Just Read: “Flesh” (Szalay)

I’m biased from knowing a Szalay or two and seeing that it won a Booker prize I decided to pick it up.

It’s…fine? A novel about a man who has no idea what he wants beyond survival across many periods of his life. Written in some Hemingway meets Houellebecq meets “Saltburn” way, it doesn’t quite feel realized.

Maybe it’s Houellebecq more a more mass-market audience? There’s plenty to be uncomfortable with but it lacks much substance that the creepy old man Michel provides plenty of. In fact, this seems like an odd choice for a Booker which I tend to associate with ambitious writing (often too much for me). It’s fine.

Kudos to whomever at Scribner handled the marketing because it seems to hit on so many timely topics of (toxic?) masculinity, trauma, dissociation, etc in a way that was made to seem to relevant that even Dua Lipa couldn’t resist. But it just didn’t seem to add much to the conversation that was needed in 2025? Who knows