A friend loaned me this Booker Prize-winning novel, so I decided to make it my pick for Hungary. Flesh, by David Szalay is a novel about a Hungarian man, István, who mostly drifts through life. Especially in the early sections of the book, I thought I was reading about Pete Davidson’s Chad character on Saturday Night Live.
There are two points where our hero shows some agency and chooses to do the right thing. Both prove pivotal to the plot, meaning that our character isn’t blank. He has some humanity.
As I writer, I loved how this book moved through time. The plot moves, and the jumps from one time period to the next are handled with enviable skill.
Beneath this story is the lack of opportunities for young people in Hungary. István is not particularly ambitious. He joins the military, serves in the Afghanistan war, and returns home to few job openings. The UK was still in the EU at this point, so István moves to London to work. At the end of the book he is back in Hungary and in another dead-end job, but he’s happy to be free of the adventure that marked his years in London.
Hungary’s economy has been struggling. The attempted solutions were to elect an authoritarian leader who is trying to implement family-friendly policies to encourage people to have more children. The birthrate is higher than average for the EU but, at 1.55 births per woman, nowhere near replacement rate.
Back in the early 2000s, the big trend in economic development was attracting the creative class, following the work of Richard Florida. He noted that communities that had higher-than-average levels of economic development were able to attract “high bohemians”: technology workers, artists, musicians, lesbians and gay men, and the like. These were people willing to try new things and take risks in starting new businesses. He noted that a lot of communities liked to market how family friendly they were, but that never worked. People who want to do big things hear “family friendly” and think “boring”. They would rather be where the action is and then figure out how to raise a family (if they want to raise a family) than live someplace pleasant with good schools and try to figure out how to do interesting work.
And, no surprise, Hungary’s GDP and GDP growth rate lags the European average.
István wouldn’t be the tech worker or musican who wants to move to London to do big things. But he did want more than he could get in Hungary, so he moved to one of the most expensive cities in the world and lived in a shared flat with a bunch of other immigrants to try to find it. And he might have stayed, had tragedy not intervened.
I suspect I would have liked this book more if I were not familiar with Pete Davidson’s Chad character. Instead, on every page I heard Pete saying “okay”. It’s a good read.
