Have you ever met a man and wondered if he is emotionally repressed or just plain dull? The protagonist of this year’s Booker-winning novel, Flesh, raises this question several times throughout the book, and the author David Szalay is not interested in giving you his answer. You figure it out, Szalay says. I will not tell you my thoughts, or the protagonist’s thoughts. Least of all the protagonist’s thoughts.When this year’s Booker Prize shortlist was announced, Flesh was the book that sounded the least appealing to me. Then it won, and I read roughly a 100 think pieces about the book before I read the book.Once I was done, it took me some time to figure out that the rage I was feeling was not because of the novel, but because of how many reviews had framed the novel.Flesh is an engaging, moving book.It is an interesting experimentation in style, with its bare-bones prose and the determined turning away from its characters’ inner lives.It is not, however, an urgent siren about the ‘crisis of masculinity’, a spotlight on ‘male loneliness’, a vindication of the allegedly maligned Male Novelist, or any of the other blather in this vein you might have read.All bones and no flesh…Flesh follows a taciturn Hungarian, Istavan, from teenage to old age. Istavan is a reticent man, most of what he says consists of “yeah” and “okay”. Neither he nor the novelist tells us what he feels through the many momentous occurrences of his life. The narrative gaze in the book is resolutely fixed at the level of the flesh; Szalay only shows us what his characters do, not what they think.Also Read | Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny: If Sally Rooney’s characters had desi parentsIn the first section, Istavan is 15, and has been groomed by his 42-year-old neighbour. The sexual encounters, described matter-of-factly, give you an ick that settles deep in your bones. The woman’s husband dies in an accident involving Istavan and he is sent to a correctional home.Story continues below this adFrom here on, Szalay propels the action to different stages of Istavan’s life, beginning abruptly, ending unexpectedly.Istavan drifts aimlessly, joins the army and is deployed to Iraq, works as a bouncer at a strip club in London, becomes fabulously rich, and suffers devastating losses. Throughout all this, women keep asking him to sleep with them, he smokes a lot of cigarettes. And replies to their questions — pleading, probing, wondering, castigating — with “okay” and “yeah”.In the outside world, the ‘war on terror’ is playing out, Hungary has joined the European Union, jobs are hard to come by, and eventually Covid-19 strikes.Flesh is, in a way, an inversion of the picaresque novels, or even the Greek epics where the action is episodic, moves from place to place, and a lot happens to move the narrative forward. Only, Szalay’s world is a moral vacuum, bleached of all colour and flair. There is no great cause and no quest. It is unclear what our hero believes in, and the action is mostly passive — things happen to Istavan, and he literally just goes with the flow.…But is there a heart?Story continues below this adFlesh is a fast-paced read. Its first few episodes are rather like watching reels, so frequently and rapidly does the action shift. And because the book does not ask you to stop and reflect, to hold Istavan’s poor broken mind and heart in your hand and gaze at them, it is easy to take him at face value. A rather doltish man who seems incapable of thinking about his actions and their effects, who does not communicate, who gives no evidence of having hobbies or interests or beliefs or principles.Yet, there are tender moments, hidden away. In the first few pages, after the neighbour has kissed Istavan, she waits for him to leave. The image of a quiet 15-year-old boy, who has just been pulled into something he does not even understand, suddenly realising he is expected to go now and quickly stepping out is very moving.Later, when Istavan is back in his town from the Iraq war, he realises that this world is entirely oblivious to the horrors he has just witnessed. “…it makes you feel slightly insane or something, to have those things inside you, when they seem to have no reality here,” his un-dramatic mind thinks in unadorned prose.Later in the book, when his stepson mocks him for his “primitive form of masculinity”, Istavan is surprised at how hurt he feels.Story continues below this adThe book loses some of its tautness in the later half, and the startle value of the first few sections is lost, but it remains an easy, engaging read.In Szalay’s own words, Flesh is a novel “about contemporary Europe… I also wanted to write about life as a physical experience, about what it’s like to be a living body in the world…” And this is exactly what he has done.But post its Booker crowning, in the need to tie the winning book to a cultural zeitgeist, Flesh is being framed as a novel about the manosphere.If young men today are all lonely and alienated and attracted to Andrew Tate, Istavan, going by the novel’s timeline, was born around 1980. How ‘young’ are we talking when we talk about the ‘crisis afflicting young men’?Story continues below this adAlso, Istavan is quite ‘chad’ — a handsome war hero who sleeps with lots of women. If Szalay was writing about the manosphere’s preoccupations, he could have made Istavan more obviously ‘beta’.Istavan’s numbed drifting through life is adequately explained in the book — an absent father, sexual abuse as a child, wrongful incarceration, war PTSD. He does not, thus, speak for every man struggling to display emotion because he is afraid of being mocked by other men.I wouldn’t call Flesh an incredible masterpiece, but it is still a literary experiment worth checking out, for many compelling reasons. Anointing it the voice of the manosphere, though, is not among them.See you after 15 days,Yours Literary,Yasheeyashee.s@indianexpress.comP.S: If you love books, write to me with what work I should discuss next. If you are not a reader of novels, follow along, and maybe you will begin to delight in the wonder and wisdom, the practical value, and the sheer joy of fiction.