David Szalay writes with voluptuous authority. He possesses voice rather than merely style, and you climb into his new novel, “All That Man Is,” as if into an understated luxury car. The book has a large, hammerlike engine, yet it is content to purr. There’s a sense of enormous power held in reserve.
Mr. Szalay (pronounced SOL-loy) has a good deal of what the critic Alfred Kazin once called “the marginal suggestiveness which in a great writer always indicates those unspoken reserves, that silent assessment of life, that can be heard below and beyond the slow marshaling of his thought.” If I am not willing to declare him a great writer — he is all of 42 — he is an exceedingly gifted one who can move in any direction he wishes.
Mr. Szalay was born in Canada but moved to England when he was very young and now lives in Budapest. He studied at Oxford University, has written radio dramas for the BBC, and is the author of three previous novels: “London and the South-East” (2008), “The Innocent” (2009) and “Spring” (2011). In 2013 Granta magazine put him on its Best of Young British Novelists list. That clattering noise you hear is the sound of critics and readers racing to find his earlier books, an activity worth the effort.
I misspoke, perhaps, when I referred to “All That Man Is,” which has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, as a novel. It is closer to a collection of linked short stories; the first and last of them subtly connect, as if the book were an extended example of that verse form known as the pantoum.
Mr. Szalay’s subject in “All That Man Is” — the title is deeply ironic — is masculinity under duress. This low-key book is a vehicle for pain and insult. It’s about invidious distinctions, the ways men compare themselves to other men and come up short. It is filled with shame, sadness, furtive desperation and a consistent sense that they are a long way from home.
His men long for respect they’ve forfeited or never earned. They insist to the world, as did Ritchie Valens in “La Bamba”: I’m not a sailor, I’m a captain. Reality reminds them otherwise. They have failed tests they did not realize they were taking.
British students on vacation; an aging Russian mogul; a real estate developer in Geneva; a Scandinavian tabloid journalist: Mr. Szalay’s characters could hardly be more diverse. But these stories are linked in their concerns — with travel, with language, with male friendship and the lack of it.
In the story about the Russian mogul, he is considering throwing himself off his $250 million yacht. He’s lost nearly all his money; his wife is leaving him; he has been humiliated in court. We have little sympathy for him. He is the sort of lout who, in Who’s Who, lists his interests as “wealth” and “power.” Yet as he stays up late at night with his lawyer, discussing his options, each man is intimately humanized.
The mogul tells a throwaway story about how he once ordered the most expensive takeout meal in history, a sushi repast delivered by private jet from a London restaurant to Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia. This scene reminds you how good Mr. Szalay is on status details, both high and low, many of them centering on food.
This cosmopolitan author is not overtly funny; his humor seeps organically to the surface, like a rising water table. In a mischievous story set along the Croatian seashore, a character in a cheap Chinese restaurant begins to eat (“strings of meat in dark, sticky sauce”) and bites down on something hard.
He pulls the item from his mouth and his friend says, “I think it’s one of those microchips” used to identify animals. It is here that he realizes he might be eating a dog. There’s a lot of sad food in “All That Man Is” — takeout kebabs, KFC “Fully Loaded” meals eaten under overhead lights. Even the elite meals arrive with a side salad of desolation. We’d don’t believe for an instant the man who asks, in the London restaurant Le Gavroche, “Who needs meaning when you have Soufflé Suissesse?”
Mr. Szalay’s prose is exacting without being fussy. From an airplane arriving in Málaga, Spain, the sea “looked as dark as denim.” A woman’s hair is “dyed a deep purple like the outside of an aubergine.” A man finds himself in bed with an overweight woman with “pale pink nipples the size of his face.”
The heft in these stories arrives in a persistent sense that life is slipping away. One character, a musclebound Hungarian in London to provide protection for a young woman from home who is working as a prostitute, begins to well up about the bad choices he’s made. “It’s as though he understands, for the first time, exactly what was at stake — his whole life, everything.”
In another story, about an aging man in Italy, we read, “It still seems incredible to him that he is actually going to die. That this is just going to stop. This. Him.” Mr. Szalay adds: “It’s the ending of that stream of perception that seems so strange.”
Mr. Szalay’s own stream of perception never falters in its sensitivity and probity. This book is a demonstration of uncommon power. It is a bummer, and it is beautiful.
All That Man Is
By David Szalay
358 pages. Graywolf Press. $26.
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