Our Take

David Szalay has built a reputation on unflinching, structurally daring fiction, and Flesh might be his most quietly ambitious work yet. Its greatest strength is restraint: Szalay strips away interiority and explanation, forcing readers to infer emotion from gesture and gap rather than confession. This spare technique recalls Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy in its refusal of conventional psychological narration, while the class-conscious trajectory of a man rising through wealth he doesn't fully understand echoes Ottessa Moshfegh's flatter, colder character studies. The novel's decades-spanning structure and terse, present-tense scenes also bring to mind John Williams's Stoner, though Szalay's protagonist is far more opaque and his world far more transactional. Thematically, the book interrogates masculinity, trauma, and the way class can insulate people from ever truly examining themselves. The prose is unadorned to the point of austerity, which some readers will find alienating and others will find hypnotic. This is a book for readers who appreciate literary fiction that trusts them to do interpretive work, fans of Cusk, Moshfegh, or Kazuo Ishiguro's more reticent narrators. It rewards patience and close attention rather than delivering easy catharsis, and it lingers long after the final page.