REVIEW: Flesh by David Szalay

Fiction. 268 pgs. Scribner. April 2025. 9781982122799.

An article about the book Flesh popped on my feed, and the feelings that I suppressed re-emerged. As a (male) writer, one that you may not know, I find the lack of true male writers, and characters, are not present, but reinforces the marketable stereotypes that men are “problems” or “void of emotions” and a perfect example of this is in Flesh.

David Szalay’s Flesh markets itself as a literary exploration of masculinity. What it delivers is something else entirely: a flattened, caricatured male experience designed to placate a grievance-market and entertain an audience rather than illuminate human complexity. Its protagonist—performative, impulsive, sex-obsessed, emotionally vacant—is less a character than a walking phallus.

This is not how literature has historically treated men. In Dostoevsky, Camus, Proust, Stendhal, or Ernst Jünger (The Glass Bees, Aladin’s Problem, Eumeswil), male characters are not reduced to libido or silence. They confront the world, its chaos, and its moral complexity. Their impulses exist within ethical, psychological, or existential frameworks. They are shaped by experience, circumstance, and reflection. Szalay’s character, by contrast, drifts through life reacting only to sensation—sex, indulgence, impulse—without consequence, without depth.

Take the older-woman trope. In The Red and the Black, Stendhal’s Julien Sorel navigates ambition, desire, and societal constraint, with sexual relationships embedded in a fully realized moral and social context. Szalay’s protagonist, on the other hand, sleeps with an older woman and then engages in increasingly absurd criminal behavior, as if the mechanics of “being a man” are reducible to sex and exploitation. It is not realism—it is a caricature designed to confirm stereotypes about male desire while entertaining a market that wants to see masculinity performed and mocked.

Consider Camus’s The Stranger. Meursault is driven by impulse, yet every act resonates with existential weight, and the consequences of his behavior are tangible and psychologically grounded. Szalay’s protagonist performs similar impulses without introspection or consequence. There is no confrontation with the world, no grappling with morality or meaning—only the surface gestures of “manhood.”

Ernst Jünger’s works further demonstrate that male silence or restraint is not a lack of depth but a mode of engagement with life’s pressures. In The Glass Bees, technological modernity challenges the protagonist, and his choices reflect intelligence, ethical reasoning, and existential confrontation. In Aladin’s Problem and Eumeswil, men navigate ideology, power, and society with thoughtfulness, often internalizing struggle rather than projecting it through sexualized spectacle. Szalay’s flattening reduces all of this to the basest behaviors, as if the only currency of male experience is conquest, appetite, and humorless bravado.

Szalay’s prose reinforces this reduction. Unlike the immersive texture of Proust, the psychological layering of Dostoevsky, or the socially grounded satire of Stendhal, Flesh presents men as instruments of spectacle. Their interiority is absent. Their struggles are simplified. Male vulnerability—the hidden, socially constrained vulnerability observed in real life, especially in urban contexts—is erased.

This is a modern stereotype show. A literary blackface. The author packages performative masculinity for easy consumption, flattening human experience to the lowest denominator while claiming insight into what men are. The book thrives not because it interrogates masculinity, but because it gives a market what it already expects: male behavior reduced to caricature, validated through recognition and shock.

Oddly, female characters in literature—even when morally repugnant—receive nuance and sympathy: Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, Amy Dunne. They inhabit complexity. In Flesh, the male protagonist is stripped of such complexity, reduced to gesture and impulse. The effect is not exploration; it is spectacle.

Flesh fails because it does not portray men—it performs them. It entertains a market rather than examining reality. It mocks masculinity by literalizing the stereotype, rather than confronting the social, ethical, and existential pressures that shape male experience. It is not a work of insight. It is a performance designed to flatter and amuse a grievance-driven audience.