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It’s an atypical story. The boy, callow, helps the neighbour with her shopping bags. The woman, “old,” kisses him, post many weeks of tepid exchange over bowls of unsuspecting food. Almost inevitably, they have the standard affair. She is married, but he is in love, so the husband dies, not so inevitably. David Szalay’s narration is in a hurry.

Like the brooding Victorian man, Flesh is teasingly laconic, but unlike him, bereft of garrulous vocabulary. The narration and narrator are one, sexy as they come, withholding, almost noiseless. He lulls you into staid comfort with undemanding prose, sentences monotonous, clipped, (“He hasn’t told anyone. He has no one to tell. And even if he did, what would he tell them?”) only to make a word like “ugly” assume unprecedented heft (“That he’d kissed someone old and ugly like her?”).

Whatever imperils the universalised, neoliberal man – loneliness, the endless urge to optimise one’s socioeconomic status, indictments of “primitive masculinity” – finds itself sequestered in Flesh, contained in a language that is wholly utilitarian. Szalay is an editor’s writer; there is no excess in his prose.

If form is assumed to follow function, though, Szalay extends no generosity to István, a protagonist the conservative coteries adore, although belatedly....

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