David Szalay on reinventing the traditional story arc

History and events often shape your characters' lives more than vice versa. How do you reconcile  individual agency with the sense that so much of life is defined by political, economic, or social forces beyond one's control?

Individual agency, or the lack thereof, is one of the central themes of Flesh. István's life is shaped, as you say, by events and forces entirely outside his control. I think it's important to emphasise as well that these forces are both external (history, society), and internal (the demands and limitations of his own body).

One of the questions the book grapples with is to what extent, under these circumstances, an individual can exert agency and to what extent free will exists at all. It is obviously a profoundly complex question to which there is no simple answer. Exactly the kind of question, in other words, that it is worth writing novels about.

In the novel, the inarticulacy of experience is a key concern, as is how characters respond to trauma. What ethical responsibilities do you feel as a writer to those inarticulate voices? How do you ensure you're not only observing but also giving form to what is hard to express?

I think that the novel, as a form, should devote itself to what is hard to express. There's no point using a novel to deal with what is easy to express. What is hard to express is usually not expressible directly. It must be, again, somehow latent or implied.

I felt a kind of ethical responsibility when writing the book, a responsibility not to misrepresent or be glib about suffering and trauma. The section of the book dealing with István's experiences in the Iraq war was a particular challenge from this point of view. In the end, I dealt with them entirely indirectly—either through silence, or through the conversations he has with the therapist.

Your prose often combines minimalism, few backstories, and an economy of character history with moments of vivid detail, including objects, clothing, and landscapes. How do you choose which details to include, and when doing so might be a distraction?

Again, this is a highly instinctive thing. In fact, I would say that I start with the details, not with the things that the details are meant to convey. So, it is the details—or the superficial things that come to me—that I imagine. The world I imagine is made of them. It's not a question of imagining a psychological interior, for instance, and then trying to think of a detail that will express or illuminate it. The two things are fused together in my mind from the very start.

You once described being "disaffected with the novel form," which led to exploring other formats or hybrid structures. How has that disaffection evolved since All That Man Is, and how do you see it shaping what you'll try next?

I think I am now pretty committed to hybrid structures. It's just become an imaginative habit, as much as anything. Even Flesh—which superficially has a very conventional novel form—consists of a sequence of quite self-contained units. I certainly thought of them while I was writing it.

The new book I am working on now also has three parts that are not connected in a standard narrative way. That sort of form seems to me to open more possibilities, a richer and more complex imaginative world, than more unitary designs.

Which writers or works have you seen grappling well with the themes you care about, and what have you taken from them (techniques, perspective, structure)?

To single out a few: Alan Hollinghurst's treatment of time, and the sort of narrative structures he uses to articulate the experience of time passing, have probably influenced me a lot. From Michel Houllebecq, there is a texture and a sense of rigorous fidelity to contemporary experience.

From Virginia Woolf, a sense of the continuum or unity of internal and external experience—a feeling that they are not two separate things but a single multifaceted thing, and an interest in finding ways to express that in language.

How has your own heritage from your Hungarian, Canadian, and British backgrounds, living between countries, affected not just the content of your books but the rhythms, linguistic choices, and sense of time in your writing?

My own background—multinational and involving a lot of movement—has, of course, affected my writing in very obvious ways. And as you say, it's not just the content, but also the perspective. I am most comfortable thinking of myself as a European writer, although I'm not sure that such a thing actually exists.

Many writers have mixed feelings about literary prizes. They can bring visibility, but they can also frame how a book is read. Now that Flesh made the Booker shortlist, do you find yourself thinking differently about it after this recognition, or do you try to keep the writing and the prizes completely separate?

I do, of course, appreciate the greater profile that a prize like the Booker can bring and the additional sales that it generates. However, I try to prevent the discussions surrounding the books that such recognition generates from affecting what I write in the future.

This isn't always easy. For instance, writing All That Man Is, I was hardly aware that there was such a thing as a crisis of masculinity, so there was no temptation for me to address it in abstract, intellectual terms. I simply wrote about the world as I saw it, unselfconsciously.

But when the book was published, it was immediately framed in terms of that question and debate. This meant that when I came to write Flesh, I knew in advance that it would likely be seen, at least partly, in that context. And that in turn made it harder to write unselfconsciously.