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The Way of All Flesh

An existential novel with an evolutionary bent Man Walking, "Stroboscopic" Photograph. Thomas Eakins. | Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Flesh by David Szalay. Scribner, 368 pages. 2025.

Here’s a hypothetical: your newborn and your grandma are drowning. If you can only save one of them, who do you save? Now it’s your sister and your aunt, your cousin and your brother. That’s what I thought; most people will save the person they most genetically resemble. Despite thousands of years of social conditioning, basic evolutionary reality cuts us to the quick. It’s troubling to contemplate how far the self-serving impulse might take us. Has altruism been doomed since the earliest symbiotic relationships sparked multicellular life? Is the very pretense of virtue just means to an end to ensure genetic survival? It’s hard to admit, and impossible to miss.

David Szalay’s latest novel, Flesh, interrogates the genetic ties that bind the reins of the mind. We begin by meeting István, a maladjusted Hungarian teenager who has just arrived at a new public school in a quiet town close to the Croatian border. No sooner does he arrive in this strange new environment, where the polestar of the West (i.e., shopping malls, computer games, McDonald’s, headphones blaring MC Hammer) have just begun to solidify, does he find himself listening to a teacher gesture toward evolutionary determinism: “In broad terms, individuals that are more ‘fit’ have better potential for survival. However, modern evolutionary theory defines fitness not by how long an organism lives, but by how successful it is at reproducing.” The reference is to The Selfish Geneby Richard Dawkins, a seminal work of evolutionary biology that, in reframing Charles Darwin’s survival of the fittest by placing the emphasis of fitness purely on the organism’s rate of reproduction—on sex, in other words—helps identify the millions-of-year-old motor that propels István, as well as the rest of us, through so much our modern lives.?

Fleshbegins with a potential new friend at school asking István, “Have you ever done it?” He hasn’t. The perpetual new kid, he’s never really had any friends, let alone kissed a girl. But arrangements are soon made with a girl who lives on the other side of the train tracks. But alone with the girl István balks. “She said you didn’t seem up for it” his friend says, a few days after. “I was up for it,” István replies. However, things aren’t the same after that; he spends more time alone. One moment of shame quickly precipitates another, when the older, ugly (István’s words) married woman across the hall offers him a shot at redemption. In her kitchen, after his mother enlists him to help her grocery shop, she compliments his physical strength, serves him a bowl of Somloi galuska, then poses the question he’d probably been longing to hear only a few pages prior: “Can I kiss you?” He doesn’t know how to respond; she grazes his lips anyway, then begins apologizing. “I think you should go now,” she says. But then a few days later she wants to know if he told anyone. He hadn’t. “He has no one to tell,” Szalay writes. “And even if he did, what would he tell them? That he’d kissed someone old and ugly like her?”

Yet, after their next grocery store trip, when she offers him another bowl of Somloi galuska,he hesitates then, unable to deny what might come next, says, “Yeah, okay.” So begins the sexual grooming that, after methodically leading him around all of the bases, will culminate in István’s immature proclamations of love and her husband dead at the bottom of their apartment complex’s stairs. Had István meant to murder him? It’s hard to say what his intentions were when he pushed the man, we’re told, and we believe it. Like our domestic drowning hypothetical, the act of manslaughter equates to simple evolutionary math: add this recently shamed teen (x) to this lonely older woman’s gradually escalating series of novel sexual acts (y), pepper in an empty yearning for affection, then reject him, letting lonesome confusion inevitably erupt as shocking violence. 

In a return to the leaping structure of Szalay’s All That Man Is, each chapter of Fleshcatches István a few years further along the road of his life. Muchfurther down that road, István, now a father, will discover a porno magazine his son has hidden in the forest near their house, leading him to reflect on the overwhelming power of burgeoning teenage body:

Perhaps it’s at that age, he thinks, that you first have the sense you and your body are not entirely identical, that you occupy the same space without being quite the same thing, because some part of you seems to lag the transformation of your body, and to be surprised by it in the way that an outside observer might be, so that you no longer feel entirely at one with your body as you always had until then, and it starts to make sense to talk about it as if it was something separate from yourself, even while you seem more powerless than ever to deny it whatever it wants.

It’s this apparent lack of agency that distinguishes Flesh, the part of you that’s not identical to your body; the approximation of human experience well personified in Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representationby its blind, slobbering beast of the will and the infirm intellect that rides upon it, pouring useless directions into deaf ears: after serving out his sentence, István returns from a youth correctional facility to little opportunity, and joins the army; he returns from a tour in Iraq to struggle with the guilt over a fellow soldier killed in an IED attack; he works odd jobs, first in Hungary, then a strip club in London, where he disturbs a mugging-in-progress and saves the life of the owner of a private security firm, whose gratitude will soon deliver him as a driver to London’s billionaire class.

But first, Mervyn, the man he saved, invites him over for dinner After sitting down to a meal of Indian and red wine, Mervyn’s wife asks István to describe what happened that night in the alleyway: “So yeah,” István says. “I saw something happening there and went to see what it was. That’s it.” “So you scared them off?” she says. “Something like that,” István says. An attempt at modesty, perhaps; but, given his taciturn remove, perhaps not—István’s masculinity meets the world before he does. This doesn’t mean he’s toxic or horny; in fact, he’s perpetually gentle, respectful, polite. It’s just an immutable fact of his life, a gravity that pulls at everyone in his orbit.

At the correctional youth facility, he discovers an aptitude for fighting; back home, drug runners scouts him as an enforcer based on his physicality. He’s a decorated soldier, a taciturn man that attracts women easily, oftentimes at the expense of their marriages. Over and over, his body dictates the shape the world assumes around him. When Helen, the wife of the billionaire István has started driving for, asks: “You know I have the hots for you, don’t you?” the affair that develops is inevitable, Dawkinsian; as a rule, when faced with these decisions, István will acquiesce to sex, regardless of risk. And when Helen and her family leave him at their mansion for an extended Christmas vacation in Sweden, without the physical input of others, he basically disappears:

Weeks pass and the park seems dead.

Then the days lengthen. The light persists until past four in the afternoon

in a way that feels strange and surprising at first.

It’s still winter though.

The first daffodils arrive in a hostile world.

Then, once their affair is (potentially) outed by Helen’s son Thomas after he (potentially) discovers them post-coitally on the warm tiles of the family’s private basement pool, the billionaire’s colon cancer relapses. It seems terminal. Helen informs István that, regarding her husband’s prospects, the doctor told her, “The will to fight is very important.” In other words: the low morale caused by the knowledge of their affair is killing him. If István ended things, he could save him; he could extricate himself from the affair without, effectively, killing another man. But does he comprehend?

After receiving the news, instead of his usual greasy breakfast sandwich, István opts for a green smoothie—and we can interpret that response however we like; if, in fact, the response flowed from awareness at all. It only gestures toward our questions, maintaining its arm’s length psychic distance—a distance that István, despite a developing interest in luxury watches and a newfound affinity for discussing art (in near cave-speak) at the Gagosian, also maintains from himself. He’s a human animal, prelapsarian even in the act of slaughter, and a sense of innocence remains intact. Life happens to István, and not the other way around—perhaps the notion that it could be otherwise is a distortion of modernity.

It’s a hypothesis that’s tested throughout. As the story unfolds, one uncontrollable event precipitates another, juking the traditional question of plot for something that builds, leap by leap, into a recursive, uncanny momentum: the girl across the train tracks becomes the woman across the hall becomes Helen; the dead husband becomes the dead friend on the roadside in Iraq, then the man who’d be dead if he hadn’t shouted at his muggers; imminent death becomes a green smoothie, and so on with an ever-increasing degree of doubling that might sound convenient, manipulative, a reveal of Szalay’s hand, but isn’t.

The synapses between the repetitions are perfectly spaced: just wide enough to provoke meaning while resisting accusations of ex deus machina. The human mind—our animal mind—works recursively, after all. While sifting through the constant bombardment of life, the brain builds meaning from what’s repeated. From job to job, love interest to love interest, and dead enemy to dead friend, István isn’t just cultivating meaning from his repetitions—he’s unwittingly seeking them out. Then Helen is pregnant, they’re married, and István has stepped into the vacancy left by her billionaire husband’s death: he’s reading bestselling leadership playbooks such as Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works and brushing shoulders with the foreign minister at charity dinners; attempting to muscle through real estate deals of his own, with money “borrowed” from his stepson Thomas’s trust fund. Muscled, borrowed—they’re verbs that, despite his physicality, had previously felt indescribable to István. Suddenly he’s taken on a degree of agency, of seemingly honest, self-possessed ambition, that momentarily threatens to shatter the conceit at the very heart of Flesh.

Had we really believed that István has been delivered—à la the ridiculous Chauncey Gardiner of Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There—to London’s upper echelons via little more than an oedipal fetish, a passive litany of yeahsand okays, and the quietly hard-grained human desire to accumulate access to safety, high status, easy sex? Simply put: yes. Given the force of his masculinity, and what those forces encounter. His body decrees it: the best, immediate choice will be made accordingly. In other words: it’s not a choice at all. If you’re dubious, there are receipts; a complex map of causes and effects that can be traced back to Flesh’s inciting event—the shame of it, the violence, the loss of innocence, the raw material of this universe that, from its inception, more likely than not, contained his fate. 

As Fleshenters its third, then fourth seasons (I’m hesitant to call them acts; Fleshspans an entire adult life) and István continues ping-ponging through his life, there is no trace of the absurd; instead, a cold, hard reality reasserts itself into his fatherhood, then through the tragedy that follows, and then what evolves after that. “There’s something terrible about the way normality asserts itself,” Szalay writes.

In lesser hands, given its associative nature and leaps in time, Fleshmight threaten to verge into incoherence, the meaningless; instead, as István’s life accumulates, it only grows more captivating, more hypnotic, the question of freedom more charged. It adapts as István adapts: growing organically, and without pretense, its disharmony continually resolves into suggestive shapes that quickly dissolve before full clarity. Instead of providing answers, Szalay poses inquiry, after inquiry, denying us what a lesser writer might feel compelled to provide. His lens is pedestrian but homed, and therefore virtuosic—what amounts to a seamless weld of form and substance that plows forward with a compelling fluidity that, as we read on, provokes the reader to lean back in their leather armchair, puff on their cigar, and attempt to see ourselves contained within the ancient dream we all share.

Meanwhile, the experiment continues playing out: the hungry pigeon in the Skinner box has been given the appropriate tools to divine its food, but will it? The answer is no, and no, and, again, no—until a strange sort of suspense starts to arise. Then, as life does, it upends itself.

“You don’t know what to do when something like that happens,” Szalay writes. “The shock is so great. He just sits on a chair. He ends up sitting there all night.” Alone again, with nothing left to lose, István’s thrown back into chaos. He drinks; he stews. He cries at Labrador puppies he’d never be able to buy his son. His pubes have turned grey. His stepson has turned twenty-five and now controls all of the money. He’s bitter; at wits end, and there’s still many pages left to read; pages that, as they thin beneath our right thumb, we will begin to feel István’s life thinning too.

Looking back, we consider that life’s Calvinistic unfolding, and its absence of a truly altruistic act. As he begins stalking Thomas, the nihilism of nature seems certain, darker almost as what seems to be coming next—until one starts to hope, and maybe pray, that there’s more to life.

Following a character for an entire life, it’s impossible not to empathize. István could very well be an antihero—he commits unforgivable acts—but in many ways, he could also be me or you, and in forgiving him, we forgive ourselves. We don’t forget his unwitting first bite of the apple that so aptly adorns the cover. And in doing so, despite the coldness on the page, a dark optimism begins to establish itself as he pushes ever forward into the unknown of his life, the sense of something distinctly human and un-animal beginning to radiate from the final pages, where he lives, once more, with his mother. From which, the town cemetery isn’t far: “It’s May. The Chestnut trees are in flower.”