[I read two or three parts at a time of the nine parts of this 2016 book. I wrote about these before reading on. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
5 May 2026
Parts 1 and 2
Anomie: a state of alienation from mainstream society characterized by feelings of hopelessness, loss of purpose, and isolation.
This isn’t a quotation from the book, but from the OED. It seems to be what the two stories that I’ve read so far entirely consist of. Not that the characters seem to be aware of their alienation. They blame their dissatisfactions on whatever or whoever is around them, because, so far, they haven’t grown up enough to look at the bigger picture. It doesn’t help that they’re in a universe of Szalay’s making, in which there doesn’t seem, really, to be any point in anything. In Part 1, two seventeen-year-old boys mooch around Berlin and Prague for a few days, failing to find anything they are interested in. In Part 2 a 21-year-old finds himself drifting out of a job because his uncle can’t stand his total lack of initiative, and into a holiday in which, unaccountably, stuff happens and he lets it.
So who are these losers? Is it fair to call them losers when, if they have any life in them at all, its purpose is to take part in someone else’s thought experiment? That someone, of course, is David Szalay. His experiment, at the age of 42, seems to be to create a series of scenarios in order to conduct some imaginary anthropological research on the way men develop in the 21st Century. OK, I’m guessing, because I’ve only read two of the nine sections so far. But his 17-21-year-olds have a very, very long way to go before they reach anything like adulthood. His main characters, the ones whose points of view he focuses on, seem to be incapable of any meaningfully joined-up thinking. Or forward planning. Or communicating rationally with other people.
What do I mean? In Part 1 we get ‘two young Englishmen … newly arrived from Kraków. They look terrible, these two teenagers, exhausted by the ordeal of the train, and thin and filthy from ten days of Inter Railing.’ They are studying for A levels and hope to go to Oxford. Simon, the one Szalay concentrates on, is studious and shy, looking mainly for what cultural delights Europe has to offer. Not many so far. Ferdinand would probably say that he just wants to have fun, and there hasn’t been much of that either. They might think they know what they want, but they don’t, not really, and clearly assumed it would be fine to set off without any plans. They don’t understand why they aren’t having a good time.
Time for Szalay to throw something new into the mix, sex. Or, at least, the idea of it. Ferdinand identifies a possible target in a girl he thinks of as Sun Hat when he fails to find her later. Simon, meanwhile, seems to be fixated on a girl in England, who seems not really to have acknowledged his existence. Her name is like an earworm for him, or whatever other worm is handy. He never, ever mentions her to Ferdinand. But he has a chance with the wife of the ex-footballer who keeps house where they have a room. She likes the look of Simon, but Ferdinand has to point out ehow she’s all over him in the kitchen. Oh, no, says Simon. (I’m paraphrasing.) No no no–she’s forty! As they prepare to leave on their last day in Prague, Simon realises Ferdinand had taken her up to bed instead.
If it seems like I’m only telling you the bare bones of what happens, that’s because the stories are like that. Plain, unornamented prose, no meaningful inner life reported on. Take Bérnard, the young man from Lille. His story is even more circumstance-driven. And total non-engagement driven. He’s living at home, because it’s cheap, having dropped out of university, a fact that seems more and more believable the longer we know him. (Too long, I’d say, but don’t listen to me.) His uncle, trying to give him a start as a favour to Bérnard’s parents, sacks him because he’s useless. And no, his uncle says, you can’t ask for holiday leave with no notice at all. But Bernard insists, gets sacked, and goes on hisholiday. He’s glad of the month’s pay in lieu of notice, but he’s a bit miffed that the friend who organised it can’t go after all.
He mooches around the third-rate Cyprus resort, thinks about sex in the fifth-rate hotel, and buys contraceptives when the briefest of chats with a nice girl makes him think she’s practically in his bed already. Two fat women, mother and daughter, take him under their wing. The mother, after a day or two, suggests he takes her daughter to bed. He thinks she’s joking, realises she isn’t, and has the best sex ever, all afternoon. Five orgasms, he thinks, and we wonder if he might have been a virgin. I can’t imagine our boy being organised enough not to be. And, oh yeh. Next day the mother, only slightly less mountainously fleshy, gets her turn. They like Cyprus, she tells him.
You see what I mean? It’s seems a strange collection of case studies, in which none of the characters, major or minor, shows the capacity to behave at any level beyond the instinctive. It’s like watching chimpanzees, or something from a Freudian nightmare. There are monsters in Francis Bacon’s paintings with more sense than this.
Parts 3, 4 and 5
Things suddenly become much more exciting. Only joking. They stay the same in all the important ways. We are in the third person limited Szalay universe, which means we know what these men are thinking, but usually only at the level of their immediate responses to whatever is going on. Which, in all five stories so far, involves some kind of journey—at the end of which, in terms of their development, they’ve gone nowhere at all. Meanwhile, there’s always sex, centre-stage or just out of sight. Whichever of these it is, it leaves our boys as clueless as before. Men don’t seem to have the capacity to learn anything in this world.
Am I being unfair? Does it matter, when nothing else seems to? And anyway, hasn’t David Szalay made things too hard for himself by spending no more than a week—sometimes only a day or two—with each of his characters? How much does anybody learn in such a short time, if there’s never any kind of epiphany? If you’re looking for epiphanies, you won’t find them here, only a repetitive-seeming plod. If anything does happen—an angry punch, an annoying scrape in a borrowed car—it has no life-changing consequences. The punch and the scrape will have to be paid for but, compared to the existential emptiness of these people’s lives, that doesn’t matter at all.
In Part 3 we’re with in Hungary with xxx, an ex-conscript who has had absolutely no sense of agency in the eight years since he left the army. He learnt nothing in Iraq except how to keep himself fit, and how to wait patiently without complaining. He’s in his late twenties, working as a trainer in a gym—he’s previously been a supermarket security guard and a bouncer—and going nowhere. An unlikeable, manipulative client has offered him work as a minder for a week abroad, and he’s accepted. He, the client, doesn’t see it as such, but he’s helping to pimp his highly fuckable girlfriend for a week, servicing rich men in London. (In Szalay’s male world, fuckability is a major feature of attraction. The boy in Part 2 had thought it was necessary for gratifying sex, and learnt the only lesson of his life when the two huge women showed him the mundane truth.) The woman dislikes the boyfriend almost as much as xxx does, and he sympathises with her. Her attractiveness—yes, it’s a euphemism—overcomes her seeming aloofness towards him, and he’d love to help her. Among other things.
In London the story, of course, goes nowhere. The two men spend a lot of time waiting for hours in the borrowed car, and only twice does the woman call for their help. The first time, xxx looks on while the boyfriend negotiates a higher price for a second man’s extra request—he wants to watch the sex—and says nothing. But, on her day off, he goes into London with her and they chat like ordinary people. Why is he surprised that there’s no more to it than that, and that she’s ready to go back to the boyfriend when he suggests they stay a little longer for a drink? Nice chap though he is—and he really is, we are led to believe—he’s still ruled by his dick. He’ll just have to pleasure himself in the shower, like all the other days. And, oh yeh, that punch. He hits a man who insults the girlfriend when she calls them to stop his unreasonable demands. The boyfriend, far from being supportive, is enraged. The man organising the whole thing in London doesn’t break xxx’s legs despite threatening to, the boyfriend won’t pay him a penny—and he is supposed to be pleased to get off so lightly. Men’s transactional understanding of sex in the novels of David Szalay. Discuss…
…and you can use the self-centred, comfortable expectations of the man in Part 4 in your discussion, too. He’s an academic in a laughably specialised corner of mediaeval philology—he can’t help but anticipate with satisfaction the stir there’ll be when he can make a dent in the consensus view about a particular vowel-shift in Old English—and he loves his life. He’s very aware, in fact, that everything is perfect, and we can see what he means. Safe, enjoyable job at Oxford—although he regrets not being able to go further with a student of his, a very short-term lover who left him for a boy her own age—and a gratifying enough long-term affair with a woman in Poland who seems as happy as he is to keep it more or less commitment-free. He’s living the masculine dream, isn’t he?
You might be right, if you don’t consider that there are two people in a relationship. Xxx doesn’t pretend to know what his lover thinks, whether she’s really happy with things as they are… so he contemplates his little academic coup as he drives her father’s big new car from Oxford to Poland. He has time to himself, and he relishes the luxury of a car that’s much higher-spec than anything he would ever own. But just as he’s parking it at the airport—he’s picking her up from Frankfurt, because this is the kind of lifestyle they have—he’s in too much of a hurry. He hears the awful noise of a scrape down the side of the car.
In his comfortable, problem-free life this is a catastrophe. [quote] Even as he meets her he can’t really think of anything else and, basically, this carries on. He seems a little detached, even though they drive, find a room somewhere picturesque—it’s their usual routine—and spend an evening like all the others. Except… he’s worried that she might want to end it. Awkwardly, after various false starts, he actually asks how she’s feeling—not quite a first—and she tells him she’s pregnant. Which is when we really see what a safe and comfortable version of Szalay’s Everyman is really like. He’s dreadful. ‘That’s shit!’ he says, and spends the whole of the rest of the story not in seeking any kind of emotional connection to his long-term lover but in making it absolutely clear that he wants her to have an abortion. Their lovely lives would be ruined if she were to have the child, her life as a successful TV presenter would be ruined, so there’s no other choice.
Szalay makes it perfectly clear how her eventual acceptance of this is not what she wants. She’s already told xxx that she loves him, finds herself lighting a candle in the Catholic church they visit—he likes to keep up his high-end cultural sightseeing, whatever the emotional temperature—but she goes along with his idea. He considers it an evening worth wasting in order to get her to comply. Phew. It even puts the problem with the car into some sort of proportion. He can deal with it.
And then, when she changes her mind, we get what might be the most plausibly grating passage in the book so far. [quote What this means, he thinks, is] But, over two pages, it becomes clear that she isn’t going to come round. And he has absolutely nothing, no emotional resources whatever, to deal with it. [quote] That’s my boy.
Part 5…. Do I really want to take myself through 48 hours with another David Szalay Everyman? This one is a successful tabloid journalist—successful because, basically, he has no humanity. He’s deputy editor, having risen through the ranks by way of the entertainment and gossip pages (exactly like Dominic Mohan of The Sun, who only survived the phone-hacking scandal by the skin of his teeth) and he’s looking for more. Not only does he not care who he tramples on to get to the top, he doesn’t seem to realise that there might be other ways to behave. No, you don’t have to sneer with the (Rebekah Brooks-like) editor about the has-beens who won’t make it past the next round of redundancies. No, you don’t have to pretend it’s in the public interest to pursue a top (divorced) politician and friend with regard to an affair with a married woman.
Xxx is as far away from the emotional world of humanity and commitment as Karel in Part 4. He gets his story, blandly ignoring any appeals by the politician to his better nature—he mocks these when he reports back to the editor—and his former friend’s chance of ever being party leader is stalled, probably for good. Xxx, unlike the other men in the office he pities, has the right stuff. He muses on the shabby life of one of them, an old school friend now living the same sort of life they both did twenty years before. While he goes back to his own family life—he’s been away for something like two days solid—in all its loveless success. He has girls he’s bringing up to be like him—they always keen on the latest celebrity gossip—and the first and last chapters open with the same routine bit of middle-class taxiing. [etc. quote?] How does it end? With him, alone, musing on how he wouldn’t have it any other way.[quote]
Parts 6 and 7
Two more losers. Do I need to say any more?
Not really, but just a few paragraphs for reference—I might want to come back sometime and remind myself why I disliked this book so much. Part 6 is about James, wondering what he’s doing with his life. ‘This is all there is,’ he’s decided as he sets off for the airport for a sales job, then ‘It’s not a joke. Life is not a joke.’ He tells a woman he meets on a work trip (and, remarkably, decides not to take to bed) that he’s fatalistic about it all… which he later realises is actually his own understanding that he’s got as far as he ever will in every aspect of his life. It’s the nearest thing we ever get to self-awareness in this book—except he’s still fantasising at the end. He markets residential properties in alpine resorts, and thinks that maybe with this particular client he might be able to move up to the next stage. Maybe he can become an actual property developer at last, like the successful one in the company, nicknamed ‘Air Miles’ for all the flights he makes to the Far East.
Maybe… but, by the end, has he taken that bold step and contacted the money-men he once tried to network with in a company bash? Has he got any further than looking for the business cards he took from them? Have a guess. He’s clearly getting cold feet as he realises he’ll need to branch out on his own—‘the thought frightens him’—while he looks for the young son he isn’t paying enough attention to in the park back in London. ‘He is aware of neglecting his own son, … too preoccupied with his own stuff. His own plans.’ He finds his son, looks into his eyes, not ‘troubled’ like his own. The story ends. ‘The day is windless. / It’s not a joke. / Life is not a joke.’
I later checked to see whether there’s a quotation from the Lieber and Stoller song made famous by Peggy Lee, Is that all there is? Not quite—but the cynical dismissiveness is the same, and only takes two or three minutes to listen to instead of an hour to read.
But James is a towering success compared to Murray, the ex-pat Scot now living in a backwater in Croatia. Murray is everything hateful that you might find in a man—we can’t help but have the book’s title in mind as we read—and it makes for one of the most miserable short stories I’ve ever read. When authors play God, they don’t often go for the God of the Book of Job as Szalay has with Murray. We’re at his mother’s funeral in Motherwell—Murray finds himself making a joke about it, because that’s how much of a shit he is—and he’s hating having to see his trade union brother and dowdy sister. He never visits, and leaves as soon as he can get a flight back. He meets up with his old work colleagues in London, cut from the same unattractive cloth as he is, and… you don’t want to hear about it. Except at least one of them, like Murray himself, was in the habit of getting sacked. All they seem to do in their conversations is take the piss.
Too much detail. He’s in Croatia because he thought he’d be able to rent a place on the attractive coast with the money from his own house in the London suburbs. He has only one friend, another loser—Murray’s word—who has no more in his life than Murray. Except he, Hans-Pieter, gets the girl Murray always considered far below his own league and is suddenly not around so much. Murray pretends he isn’t catastrophically jealous, accepts half-hearted invitations from Hans-Pieter to spend time with them occasionally—she hates the idea—and, eventually, accepts an offer. Her mother is lonely, and maybe…? He takes her out, finds her unattractive when he’s sober and, as he tells the police later, was only trying to kiss her when he wasn’t sober at all.
Still too much detail. He borrows money from a British bank to fund a get-rich-quick scheme involving ex-police minibuses, and we guess long before he does that it’s a scam. Another friend, with some status in this sad little group because he has an actual job, suggests he sees a woman who helped him with his own cursed life. How? She got rid of the curse. (I’m paraphrasing.) He says no, obviously, but has reached such a low point after the loss of the money that he goes anyway. Her flat is seediness in material form, mainly grubby material, and she tells him, through intense scrutiny and card-reading, that his life is in a crisis. The ‘future’ card has told her that there’s nothing left for him, unless he changes something, but old age and death. As he says, in so many words, he could have told her that.
Ending: he’s at the drizzly coast with Hans-Pieter and the girl, ignoring their ‘snogging’—his word—and looking at the slate-grey sea. There’s a super-yacht in the distance, which he mutters about sarcastically, until—and I’m not kidding this time—there’s a real epiphany. [quote] Yes, definitely real—but as soon as the sun goes in it’s over. Damn. We remember how James’s story ended. Murray’s far less upbeat. ‘Fuck it. / His eyes find the superyacht again. / And fuck that as well. / Aye, fuck the lot of it.’
Parts 8 and 9—to the end
I think Szalay must be demob-happy. His last two cautionary tales are about winners, and there’s even a bit of fun when in each of them there’s a cross-reference to an earlier one. What is this, David, an end-of-pier show?
No, obviously not. First, the references aren’t hard-to-find Easter eggs but are there in plain sight. Alexandr, the oligarch anti-hero of Part 8, sails past the coast of Croatia on his super-yacht on a drizzly November day, and ‘he’, the knighted ex-civil servant in Part 9, is the grandfather of Simon in Part 1. Like the super-yacht link, this one goes nowhere—except ‘he’ can’t help preferring Simon’s personable friend Ferdinand. Unsurprisingly, even family connections are tenuous in Szalay-land—this old man’s marriage has been a sham for 20 years. Oh, and we discover when his housekeeper greets him that he’s called Parson. Or ‘Signor Parson’ to her, because this section takes place in and around the couple’s holiday house in a second-rate part of Italy, in winter. I think I’ve mentioned before that Szalay doesn’t make things hard for himself. Depression, anomie, whatever are all more easily evoked in crap circumstances.
That’s the first thing. Second, as you will have gathered by now, these winners aren’t winners at all. Alexandr’s years of mega-prosperity—that yacht cost 250 million euros—have come to an end through his own greed and narcissism. Parson’s life of success in Whitehall is revealed for the worthless thing it is through the simple fact of his suddenly having to acknowledge his own mortality. He’s 73, has a serious heart condition, and spends the opening paragraph wondering how many years he might have left. He seems to personify the third tarot card in Murray’s hand in Part 7, old age personified. Which makes Alexandr is the second card, obviously, the lover of money. Is that the supposed thread running through this book, that Szalay is offering us permutations of the six cards in Parts 4 (?) and 7?
I don’t know. But whatever else they are, these two are men who have realised too late, like James in Part 6, that this is all there is to their lives. The ways they lived must have seemed worthwhile at the time, Alexandr with his financial killings in the profitable aftermath of the fall of Communism and Parsons with his well-rewarded—well enough, anyway—contributions to decades of government. OK, so some obscure Italian backwater isn’t Shangri-La—and neither is Alexandr’s superyacht now the days of prosperity are definitely over. At the start of the story, he’s planning a Robert Maxwell-style suicide from one of the decks but, somehow, it doesn’t happen as they make their way for some random Mediterranean destination….
…and things only go downhill from there. Wherever they arrive—Ithaca? Monaco?—his accountant comes for lunch, possibly brought there by Alexandr’s private helicopter. All around them, as they talk about how everything in Alexandr’s massive portfolio of assets is going to the dogs—and how those legal battles he keeps losing are too expensive to sustain—the trappings of his absurdly lavish way of life begin to feel like a mockery. As Murray is eyeing the yacht from Croatia in Part 7, he has no idea how hollowed-out the owner has become. It would probably cheer him up. How is Alexandr by the end of his pointless voyage from nowhere to nowhere? Ah yes, remembering his uncle, a military hero of the Soviet Union. Six one- or two-sentence paragraphs. ‘And ten years later he took his own life. / He had nothing left to live for. He had devoted his whole life to something, and it had failed. / What else did he have left to live for? / Nothing. / It was over. / That was it.’ And he’s not thinking about his uncle any more.
Things might not go quite so downhill for Parsons, but they’re bad enough. Things start to go really wrong on a pointless visit to a dull monastery, ending in a crash that writes off his trusty old car and sends him to hospital. His wife’s dutiful (and resentful) arrival doesn’t help and, when she’s gone, nor does his daughter’s. We’ve gathered by now that Parsons has never come to terms with his own sexuality—he’s gay, a fact his wife admits to knowing about very soon into the marriage—and it’s clear that her experiences of life have always been far richer when he hasn’t been around. She’s off to America on some publishing jaunt when she leaves the house, I think—and when his daughter Cordelia (!) arrives to take over she simply strikes him as much more fit for purpose than he has been for a long time. He couldn’t begin to imagine doing all the sorting out—new car, all the insurance details, even simple things like meals—without her ultra-competent presence. At the end, as they leave a restaurant having spoken about nothing deep, ‘Via Maggiore is fading away in the dusk.’ It’s not the only thing fading.
Final thoughts? Not really—except there’s very little about this book that I find impressive or rewarding. A friend had recommended it as being beautifully written, but I don’t see it at all. The drawbacks to Szalay’s chosen form—tenuously connected overlong short stories—far outweigh everything else. There isn’t enough room for any development in the characters, only a kind of growing awareness (or not, in several cases) of their own uselessness. And it’s all on one note, the definition of monotonous. The endings are arbitrary, with no resolution—which might work once or twice, but it started to feel like a gimmick very quickly. Nine lost souls looking into—what? Is that really all there is?
No, David Szalay, it isn’t. And even if it were, you’d have to do a much better job of convincing me.
We can read it for you wholesale 