All That Man Is
- Alan Bray
- 6 days ago
- 5 min read
Today, let’s look at David Szalay’s (pronounced SOL-loy) 2015 book, “All That Man Is.” Mr. Szalay recently won the Booker Prize for his novel, “Flesh.”
The book is a series of nine linked short stories—not that they share characters but have similar themes. Each concerns a man of a defined age, beginning with seventeen and continuing up to seventy-three, who is usually away from home and becomes pre-occupied with questioning the meaning of his life. Well, okay, all of us do that from time to time but we don’t have short stories written about us (not always). The book is written in first person and present tense and calls upon a reliable and hidden narrator to propel things along. There is a lack of backstory. In a sense, each character, each man, is encountered by the reader in the present and is poor in context—this is not a criticism but an observation. Szalay has a distinctive style, making liberal use of free indirect speech and many sentence fragments.
Mr. Szalay, in a Paris Review interview from 2015 says: “What does it mean to write a series like this? It means that each story isn’t expected to carry its own solitary burden of meaning. It means you get a richer texture. It also imposes a kind of economy. This is important. Each story is short, ten to fifteen thousand words approximately. I think part of the problem, when I contemplated writing a new novel, was that all the masses of incidental detail—which you need in a novel, if only to make it long enough—seemed pointless. None of the characters in this book have elaborate backstories. You don’t know much about their pasts. You don’t know much about their family backgrounds. They’re points on an arc, rather than being arcs in themselves. That let me focus on narrative. It’s not as if a huge amount happens in each story, but they’re not nothing-happens stories either. There’s a very clear—simple, I hope—narrative progression. Working in that smaller form was a relief and a pleasure. I didn’t have to elaborate for the sake of elaboration, which is how it can sometimes feel to write a novel, or how it had come to feel.”
Kevin Porter, in a recent New York Review article (All the Sad Unliterary Men, January 15th, 2026), writes about Szalay’s loyalty to the realist tradition in his fiction. He quotes Szalay: “As I see it, the purpose of writing fiction isn’t to have original ideas, but to express platitudes—that is, ideas that almost everyone would accept as true—in an imaginatively compelling way.”
Hmmm. The stories in All That Man Is do present the characters in a realistic way, and address common human themes of love, death, ageing, car accidents, and parenting—the meaning of life thing. I wouldn’t necessarily call them platitudes, that characterization seems to me to be more about how these themes are addressed rather than if. Perhaps Mr. Szalay is being rather hard on himself, I think he’s written a very fine book about the human condition, in particular, the male half.
Mr. Szalay’s protagonists are often inarticulate and prone to using violence to solve problems. They are caught up in somewhat petty, self-centered concerns but in each story, reach a point where they are confronted with existence and mortality.
Let’s consider the first story as an example. Like the rest, it has no title, only the number 1. And then an epigram:
Seventeen, I fell in love…
It begins:
“Berlin-Hauptbahnhof
It is where the trains from Poland get in and the two young Englishmen are newly arrived from Krakow…One of them, Simon, stares listlessly at nothing. He is a handsome boy, high- cheekboned, with a solemn, inexpressive, nervous face.”
We immediately get the realist style, and the sense of an unnamed narrator observing and explaining. We know where we are—Berlin, and who the story is about—two young Englishmen, one named Simon. We get some sense of what the story is about from the epigram: An “I” is or was seventeen and imagines or does fall in love. Questions arise! In love with whom? Why are these lads arriving in Berlin from Poland? Why does Simon have a solemn and nervous face? What would that look like? Most importantly, we wonder what the story is about.
We are not in a story about whether the lads do or don’t arrive in Berlin from Poland, nor are we in a story about whether or not someone falls in love (or imagines they do). No sir. These questions are decided for us by the story, making us focus on other questions.
Mr. Szalay comments: “…your question isn’t what’s going to happen but how will it happen and how will the characters react. That creates far more tension than the question of what’s going to happen. Because the question of what’s going to happen is often just too open-ended, you know? After all, anything could happen.”
The first scene of the story involves Simon and his companion, Ferdinand, being in the train station. Ferdinand is attempting to arrange a visit with someone he knows. While he is phoning, the narrator uses the simple past tense to provide context: “There was an altercation with the waiter—whether it would be possible to have two cups with a single Kaffeekanchen. It was not possible…The waiter had been insolent with them.” Please note that this is an example of free indirect speech, that is, the comment about the waiter shows Simon’s thoughts instead of saying, “He thinks about how the waiter was insolent with them.”
Simon observes the waiter dealing with an older customer. “The waiter literally bows to the suited man.” Although it is not written, there’s a sense that Simon makes meaning of this encounter with the waiter and concludes the man mistreats he and Ferdinand because they are young.
Then: “The life of the station plunges and swirls like a dirty stream. People. People moving through the station like a dirty stream.
And that question again -
What am I doing here?
The text is written just like this with that existential question tabbed several times, and one can imagine Mr. Szalay telling the publisher, “Bro, I want it done just like that!”
Kevin Porter notes a pervasive influence of the British poet Philip Larkin in Mr. Szalay’s work, and sure enough, Larkin’s poetry is full of expressive indents.
And—this passage is a fine example of the story presenting a character moved to make heavy meaning of a somewhat mundane situation. Simon observes the station and the waiter and almost disassociates, comparing the people to a dirty stream of water. He (or the narrator) poses the question: What am I doing here?
‘Kay.
Let’s stop here and seek answers next time.
Till then.