Control · Fall 2026Page 82 of 100.THE REVIEW
A bearded man sits in the driver’s seat of a car at night, dimly lit.
A man sits alone behind the wheel at night, his face barely lit. Szalay’s István spends much of his London life driving for the rich and saying almost nothing.The photograph is by Orhan Pergel on Pexels.

Review

Szalay leaves out the life and keeps the man.

David Szalay’s Flesh, which won the 2025 Booker Prize, follows a Hungarian man from a housing estate to London money in prose that declines to explain him.

Written by CONTROL

This article runs 460 words and takes about two minutes to read.

9out of 10
Book
Flesh
By
David Szalay
From
Scribner, 2025

Most novels about a whole life are novels about a mind. David Szalay has written one about a body, and about how little the man inside it gets to decide. Flesh was published by Jonathan Cape in March 2025 and by Scribner in April, and in November it won the Booker Prize. It is a short book for the ground it covers, and the shortness is the argument.

István is fifteen when the novel opens, a quiet, poor boy on a Hungarian housing estate. An affair with a married woman in her forties, which the book understands as the abuse it is, ends with her husband dead and István in a juvenile institution. After that comes the army and a tour in Iraq, then London, where he works the door of a Soho strip club and then drives for a very rich family. He becomes the lover of Helen, the wife, and after her husband’s death, her husband. Then the life he has been carried into begins to carry him back out.

A curved staircase with wooden railings spirals up around a tiled wall, with a number 9 on the landing.
A spiral stairwell winds past a landing marked with the number nine. Szalay’s novel moves like this, climbing through a life in turns while skipping the floors where the big events happen.The photograph is by Wolfgang Weiser on Pexels.
Three floors of an apartment building with identical doors along railed interior walkways.
Tiers of identical doors along the open walkways of an apartment block. Flesh begins on a Hungarian housing estate, and the novel never pretends its hero fully escapes one.The photograph is by Valentin Ivantsov on Pexels.

What the blanks are doing

Szalay tells all of this in episodes separated by years, and the most consequential events often happen in the gaps. A war, a marriage and a death can arrive as facts already settled at the start of a chapter. István speaks as little as possible, and his habitual answer to almost everything is a flat “okay,” which comes to sound less like agreement than surrender. The prose never goes inside his head to report what he feels. It stays with what he sees, eats, lifts and wants, and it trusts the reader to notice the pressure building behind a face that gives nothing away.

Some critics found this a trick that withholds too much, and in a few middle chapters, where the novel settles into a more ordinary account of money and manners, the method briefly looks like evasion. But the design pays off. By withholding interiority, Szalay forces the question of whether István has much of one to give, and whether a man who was acted upon so early could learn any other way to be. The luxury he acquires, the private jets and restaurants and cars, changes his circumstances without changing his position, which is still that of a man waiting to be told what happens next.

It is also a very readable book, which is not a small thing. The chapters move fast, the dialogue is sparse and exact, and the ending, set back in Hungary, lands with a quiet force that the preceding silence has earned.

The verdict: Read it, in a sitting if you can. Flesh is the rare prize winner that deserved the prize, and its restraint says more about male helplessness than a louder book could.