Just Write the Next Fucking Sentence

by Nate

a book review

The novel is Flesh. The author is David Szalay. The accolades are the 2025 Man Booker Prize, which, if you are uninitiated, is one of the more prestigious literary awards among the stuffy-ass faux intellectual set. The reason to read the fucking thing, besides the fact that it can be deeply and appreciably consumed in a weekend despite being 375 pages long, is that it is an incredible work of just writing the next fucking sentence. 

A straw man could level minimalism as a criticism, but the wise sage recognizes that minimalism is the fucking point. You get the character's name (Istvan), a general sense of what's going on in his life (lower-middle-class in Hungary), and an early inciting incident (a sexual awakening in his teens) that takes about 20 pages. Something quite fucked up happens on page 23 with almost no fanfare. It's a gunshot shock that feels sudden until you go back and realize you've been on rails to get to that point without even noticing it because this book is a magic trick of just telling you the most important thing that's happening, even if it's nothing. It is just writing the fucking sentence then moving on to the next one.

A problem that continues to plague society—and one that is in some ways a response to the isolation and segregation that comes with an online-first existence—is the desire to have things explained, to have someone clearly tell you what something means, to share how someone should feel about something, to reduce within the consumer of culture any need to sit or interoperate or process or disagree about what one act / art / effect does or does not mean. If that last sentence was even quasi-legible to you, this novel is a boon. 

It never tells us in any significant way how any of the characters feel about each other, unless they are directly telling each other in the dialog. It never shades how we, as readers, are supposed to understand or respond to what is happening in Istvan's life. It's the kind of novel that three people can read and come away with three completely different interpretations on and all of them can be both correct and wrong as hell. It archives the specific universality that all great art strives for: it exists both as a direct expression of perspective and vessel so vacant that anyone can pour themselves into it and see their own reflection. 

And, not for nothing, if fucking moves. It runs. I was shocked by A) how little was happening B) how propulsive what little there was turned out to be and C) how thrilled I was to be able to apply my own judgement or reaction to what happened without the hand of the author pointing me in a direction or offering any legible direction of their own.

The way that Szalay achieves this is by just writing the next fucking sentence and not worrying about anything else. He is wholly enveloped in his characters, his only service is what they are doing now, to each other, and what they do next as a result of whatever just happened (a blow job, a trip to the beach, a job interview, a death). This is less like a novel and more like peering into someone's life as a ghost might; strictly observing, explaining nothing, experiencing everything.

In closing, a good deal of this book is about smoking cigarettes on balconies. Strong recommend, an easy One Nate Up.