The Kept Man's Survival Guide

ROL Heartthrob Aled Maclean-Jones Reviews David Szalay's Flesh

THE KEPT MAN’S SURVIVAL GUIDE

In 2013, Roger Martin, a business professor at the University of Toronto, and A.G. Lafley, the freshly retired CEO of Procter & Gamble, published Playing to Win. The book, already a classic of business strategy, starts with a simple principle: most organisational strategies are not strategies, but simply a series of loosely bundled aspirations. True strategy is about choices: hard decisions, made each day, to chart one’s course. Make the right choices, and success will follow.

This is the book István, the protagonist of David Szalay’s Flesh, starts reading halfway through the novel. By then, he’s living in a country house just outside London; a mansion once owned by a man now dead. The journey to this point has been vertiginous. We first met István at fifteen, living with his mother in a flat in his native Hungary. A few years later, a chance encounter in a London alley landed him a job as a driver, the springboard to a life amongst the more monied tiers of London society.

Contrary to the mantra of Playing to Win, very little of this is István’s own doing. His life unfolds as the logical consequence of things that happen to him. That’s not to say the novel has no plot; it has plenty. Whilst for most of it István is present physically, he is not in spirit — wearing, I imagine, the same glazed-over stare I had this morning while unpeeling an orange and half-listening to a podcast. As Roger Ebert said of Barry Lyndon: ‘he is a man to whom things happen.’

It’s hard not to think of young Redmond Barry, the protagonist of William Thackeray’s The Luck of Barry Lyndon, perhaps literature’s greatest kept man. Flesh is, quite clearly, a near beat-for-beat mirror — of Kubrick’s film adaptation, at least, to such a level I’d almost call it a retelling.

Barry is born abroad, half-kills a man, and finds brief purpose in a stint in the military before drifting into a life on the fringes of the London underworld. That, in turn, leads to a chance encounter with a lady of means, whom he marries after her husband dies. Together, they collectively leech off the estate belonging to her son, Lord Bullingdon (whom Barry hates), while raising a new son of their own (whom he adores). Eventually, the stepson confronts Barry publicly. Barry gets swinging. And then comes the fall.

Replace the word Barry with István, and Lord Bullingdon with his modern incarnation, Thomas, and you have the plot in a paragraph.

There is, however, one crucial difference: Barry Lyndon has plenty of agency. Like all great rakes, he knows what he wants, has a fair idea how to get it, and knows exactly who to ensnare along the way. István, by contrast, is rarely the ensnarer — almost always the ensnared. In any decent 18th-century novel, this would be fatal to his prospects, no matter how much wig and powder he wears.

But as Szalay cannily understands, the heroine of the marriage plot — the person both object and beneficiary of desire — is, today, just as likely to be a man.

The book’s opening is devoted to a teenage István’s grooming at the hands of the forty-something woman next door. A decade later, when he gets the job as a driver, it’s not he who seduces his boss’ wife, Helen, but the other way round: ‘you know I’ve got the hots for you.’ When taking a break from the wisdom of Lafley and Martin by the pool, it’s one of Helen’s friends who invites him to her bedroom, ostensibly to view a painting, before lying on the bed and deploying the time-honoured technique of female seduction: the very, very long pause.

In Ways of Seeing, John Berger’s classic formulation on the male gaze is set apart by its simplicity: ‘men act and women appear.’ Here, it's the other way around. Why that happens is an interesting diversion. My wife thinks István must be insanely good-looking, and either he never tells us, or, like Karl Ove Knausgaard in My Struggle, never even realises.

I’m reminded instead of a recurring Saturday Night Live sketch featuring Pete Davidson, in which he plays a character called Chad. In conversation, he replies to every question with a monosyllable, evincing zero interest, and the more passive he becomes, the more alluring he is to his female co-star. JLo. Jessica Chastain. Julia Louis-Dreyfus. No female celebrity was immune to Chad’s gormless charm.

You might think, at this point, ‘fair play to István!’ as he (quite literally) rides his way from Hungary to Holland Park. However, compared to the 18th-century women who came before him — by way of example, Richardson’s Pamela, Burney’s Cecilia, and Defoe’s Moll Flanders — he comes at things with a pretty hefty disadvantage.

Those heroines realised what the deal was, and so they schemed, charmed, and survived with their eyes wide open. István drifts upwards without ever noticing the price of admission. As a result, he never quite develops the rugged agency the protagonists of such novels usually rely on. Worse, he starts to believe the story others have built around him: proximity confused for authorship; comfort, for control.

Szalay’s kind enough to point us to the exact moment this happens. István is in his 40s: a property developer, rubbing shoulders with Tory grandees, and not yet having duffed up his very own version of Lord Bullingdon. His cruelly adorable young son Jacob tells him that he would like to be a fireman:

‘Okay,’ Istvân says, still smiling at him, and enjoying the fact that he knows very well that his son will not be a fireman, that he’ll be something more exalted than that. [...] he idly wonders what his son will be, what position he will actually occupy in the world. There seems to be no limit to what is possible there. And whose achievement is that, he thinks, turning off the light and slipping quietly out of the room, if not his own?’

And so, like Icarus with a Royal Oak on his wrist, comes the inevitable fall — rendered with a ruthlessness that would make even George Eliot, monster of the Floss, flinch. Cigars become vapes, which quickly become hand-rolled cigarettes, as István fast becomes yet another of the failed kept men of fiction: Gilbert Osmond, stuck in Rome, loathed by all around him; Wickham, eternal scoundrel, reliant on Darcy’s dollar to make ends meet; or Joe Gillis, face down in the pool with three gunshot wounds in his back. ‘No one ever leaves a star.’

Where does István go wrong? The obvious candidate is hubris — but there’s more to it than that. He simply gets too comfortable: breathing a little easier than he should, forgetting to keep one eye on the emergency exit. Before he picked up Playing to Win, István would almost certainly have read another business classic, the memoirs of fellow Hungarian and ex-CEO of Intel Andy Grove about his time running the company. Grove’s lesson is also the book’s title: ‘only the paranoid survive.’ I am not mounting a defence of imposter syndrome, but as someone who has felt its tendrils: there is an optimum level, and that level is not zero.

Once you enter a mental world where there’s no longer any need to pack a metaphorical go-bag, a second thing happens: a life that was simple quickly becomes complicated. There’s a reason why one of Vanity Fair’s chapter titles is simply: ‘how to live well on nothing a year.’ The property schemes get bigger, and more and more money is skimmed off (with the help of an enjoyably Dickensian lawyer called Heath), until we’re circling £80 million in loans, several houses and dependents, and a growing list of people who each day call István to tell him he must to do something for them. By the inevitable crash, I almost felt a sigh of relief as, Lehman Trilogy-style, he trips from the tightrope.

In other novels, relief might have come in one of two forms. The first would be that the protagonist, at the very least, enjoys it. But aside from a few nice watches (the aforementioned Royal Oak, plus a five-digit Rolex Submariner), a trip to the BMW Museum in Munich, and razzing around his country estate on a 300cc Polaris quad bike, there’s very little fun for István. They ski in Verbier; the snow is rubbish, and his son just wants to play Minecraft. His social life mostly consists of Conservative politicians, ranging from ‘lunch with Damian Green’ to a trip to the party’s largest annual fundraiser, the Black and White. I’ve actually been to this ball once, and Szalay clearly had a man on the inside. It is just as dire as he describes.

The other kind of relief would have been for things to get so bad that the protagonist is finally forced into a heroic act of agency. Unfortunately, István is so disembodied that whenever he tries to take action, it simply blows up in his face. This most enjoyably happens in Szalay’s version of the scene where Barry Lyndon gives his stepson a good duffing-up in front of English society: wigs slipping, feet sliding on the parquet floor, women screaming, as the assembled men try to stop Barry from choke-slamming Lord Bullingdon to the ground for a fourth time.

Here it’s not a country house but the Gagosian Gallery on Grosvenor Hill, and instead of powdered aristos, it’s the Foreign Secretary and his wife. Even when István’s agency is used for good, it backfires. Late in the novel, he saves another character’s life, as Barry Lyndon does in aiming wide in the post-parquet wrestling match duel with his stepson. István’s good deed, too, is inevitably and gloriously punished.

After reading Flesh, I found myself wondering whether there had ever been any successful kept men in the canon, and if so, what their secret was. I could only think of two, sitting at opposite ends of the spectrum.

The first is Bernard Samson, protagonist of Len Deighton’s nine-volume Game, Set and Match spy series. Samson’s method is to take ‘only the paranoid survive’ and turn it into an art form, though given his profession, and the people around him, this is hardly a surprise. His wife, and her family, are far wealthier than he is: a fact he treats with gross suspicion, regarding them and their riches in the way most in his line of work would regard a KGB spymaster, with a go-bag full of cash, fake passports, his dad’s old revolver, and a Swedish pilot on retainer in case his in-laws (who, again, he still married into) ever decide to make their move. A sentiment to applaud.

The other is Will Thacker, the benign bookseller in Richard Curtis’ Notting Hill, who adopts an approach I’d best describe as going full himbo, looking forward to nothing more than fading Hugh Grant-ishly into the background. It’s a life lived staring at the ground, with only a money-losing indie bookshop to add the tiniest bit of sand to the gears.

The story of Flesh might only, at first blush, provide useful tips to those firmly in the gold-digging business. But I’m not so sure. In an economy of outliers, where incomes can rise and fall like snakes and ladders, many of us will end up either keeping or being kept at some point. And in giving us a blueprint of what not to do, Szalay offers more of us than we might realise a survival guide of sorts.

Flesh also offers a useful counterweight — particularly for men — to the world of Andrew Huberman, stoicism podcasts, and the idea that books like Playing to Win can serve not just as business advice, but as blueprints for life.

István’s life is shaped not by strategy or optimisation, but by a seemingly random series of events. A neighbour’s fall. An IED that explodes. A stranger’s death, interrupted. An employer’s request, acquiesced to. A car crash he wasn’t involved in. The moments that mattered most were the ones he couldn’t really control. In truth, as Szalay rudely reminds us, very little of life is actually lived on purpose. Not playing to win, nor to lose — but never quite realising we’re playing at all.

By the end, he’s done enough living anyway, trading in his receipt- and can-strewn Bentley for an altogether simpler life. What’s left? Just a few old photos on a phone, to look at from time to time; Szalay’s version of the epilogue at the end of Barry Lyndon.

“Good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor — they are all equal now.”

Aled Maclean-Jones is co-founder of Ashore and lives in London. He writes a weekly newsletter on culture, books, and technology. You can find it here.