The Man Who Drifted Through Time — And Why Flesh Might Be the Defining Novel About Masculinity in 2025

In my experience there are 2 kinds of book recommendations: the kind you politely nod at while mentally filing under never, and the kind that actually consider reading yourself. For me, Flesh, David Szalay’s latest novel, came courtesy of Jia Tolentino’s New Yorker shortlist of “The Best Books So Far” — and I’ll be honest, I’m usually allergic to “best of” lists. But Tolentino had already gone two-for-three with me this year, and when you’re batting .667 in the literary game, you take the swing.

Good choice. Flesh is that rare, maddeningly quiet, deeply unsettling novel that doesn’t so much grab you by the lapels as quietly replace them with a different jacket when you’re not looking. It’s a book about István, a Hungarian man we meet as a teenager and follow until middle age, by which time his personality has ossified into something between a Camus protagonist and a man who wandered into the wrong decade.

The plot? You could write it out in bullet points and it would sound like a European arthouse film that wins a festival prize for its silences: an affair with an older neighbor that curdles into tragedy, a military stint, migration from Hungary to London, a social climb, a return to his hometown. Except that Szalay doesn’t give us the steady build-up we’ve been trained to expect. Every chapter is a time jump — sometimes years, sometimes decades — leaving you blinking in disorientation. It’s a structural move that mirrors István’s own experience in life: "As long as no one knows about it, it's like it isn't really happening. It's like it exists in the same way that his fantasies exist, as that something he's just imagining. That is how it seeams sometimes." In fact, sometimes even he doesn't seem to know what is happening around him and more importantly to him - things happen to him, and he finds himself in the middle of a new chapter without explanation. So do we.

This, of course, isn’t just clever architecture. It’s a literary embodiment of a certain kind of masculinity: the man as passenger, buffeted by the tides of history, economy, and erotic misadventure. Academic studies in masculinity over the past few years have been circling this idea like sharks — the move away from the “agentive hero” to a model of manhood defined by reaction rather than action. István isn’t the strong, silent type in the Hollywood sense. He’s just… silent. And Szalay knows exactly how to make that silence deafening.

Which brings us to Flesh’s other great trick: for all its emotional detachment, it’s still a profoundly physical novel. The Guardian’s Keiran Goddard nailed it when he pointed out that Szalay keeps pulling us back to István’s body — the urges toward sex and violence that break through the stoicism, the way war briefly electrifies him with its proximity to death. If hegemonic masculinity taught men to be composed statues, Flesh is about the cracks in the marble, the moments when the human underneath bursts through.

Stylistically, this thing is all bone. No fat, no frills. Dialogue is as sparse as a hangover fridge — “It was OK” is István’s verdict on combat — and yet the restraint makes the moments of shock all the more potent. The gaps, like the time jumps, force us to do the imaginative heavy lifting. That’s part of Szalay’s quiet confidence: he knows the reader will meet him halfway.

While the book wears its masculinity themes on its well-cut sleeve, it’s reaching for something bigger. It’s about what can’t be said at all — the ineffable strangeness of living in what Goddard called “a machine made of meat.” It’s the rare modern novel that takes a swing at the big existential pitch and connects, not with a roar, but with a perfect, bone-dry crack of the bat.

In a cultural moment obsessed with loud performances of identity — curated feeds, hot takes, viral masculinity debates — Flesh offers the opposite: a study in drift, in fate’s cold indifference, in how a life can be lived without ever truly steering the wheel. It’s not flashy, but then again, neither is life when you look at it without the Instagram filter.

You won’t close Flesh and feel uplifted. You’ll feel unsettled, a little haunted, maybe even annoyed at how much Szalay withholds. And then, days later, you’ll be thinking about István again, about how his quiet resignation might be less failure than a grim kind of wisdom.

And that’s why Tolentino was right — damn it — to put this book on her list. Flesh isn’t just one of the best books of the year. It’s one of the most honest portraits of contemporary manhood we’re going to get — not the man we want to be, not the man we think we are, but the one quietly existing, somewhere between longing and surrender, in the gaps between chapters.