One of the stranger feelings in adult life is realizing that “progress” can narrow a person as much as it elevates him.
A family climbs and suddenly whole kinds of work, whole ways of speaking, even whole categories of suffering start to feel farther away — not because they disappeared, but because success encourages the fantasy that you have outgrown them. That distance can look like refinement or achievement. It can also look like emotional cowardice, class vanity and a failure to say what really happened to you.
That’s an idea I took from Flesh, David Szalay’s 2025 novel that won the prestigious Booker Prize.
I adored this, pored over it and found it beautiful and visually-insightful and memorable. Below I have a few notes I took for future reference.
Quick notes:
- Of an early lover, described as old and ugly whom we later learn is 42 years old: “He assumed she was too old to get pregnant”
- Narrator about his mother and his time in Iraq: “There’s this feeling that she wouldn’t understand something important about it, something so important that the whole exercise of talking about it was seemed futile, or worse.”
- Talking to his 7-year-old son about future job prospects: “Okay,” István says, still smiling at him, and enjoying the fact that he knows very well that his son will not be a fireman, that he’ll be something altogether more exalted than that. When he himself was Jacob’s age, of course, it would have seemed like an appropriate ambition for him, something that might actually happen, and part of the enjoyment he experiences now is to do with the feeling of progress involved in knowing that jobs like fireman have dropped out of the field of possibility for his family. Already he sometimes idly wonders what his son will actually be, what position he will actually occupy in the world. There seems to be no limit to what is possible there. And whose achievement is that, he thinks, turning off the light and slipping quietly out of the room, if not his own?