David Szalay, Flesh, Jonathan Cape (Penguin Random House), 349 pages, $34.99
Every so often a writer appears who transforms what you think fiction can achieve, or at any rate, transfigure the means by which the representation of the world is inflected. A month or so ago, we stumbled upon All That man Is by David Szalay. The title of the book is from Yeats, which is some clue to these discontinuous narratives where there is nonetheless an associative tonality, constituting a unity even where the action seems to have moved on. The outsider in a trio becomes the main player. A group of people are up to something, but the eventual resolution of that puzzle is not separate from the uncanny intimacy that is created against the odds by a young man and a young woman besotted with each other. The language is constantly meditative, analytical, and full of narrative surprises that somehow consort with an atmosphere of intimacy that compels belief though we’re never, or only in the end, clear about what is happening. And mad things happen like a revelation of the mystery of the world, lithe young boys end up, captivated, in the arms of an embattled older woman.
Here is a quotation almost at random to indicate the slow, masterful grammar of what Szalay can do.
Without saying anything else, they started to walk towards his hotel.
So what are you going to do?
The question was one for him as well. It seemed pretty obvious, anyway, what she had in mind.
In the oppressive light of the lobby, though, the idea seemed silly. Somehow unpalatable. There was a short pause as they stood there.
‘I suppose we’d better get you a room,’ he heard himself say.
To which, after just a moment’s hesitation, she just nodded.
And then he was at the desk, making the arrangements.
And now he is in his own room, sitting on the bed.
He pulls off his socks.
He is tired, that’s true.
Still.
Might’ve been nice.
There is a melancholy sense, as he takes off his socks, of opportunity lost.
He wasn’t willing to make any effort to make it happen…
All That Man Is, page 265
Szalay is a master of the syntax of narrative expectation and narrative surprise. The logic that makes it all as real as magic, as enchanted as any lost world regained, operates whether the characters are doing a drug deal or enacting their ruin as one-time oligarchs. The effect is writerly in