Ahead of his Auckland visit, Booker winner David Szalay talks sex & masculinity

Born in Montreal 52 years ago to a Canadian mother and Hungarian father, Szalay moved as a child with his family to Beirut, but they decamped to London when the Lebanese Civil War erupted. He studied English at Oxford, then worked in London. The stay in Britain was supposed to last just a few months, but Szalay ended up living there three decades. He eventually moved to the small city of Pécs, in southern Hungary, which meant he could eke out his then meagre earnings as a writer. The author of six works of fiction, last year, in the face of stiff opposition, he won the Booker Prize for his novel Flesh. He now lives in Vienna with his family.

The peripatetic, borderless motion of Szalay’s life is reflected in his fiction, particularly over the past decade: Flesh, the aviation-adjacent short tales of Turbulence and the linked short stories of All That Man Is, in which men of varying ages, backgrounds and experience romp and roam through Europe. (Earlier books, Spring and London and the South East, are more conventional, less episodic works set in Britain.)

Flesh follows István from his hardscrabble beginnings as a teen with his mother in Hungary to building a family and fortune in Britain, only to lose it. It is a novel driven by dislocation, a desire to belong and to find meaning. Even though Szalay has said nothing in Flesh is directly autobiographical, “it started with my underlying experience of being poised between two places and feeling not 100% at home in either of them”.

Szalay, visiting for the Auckland Writers Festival this month, accepts his fiction reflects the perspective of an outsider, or at least a sensibility that’s never entirely at home in one place. In a video call with the Listener, he presents as an affable Englishman – he doesn’t speak Hungarian very well and, despite living in Austria, doesn’t speak German. (He’s not Jewish, either, despite the certitude of sources online, though a recent DNA test revealed he had 2-3% Ashkenazi heritage. “I don’t know if that counts.”)

What is particularly unusual about Szalay’s fiction is that it centres the male experience in a very tactile, physical sense. Although the women in Flesh are rounded and convincing, the story is told almost entirely from István’s point of view, and even when he’s not speaking, the novel’s narrative voice strongly reflects his perspective. István is taciturn, passive, often incurious. He isn’t always aware in the moment of his thoughts and feelings, or his motivations.

Also unusually, much of the action in Flesh – István goes into a youth facility, he serves in the army, he moves to London – happens between chapters. What in other novels might be explicated at length, we’re often told in passing: “And it’s true that István had made a sort of a name for himself in the institution.” Later, someone says: “I know your friend was killed. It was on the news.” Later again: “I know you like classic watches.”

Reflective perhaps of István’s character, the novel is full of everyday, repetitive conversations – okay, sure, I don’t know – which some might find grating, but they build a kind of narrative rhythm.

“I would hope that they make the whole situation feel real,” Szalay says. “I find them quite amusing often. And they have their own sort of weird poetry sometimes. They also reinforce, I guess, the sense that a direct verbal assault on the situation isn’t going to yield results, and that what’s being done is something more oblique and more to do with implication. In terms of the interaction between the characters involved, what they’re doing isn’t always identical with the words that are being said. The conversations almost have the form of actions in a funny way.”

Roddy Doyle, chair of the Booker judges, said they chose Flesh because of its singularity. “We had never read anything quite like it. It is, in many ways, a dark book but it is a joy to read.” At the end of the novel, we don’t know what István looks like, adds Doyle, “but this never feels like a lack; quite the opposite. Somehow, it’s the absence of words – or the absence of István’s words – that allow us to know István. The writing is spare and that is its great strength. Every word matters; the spaces between the words matter. The book is about living, and the strangeness of living .”

Szalay says he writes about the male experience, at least in the first instance, because it’s what he knows. “I think the only respect in which my conscious decision-making process is engaged in this is a wariness about slipping into a kind of self censorship about experience. The problem with that being mainly that it will produce boring, anodyne material.”

In one startling early scene, teenage István is seduced by an older married woman. He’s not fully aware of what’s happening, says it’s like something he’s just imagining. The affair leads to tragic events, and could be said to set the tone of István’s life. There’s quite a lot of sex in the novel, and awkwardness about it.

“One of the main things I started with this book was to address life as a physical experience, our existence from a physical point of view. Writing about sex is notoriously difficult to do without sort of becoming unintentionally comic or absurd or creepy or whatever. My approach was just to try and do it as straightforwardly as possible. The most difficult thing of writing about sex, perhaps, is that the subjective experience is extremely difficult to capture. But if you just give them the starting point, the reader will be able to kind of imagine that, to supply the emotional content.”

Given that a lot of István’s life happens off the page, was Szalay concerned readers would not be taken through in the evolution of the character?

“Ultimately, it’s a very dramatic and eventful story, but the way it’s presented almost sort of downplays that aspect of it in some ways. What we’re often given as a reader is the calmer, less eventful moments before and after the big life events that take place. Obviously, that was something I did deliberately, if not entirely consciously, because I felt it was a way of making those very dramatic and often violent incidents feel more real to the reader than they would if they were presented directly, in a funny way. The idea wasn’t to create an entirely coherent psychological picture; it was more to create a powerful impression.”

Despite much happening “off screen”, a tension runs through the book. That was intentional, he says, especially around István’s son, Jacob. “I’m not sure entirely where that comes from, because I don’t think anything is really hinted at in any explicit way, but there is a sense of unease, of the possibility of disaster.”

Szalay has said he intended Flesh almost as connected stories, a form he now finds it natural to write in; it feels like a novel. “There’s no doubt that it is. It’s the life story of a single character. There are traditional novelistic tropes: coming of age, rags to riches and back again. All these kind of things are very typical of the traditional novel going back to the 19th century. I think, though, it’s a highly episodic structure, and the fact each chapter is very self-contained and covers a relatively short period of time, whereas the gaps between the chapters usually are years long, does give it a sense of being a novel that has some sort of kinship with a collection of stories.”

We do get insights into István later in the book, into his childhood and his time in Iraq – his elevation in society, the appearance of the brands of the wealthy (a 30-year-old Macallan whisky, a Tom Ford suit, Cartier cologne) and the freedom and possibilities that money allows. Is he just a late developer?

“Possibly, yes. I think he does develop. He changes dramatically, I would say, not only externally, but in terms of a sense you get of his subjective experience and the way he thinks about things. So you could describe him as a late developer in that sense, and it takes a series of sort of catastrophic personal disasters to really push him towards that. But in some sense, that’s probably true of all of us. I think we probably all, you know, mature in that sense, more through dealing with setbacks than with triumphs.”

István is popular with the ladies right through his life; at one point, a privileged relation, Thomas, says he represents a primitive form of masculinity. Does he?

“Well, that’s the question. I was tempted to cut that because I thought it’s a bit too much of a sort of nod to contemporary debate, which I generally was trying to avoid. But I left that particular instance in because I, and in fact my editor, particularly picked up on it and said she can’t answer that question. The reader will naturally ask themselves, I guess, whether this is true or not. Obviously, Thomas is using it as an insult, and it’s in the context of a conflict. I think the interesting thing is that I find it impossible to say.”

In keeping with his overt masculinity, there’s also a lot of smoking in the book. Szalay used to smoke. “I think it’s very much an ex-smoker thing to have so much smoke. But it’s also very naturalistic. I mean, István is a Hungarian man born in the 1970s; that he would be a heavy smoker is almost [natural].” It also seems useful as a kind of narrative punctuation point. “Smoking is very useful for that,” he says with a laugh. “If you don’t know what happens next, he can always just light a cigarette.”

Winning the Booker is a bonanza for sales of an author’s books, but it deprives a writer of time and attention, often more than a year having to be put aside for travel and social obligations. When Szalay volunteers that he has three children, I ask about the “pram in the hall” issue – Cyril Connolly’s line about domesticity being the enemy of good art – but it doesn’t seem to be a problem.

“I have two older children who are 14 and 12, and I have a 15-month-old son. So I have got this kind of full spectrum of parenting at the moment. I wrote All That Man Is when my older children were sort of toddlers; you would think that would be the time when it would be most distracting and problematic in terms of work. This book was finished before my younger son was born. I’m writing something now, which seems to be going quite well.

“In a funny way, it’s sort of stimulating. It sort of intensifies life, and it also means that the moments when you do have a bit of peace, you use them, because you know they’re kind of finite, whereas if it’s just you sitting in your wonderfully quiet, undisturbed apartment, there’s always a question of: ‘Why do this now? Why not do it in two hours?’”

The Booker has certainly made Szalay’s life busier. “I mean, it’s almost like having a real job. It’s all quite fun.” This includes heading downunder for festivals. He’s not been before. He should probably bring his notepad. If he’s searching for more exotic locations and under-articulate, emotionally reserved characters, he won’t have far to look.

David Szalay: Auckland Writers Festival, Aotea Centre, Sunday, May 17, 2.30pm & 5.30pm.