David Szalay’s Flesh is an alienated novel about alienation: It keeps the reader at arm’s length from its main character, István, a young Hungarian man with no apparent morality or values who acts on impulse for most of his life. The spartan prose, especially the dialogue, helps create an atmosphere of futility and disaffection, reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange, but doesn’t ask any questions of itself, neither its protagonist or its world, to explain his feelings or his actions in a meaningful way. It won the 2025 Booker Prize, beating out books by previous winner Kiran Desai as well as Susan Choi.

When we meet István, he’s a 15-year-old living in a public housing project in Hungary who, after a friend tries to get him to lose his virginity with another girl they know, ends up groomed into a ‘relationship’ by an adult woman neighbor – although this is just statutory rape. This ends in violence that leads to István serving time in juvenile detention and then as a soldier in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which further hardens him; while there, he saw one of his close friends killed by an IED, later receiving an honor for his own efforts in the same incident. Upon his discharge, he moves to London, works in private security, and ends up in a relationship with the wife of his wealthy boss, leading to an elevation in his social status that he can’t match with any change in his attitudes, language, or ultimately his behavior.

Life largely happens to István; he perseveres but has almost no initiative, and the most active thing he does – the crime that gets him sent to prison early in the book – is an accident. He almost fails upwards, going from someone who doesn’t even know what sex is when the novel opens to someone who falls backwards into it by the time his boss’s wife seduces him. The pervasive anomie throughout the novel provides some context, although Szalay seems to be telling us that the world is making men like István – the incel argument, although he is certainly not celibate – rather than making István responsible for at least some of his own actions. He’s born poor, with fewer choices than someone born into more privilege, but he doesn’t lack agency entirely.

Much of the praise for Flesh has been for its ascetic prose, which does make the book a very quick read, while also preventing it from becoming leaden with its aimless protagonist and depressing plot. The sparseness is primarily in the dialogue; István is a man of few words, but none of the characters is especially garrulous. Szalay also creates paragraphs of a single sentence – “The news is disorienting,” “It’s already getting dark” – that make the book a faster read, but also don’t imprint anything on the mind. The words rolled off me, even when I sort of found some meaning in the story.

Flesh is built on a foundation of toxic masculinity. Is it, however, an indictment of toxic masculinity itself, or of the so-called masculinity crisis, which is (in my opinion) largely manufactured by, well, men. Szalay presents István as a man with limited options, not with no options. He seems to be making the case that society as a whole has lost its centers that provided young men with direction or purpose. Religion is dying. Traditional male job paths have declined. The man as head-of-household is no longer the dominant family paradigm. István goes into the military, which might be the one traditionally male or masculine field that’s at least similar to what it was fifty years ago, and it’s the only major event in István’s life that provides him with structure and meaning – and it’s accompanied by trauma. One of the Booker Prize judges said that István is “struggling to gain control of his life.” I could buy that if I saw any of the struggle.

Next up: About halfway through Petersburg by Andrei Bely, who for some reason is listed as “Deceased Andrei Bely” on Bookshop.