Across five previous books, David Szalay has made a name for himself as a writer of supremely controlled prose describing characters, often men, under pressure. He is not particularly interested in revealing the unexpected complexities of people who might otherwise be dismissed as rich guys or muscleheads. His characters are neither more nor less than they initially seem. 

He tests this method to near-destruction in Flesh, the event-filled life story of a robustly libidinal Hungarian man. The novel begins with fifteen-year-old István moving with his mother to an unnamed town in Hungary in the late 1990s. He makes one friend there, ‘another solitary individual’, and they soon compare notes on sex. István doesn’t masturbate as many times a day as his buddy, who tells him, ‘You must have a weak sex drive.’ István’s response, conveyed in the third person, is instructive: ‘It may be true, for all he knows. He doesn’t know what it’s like for other people. He only has his own experience.’ His mother asks him to do some chores for a married, middle-aged female neighbour whose husband has health problems and is often away. István is seduced; things progress from brief kisses to longer sessions on the couch, which Szalay describes in clinical detail, down to the sperm drying in the boy’s pubic hair. Ostensibly, István is living out a teenager’s fantasy but he shows little in the way of excitement about the whole affair. Szalay assigns no early-life trauma as an easy explanation for István’s conduct. Rather, István is shown just carrying on. When the affair ends, he reacts badly and lands in jail. But he takes this in his stride, his temperament never changing. 

Szalay has no patience for expository transitions. We jump ahead to István enlisting in the army and serving in Iraq in 2003. Bad things happen to his friends. He spends his downtime taking drugs and having sex with prostitutes in Kuwait. Then he moves to London and works as