David Szalay on Writing and Self-Control

“My relationship to Canada is very real,” David Szalay assures me over the phone. When the now-52-year-old author won the Booker Prize last November, Canadian outlets were quick to herald Szalay’s victory, with articles enthusiastically reporting that he was born in Montreal to a Canadian mother and a Hungarian father. Though Szalay spent only the first year of his life there before his family emigrated, eventually settling in London, he is still the first Canadian-born author to win the prize in six years. The careful phrasing of the headlines seemed quintessentially Canadian: a nation trawling through international news, eager to boast of even the most tenuous connection.

Szalay is happy to substantiate his Canadian ties: he has aunts, uncles, and cousins in Montreal and Toronto whom he visits regularly, and he thinks very highly of the Great White North. “I sometimes even entertain a fantasy about going to live in Canada. But I think I’m just too used to living in Europe. Even Montreal seems a bit like another world to me.”

Szalay’s quintessential Europeanness may not surprise his readers. His works are attentive to the continent, acutely rendering everywhere from contemporary London to Soviet Russia. His personal migrations were a key inspiration for Flesh, his Booker Prize-winning novel, which follows a Hungarian teenager named István as he moves between Hungary and England, rising from small-time drug dealing to chauffeuring London’s elite to lounging by the inner sanctum’s private pools himself (“István does spend a lot of time swimming,” Szalay says, amused when I mention it. “I noticed that as well”). He has a series of taboo affairs. He comes into considerable money, but his original class and culture create inescapable frictions.

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When conceiving the novel, David Szalay drew on his own background. After living in England for his entire life after leaving Montreal, Szalay moved to Hungary in 2009. What was initially supposed to be a brief trip became a decade-long residence. “It was really that feeling of displacement,” he says of his inspiration, “of being sort of not fully present in either place.”

 

He was also inspired by his cousin, who had travelled in the other direction and moved from Hungary to England in 2005, after the former joined the E.U. Szalay was excited by the possibility of bringing these two countries into deeper conversation with each other. “So it wasn’t just about me personally. There was a whole social phenomenon going on that I wanted to write about.”

When Szalay was around 10 years old, he decided that he wanted to be a writer. It was, as he recollects, the logical next step for an active reader. As a boy, he was captivated by Sheila K. McCullagh’s colour-coded pirate stories, following Roderick the Red and Gregory the Green through their sea-faring adventures. The next foundational text he often cites is Animal Farm, which impressed upon him some of life’s cruelty. Later, as a student at Oxford, Szalay wrote stage plays. “I remember them vaguely,” he says, expressing relief that no records of these productions survive. “And then didn’t really write anything much for some years after leaving university.” The childhood dream was tucked away. To pay the bills, he sold magazine advertisements over the phone.

During that time, he reconnected with an old university friend who now worked for the BBC—and who remembered those undergrad plays. He suggested Szalay approach the Radio 4 drama department. So Szalay wrote. The BBC ended up commissioning a small string of dramas, inciting Szalay to not only reawaken but also broaden his skills as a writer. “A radio play is a very interesting thing to write because you have a huge amount of freedom in that format. The only thing there is the voices, so it’s almost more like writing a book than writing a stage play, which will be seen. The words have to do absolutely everything.”

Szalay is hesitant to prioritize the radio dramas over his career in sales, although he concedes the former was certainly a stepping stone. “Once I’d done a few radio plays, that was probably when I thought, ‘Okay, maybe I should try and write something bigger now.’ And I started working on a novel. But in terms of the actual content of the novel, the years of working as a telephone salesman were also pivotal.” London and the South-East, Szalay’s 2008 debut, is a bleak tragicomedy about an alcoholic advertising salesman—Szalay based the protagonist on a former colleague. It won two major awards. He followed that up with The Innocent, released in 2009, a historical novel that follows a young Russian officer through different eras of Soviet communism, before returning to contemporary London for his third book, Spring. Soon after, Granta magazine recognized Szalay as one of the Best of Young British Novelists for 2013. In 2016, his fourth novel, All That Man Is, was shortlisted for the Booker. Turbulence, his fifth novel and Flesh’s predecessor, also engages with international migration, tracking 12 strangers across a series of international flights.

And yet, there is a small glimmer of the theatrical in Flesh. Not in the sense of “exaggerated” or “staged,” but “embodied.” István is not a character full of deep inner monologue—or even external monologues. His dialogue is sparse, often superficially noncommittal. He is liable to answer with “Yeah” or “Okay” or “I don’t know.” Instead, the reader becomes especially attuned to István’s actions and routines. In an interview for the Booker website, Szalay says that he wanted Flesh to capture “life as a physical experience, about what it’s like to be a living body in the world”—in other interviews, he specifies “a male body in the world.” Sex, violence, and monotony are all depicted with striking honesty, a deceptive straightforwardness that invites readers to consider the full, complicated mess of tensions through which István moves.

By the end of the novel, these sparse and external qualities feel almost magical. Through prose, I had seen him through an entire life. In Hungary and in England. As a teenager, a soldier, a real estate mogul. Were he real, István and I would, I am sure, want nothing to do with each other. And yet I closed the book thinking I knew him intimately.

“It’s an interesting philosophical question: which parts of you are integral?” Szalay muses. “I hope that readers will feel that the novel’s about that. István changes immensely in some ways over the course of the book, and in other ways he stays the same. It’s extremely complicated, I think, to disentangle that, but I just hope that there’s this very strong feeling you get when reading the book that this has happened, these changes have occurred.”

Because of his commitments to honesty and complexity, Szalay has been praised as a realist throughout his career. He concedes this classification, preferring not only to write in this mode but to also see realism reflected in the books he reads and the media he enjoys. Though he hesitates to name any favourite novelists—“I find it hard to answer that question. I’m not somebody who sort of systematically reads every work by an author that I like”—Szalay read Katherine Faw’s Ultraluminous, a compact and biting novel about a high-end sex worker, when he was just beginning to write Flesh and credits it with influencing the novel’s form. Around the same time, he also read Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, the lauded Hemingwayesque novella of a railroad labourer. Both possess Flesh’s affecting directness.

Szalay is more definitive, however, about his taste in film. “I’m to some extent a film person,” he admits. “And I do have this kind of predilection for ’70s American films. I just love their style. I love their approach. I love their feel.” Here, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Alan J. Pakula may come to mind. “They’re very much grounded in a strong commitment to realism, to the texture of reality.” Though Szalay can’t pinpoint why he’s pulled in that direction, it seems to be that commitment to rendering texture that resonates in his own craft. “I try just to concentrate on the concrete aspects of reality and trust that meaning will emerge naturally.”

 

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When David Szalay was around 10 years old, he decided that he wanted to be a writer. It was, as he recollects, the logical next step for an active reader. Later, as a student at Oxford, he wrote stage plays. “And then didn’t really write anything much for some years after leaving university.” The childhood dream was tucked away.

 

In conversation, Szalay speaks carefully. When he hesitates to name favourites, it doesn’t seem out of shyness or secrecy but from a commitment to the same standard of precision that runs through his novels. He’s attuned to the particularities of language, their slightest connotations. When I comment that Flesh is arguably structured around loneliness—opening with István’s first sexual relationships and closing the narrative after his last—Szalay politely pushes back: “I prefer the word solitude, perhaps. Loneliness has, built into it, a sense of an acute lack.” Szalay is not only interested in arriving at the most apt word but also in what goes unsaid. In conversation with the pop star and bookfluencer Dua Lipa, he stressed that the large leaps of time from one chapter to another were very much intentional. While István’s monosyllabic responses have led some readers to see him as passive, Szalay draws our attention to what isn’t “on screen.” It’s between the chapters that István serves in the Hungarian military, emigrates to England, and builds a business. Szalay tells me he wrote a chapter about István’s early forays into property development. “It was cut in its entirety,” he says, “because I just thought it wasn’t necessary.” Instead, he hopes readers will be as attentive to the intentionality of the book’s negative space as they are to its carefully chosen passages. For Szalay, it’s an invitation for the audience to think actively and conspire with the text. The changes that occur unsaid are, perhaps, just as important as the ones we witness.

Winning the Booker Prize can be a career-defining high. While Szalay would never have presumed to make winning the prize a personal goal, after he was shortlisted and lost in 2016 he did think it would be nice to come back and win one day. Now that he has, he’s interested to see how the experience will change his relationship to Flesh—but first he needs to catch his breath. “It was only a month ago,” he reminds me, “and I’ve been very busy since then, so I haven’t had that much time for things to settle. It will inevitably, to some extent, change how I think about this book. I’m not sure how yet though.”

Eventually, he’ll return to writing. In the meantime, there are more interviews to be done. He might catch a film; between Flesh’s conception and its publication, Train Dreams was adapted by Netflix. However, unlike his protagonist, we won’t find Szalay funnelling his prize earnings into lounging poolside. “I would like to have a pool, but I don’t really have anywhere to put it,” he quips. “I’m sure there’ll be better pursuits.”

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