David Szalay, All That Man Is (Jonathan Cape)The title of this looked familiar until I checked and found that James Salter's book was called All That Is. That was a disappointment and so is this, although to a much lesser extent. It is nine separate stories, a bit like the Seven Ages of Man except with nine of them, which take us from teenage backpackers to old age in various parts of Europe. And so it's a bit like Sebastian Faulks' A Possible Life, which is five more substantial stories but not even as vaguely linked as these.
One realizes at quite an early stage that, for Szalay, 'all that man is' is not going to be full of potential, made in God's image and capable of infinite goodness, compassion and love. It is about men in the masculine sense of the word and, for the most part, they are in pursuit of money and sex and often dissatisfied at the amount or quality of them that they achieve. Once one appreciates his irony, one can see the thematic thread continuing from Spring, and both seem to be born from the post-boom letdown of the nineties, which was only a letdown for those who saw it as an ongoing project of accumulation that inevitably went wrong but they never saw it coming.
So, even if it is not an uplifting read, one can see it as a realistic assessment of the basic motivations of a certain sort of 'man' adrift in European capitalism, written in the sort of prose in which the art is to look artless and go unnoticed.
On holiday, a feckless youth thinks he's going to succeed with a young Latvian girl until he finds her belatedly in the arms of another bloke in a night club. And he ends up with the morose, overweight daughter and then her mother who are staying in the same dingy hotel.
Another part describes an escort in London and the hopeless infatuation of the kid destined to mooch about after her in a world where sex is money and he doesn't have enough of one to get the other. Szalay captures these tableaux with insight and bleak accuracy.
Stories of yachts, millions lost to the crash and to opportunist ex-wives and other unsatisfactory outcomes continue, depressingly but gathering some momentum as one understands the sub-text, until the gentler, slow-moving last part, about retirement, the estranged wife flying out to look after the defeated old boy after a car crash and lucky escape into hospital. It achieves some sort of redemption, in its way.
There will be better novels than this this year- there already have been- but David Szalay is a writer worth acknowledging, very good at what he's doing even if it doesn't seem to be a beautiful thing.
