thomas Peermohamed Lambert is a writer and academic from London. He writes for a number of publications, including The Times, The New Statesman, and UnHerd, and his first novel, Shibboleth, was released in May. He is also a doctoral student in Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, researching Jorge Luis Borges.