Flesh

What is crystal clear from the outset of David Szalay's novel Flesh is that Mr. Szalay has read a lot of Hemingway. What is equally clear is that he has utterly failed to understand how Hemingway Hemingway-ed. It's not a matter of short sentences. Szalay has that down. It's not a matter of terse dialogue, such as

Do you think so? 

Yeah. 

Really? 

Yeah. 

What? 

Yeah.

Sure.

Okay.

which, although unintentionally hilarious, does nothing to move the story along.

This is all tone and no intention. It is tone for the sake of tone, and it is silly. 

And it don't get much better from there, folks. 

Flesh is the story of an insensitive man of meager means who manages nonetheless to rise in the world by capturing the affection, for some ungiven reason, of a wealthy woman (or rather the wife of a wealthy man), and then fall again by his own clueless devices, whereafter, it is said, he lives alone. 

That's it? 

Yeah. 

Really? 

Sure. 

The most compelling question raised by this novel, in my mind anyway, is why it was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker prize. 

Brilliance on every page, the book cover blurb gushes. 

Well, I stuck with it, friends, to the dreary end. I kept waiting for the brilliance to show up. It never did. The author could have said the whole thing in a short short story and succeeded just as well and saying nothing at all.