You should get a job

‘From the start,’ David Szalay writes of the protagonist of his first novel, London and the South-East (2008), ‘he had felt his way towards a more subtle style – offhand, low-intensity.’ Although style, in this instance, relates to Paul Rainey’s telesales manner, the words seem to anticipate the evolution of Szalay’s writing towards the lean and laconic prose of his latest novel, Flesh. It has been a long journey. Inspired by Szalay’s experiences as a telemarketer in London in the 1990s, London and the South-East is lavish, densely plotted and, despite his cosmopolitan background (he was born in Canada to a Hungarian father and Canadian mother), drenched in British detail and idiom. Having lost a lucrative ‘dial-a-deal’ contract, Paul runs a sales team condemned by unattainable targets to ‘perpetual, soul-wearying failure’. He readily accepts an invitation to poach half a dozen of his colleagues and take them to a rival company where the pickings are richer. It’s a decision that affords Paul the illusion of ‘Olympian elevation’ while exposing him to eventual calamity.

Everything in this dark comedy is seen in terms of winning and losing, success and failure. Paul’s anxieties are divided equally between the horror of underachieving and the fear that the drive to succeed – ‘lying for a living’ – will destroy him. An endless stream of alcohol has him veering between tipsy complacency and hungover humiliation. Szalay allows Paul’s polarised emotions to colour not only the character descriptions – Eddy with his ‘Nietzschean stare’ slaps down ‘a big salmon fifty’ to pay a restaurant bill – but almost every evocation of the human body and even the landscape. Mocked by strangers, Paul makes a spliff in the ‘tousled darkness’. On a couch his spine is ‘a dejected curve’. From ‘his balconette’ he hears ‘the metallic mutter of the tube trains, down in their damp cutting’. We watch him ‘sniffling in a nippy loo’. The only Latin tag he knows is sic transit gloria mundi.

The Innocent (2009) abandons London for Sverdlovsk, a thousand miles east of Moscow. Aleksandr, a retired KGB officer, has lived by his Marxist faith. He is convinced that communism is not only the correct path but an inevitable historical development, so it is right that people be compelled to accept it. The novel recounts an earlier episode involving the persecution of Mikhail Lozovsky, a medical researcher and musician who takes a more relativist view of human behaviour, and Aleksandr’s growing attachment to Lozovsky’s wife. Destroying Lozovsky brings Aleksandr accolades and promotion, and then, many years later, disgrace. It also destroys his marriage. This time, the only hint of comedy comes with the descriptions of Aleksandr’s obsessive support for the USSR’s football team, ice hockey team and chess players; the Soviet Union must win at everything to prove that he is right about communism. But his determination to be the perfect Marxist is undermined by the waywardness of his own emotions and desires. To his astonishment, he finds himself confessing to his wife that he is in love with another woman.

The Innocent, a gloomy critique of the perils of wilfulness, must itself have involved an impressive act of will, as Szalay sought to provide the same level of detailed realism that he had for London. The result is ambitious yet dour, and sometimes feels as contrived as Aleksandr’s worldview. Writing fiction, like telemarketing and Marxism, can set one up for failure. The prevailing atmosphere is much like that described after West Germany scored three goals against the USSR in the 1972 European Championship final: ‘Kick-off seems a long time ago, seems to have taken place in another world … a world of wonderful possibility, that is now a world of sour outcome.’

In Spring (2011), James keeps phoning Katherine not because he has anything to say but ‘only because he wants to know that things are okay. On that question he is insatiable.’ Like Paul Rainey, he has fallen on hard times, having made then lost a fortune with a startup. He buys a stake in a racehorse, but what really matters to him is his new relationship: a woman is the ‘indispensable ingredient’ without which there would be ‘something sad, something futile’ about ‘the few small luxuries’ that remain. The apprehension of life as success or failure is now brought to bear on the delicate process of a bond being formed between a separated woman and a disappointed adventurer. Every encounter is examined accordingly. The first time they sleep together is a ‘fiasco’. On one occasion, after sex, he wipes ‘her stomach and the seam of her pussy like an exhausted waiter wiping a table’. And whereas when trying to make money one knows exactly what one wants and whether one is winning or losing, with relationships nothing is sure, neither one’s own feelings nor those of one’s partner:

‘We had such a lovely time on Friday,’ he says.

‘Yes.’

‘Why was that so lovely and yesterday such a fucking disaster?’

She laughs. ‘I don’t know. Why?’

‘I don’t know either.’

The characters in these novels are deeply self-absorbed, their anxious ruminations accounting for much of the irony and pathos. In All That Man Is (2016), Szalay drops the conventional novel for nine stories linked by theme. This allows him to introduce a wider cast of characters, not all of whom are obsessive thinkers. The prose becomes slimmer, faster, shedding the savviness and flamboyance of the early work. The settings range all over Europe, often shifting towns and countries in the same story, with the effect that a single intensely described place no longer dominates. Description contributes to mood rather than constructing a world.

Yet the search for success and fear of failure remain. Bored with his uncle’s window business, Bérnard books a last-minute holiday to Cyprus. ‘You’re a loser,’ his uncle says, and fires him. When the friend who was meant to accompany him drops out, Bérnard himself worries that he’ll ‘feel like a fucking loser’ if he goes alone. But the trip is paid for so he goes anyway, to a miserable hotel in a miserably dusty landscape, far from the sea. The package is a sham. The travel agency’s local rep ‘has the air of a man who gets laid effortlessly and often’. Bérnard feels ‘he has failed a test,’ but when a Latvian girl in denim hot pants agrees to meet him at a club, ‘his mood … is totally transformed. He fucking loves this place now.’ When they meet up again, however, he finds the girl in ‘a man’s hands, mouths melting together’. At this point the story takes off. The disconsolate Bérnard is co-opted by ‘a short and very fat’ British woman in her mid-forties trailing a daughter so obese as to be an object of fascination. The woman berates Bérnard for his passivity, his unwillingness to complain about the holiday (‘you need to be more assertive’), then more or less demands that he invite her daughter, who has barely said a word, to his room. It was hardly the triumph Bérnard was planning, but he obeys, and is ‘stunned [to find] how much he wants her’. They have sex all afternoon.

All the stories point up the body’s indifference to the plans the will seeks to impose, its capacity to torment a person with inappropriate desire, or to carry on regardless of success or failure. The theme is picked up in Turbulence (2018), another collection, this time of twelve much shorter stories originally written for radio. Each revolves around a plane flight during which the protagonist meets the protagonist of the following story. An elderly woman returning home to Madrid after visiting her sick son in London suffers a diabetic attack. The passenger who comes to her aid flies on to Dakar, where he discovers that his own son has been killed in an accident. A journalist flies from São Paolo to Toronto only to hear that her interview with a famous writer has been cancelled because the writer’s daughter has gone into labour. At the end of her flight from Toronto to Seattle the writer learns that her grandson has been born blind. It’s bleak material: plans and hopes thwarted at every turn. But while in All That Man Is the whole is greater than the parts, building up an impression of a single everyman experience, in Turbulence the formula linking the stories risks becoming mechanical. People of many races and nationalities seem undifferentiated, whatever their language or culture, and if the centrality of basic existential concerns is perhaps the point, one is left with the impression of contrivance more than profundity.

In interviews​ Szalay has expressed his dissatisfaction with the conventional novel’s presentation of ‘a unified story’ with ‘a single narrative about a single set of characters’. He has also spoken of a ‘general crisis in the idea of progress’, both ‘personal’ and ‘societal’. In Flesh he employs the strategies of the short stories to produce a very different kind of novel that at first seems picaresque in structure. It begins in Hungary (where Szalay lived until recently). The 15-year-old István is first rejected by a girl his own age, then seduced, or preyed on, by an older neighbour who asks him to help carry her shopping in return for sweets and ice cream. The pacey, provocatively terse prose, often with almost entire pages of one-line paragraphs, matches the boy’s inarticulacy and generates anxiety, as if we were watching an animal being led to slaughter. István finds the neighbour ugly:

He doesn’t feel anything for her.

She’s just this old woman, maybe even older than his mother.

It’s like she hardly exists.

Nevertheless, when she asks if she can kiss him he says OK. ‘He doesn’t know why he says that. Some part of him seems to want to.’ Oscillating between disgust and desire, he is soon obsessed with her. Flesh is flesh, even if it’s not the flesh one originally desired. When István declares his love, the woman tries to end the relationship and the disaster we were waiting for occurs. Barred by her husband from seeing her, István pushes him down the stairs, killing him. At first this seems like an accident, but perhaps not:

He starts to wonder if he is remembering it right or not.

He wanted the man dead.

He did want him dead.

‘You wanted him dead, didn’t you?’ the policeman says to him. And he doesn’t deny it. He doesn’t say anything.

Throughout these pages, we are reminded of Hungary only by the names of the treats the older woman provides to lure her young lover: somlói galuska, rákóczi túrós.

Years in a young offender institution exclude István from the kinds of career available to the more articulate characters of the earlier novels. Having now learned how to intimidate people, he can make a living protecting drug smugglers on trips to Croatia (there is an echo of the story in All That Man Is about a young Hungarian man, Balázs, who goes to London as muscle for a high-class call girl). But the core of the second István episode, symmetrical to the first, is his attempt to start a relationship with his uncle’s stepdaughter, Noémi, with whom he is ‘sort of in love’. Pages of droll conversation, revolving largely around how many people each of them has slept with, eventually lead to a day at a lake, some heavy drinking and a night in a chalet. At the crucial moment Noémi admits what she had previously denied: she has a boyfriend, and she only wants to kiss.

For the next few days he hardly eats or sleeps.

He spends a lot of time on the balcony, smoking cigarettes.

It feels like autumn suddenly.

It’s windy and leaves start to come off the trees.

It rains all night.

‘You need to get a job,’ his mother says.

So he joins the army. In the third episode he has just returned to Budapest, traumatised by his experiences in Iraq. He snorts coke and scores girls for group sex with his friends, disoriented by the disconnect between war and a ‘normality’ that ‘feels like a sort of outrage’. Essentially he is an intelligent man, short on skills, who ‘isn’t really thinking about the future’ but must do something. His mother finds him a dull job in a warehouse, but this is only marking time.

When Szalay’s frustrated male characters lash out, the result is always self-harm. In All That Man Is Balázs punches a client who has insulted the girl he’s protecting and loses his job. István punches a door. ‘He doesn’t know why … Something wells up in him. It feels as purely physical and involuntary as throwing up.’ Realising that the doctor who sets the bones in his hand is an old schoolfriend, he becomes aware of his own failure: ‘From the same starting point, this enormous space has opened up between them … the doctor’s a doctor and he’s … whatever he is.’ Which is what, exactly? Szalay offers no physical description of István, no mention of his childhood or his absent father, nothing beyond the immediate material of each episode. But István does occasionally reveal himself in conversations. His mother arranges an appointment with a therapist, who encourages him to describe the moment in Iraq when the column of vehicles he was travelling in was attacked. He is tormented by the thought – groundless, as it turns out – that he might have done more to save the life of a friend. The therapist prescribes antidepressants.

And now István does save a life. The next episode opens two years later in London, where he is working as a bouncer at a strip club. Returning home in the early hours, he hears a call for help from a dark alley and interrupts an attack on an older man. The man takes him under his wing and sets him up at the high end of the private security business, where ‘people with serious money … want someone who fits in with everything else in their lives.’ Soon enough István is driver and bodyguard for Karl Nyman, his young wife, Helen, and their son, Thomas. He fits in perfectly, so much so that in a replay of the earlier affair with the older woman, Helen asks him to kiss her. ‘I’m not sure that would be such a good idea,’ István says, but he succumbs, and finds that ‘the fact that he doesn’t particularly want to have sex with her somehow makes the sex more intense and exciting.’

At this point the novel drops its picaresque structure and becomes a densely plotted ‘unified story’. István has got himself into a precarious situation: he is at once subordinate, humiliatingly excluded from the milieu that surrounds him (he has to use the tradesman’s entrance to the Nymans’ Chelsea home), yet increasingly central to the family’s destiny. Szalay handles the story with patience and resourcefulness. Writing about the kind of figure who is usually given short shrift in literary fiction, he avoids the obvious showdowns, allowing illness and accident to deepen the characters’ attachments in unexpected ways. In one fine scene a friend of Helen’s invites István to her room to smoke a spliff. He imagines ‘fucking her there and then. It’s almost embarrassing, how vividly he imagines it.’ But he walks out and ‘just as when he was in there the whole world outside that room hardly seemed to exist, now that he has left it’s the opposite, and everything that happened in there, including the thoughts that he had, seems as vague and insubstantial as a half-forgotten dream.’

As ever​ , winning and losing are to the fore. István reads a book called Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works. Thomas disappoints his father because he isn’t obsessed with coming top. When István and Thomas play tennis, István wins but Thomas tries to get the upper hand by showing his indifference. The boy becomes István’s nemesis in a drama in which István’s uncontrollable instincts, whether to hit out in frustration or to save someone’s life, eventually combine to cause his downfall – if losing a vast fortune is indeed a downfall. We are left with a sense of all the unspoken experience lying behind each ‘OK’ and ‘I don’t know,’ words he repeats hundreds of times. We know him and don’t know him; he has remained essentially the same, through triumph and humiliation, yet matured to the point that later on, observing the son he has with Helen, now approaching adolescence, he can formulate the idea at the core of the book:

All that burgeoning physicality is held within yourself as a sort of secret, even as it is also the actual surface that you present to the world, so that you’re left absurdly exposed, unsure whether the world knows everything about you or nothing, because you have no way of knowing whether these experiences that you’re having are universal or entirely specific to you.