WHAT THIS MAN IS
Montreal-born David Szalay talks about his Booker-nominated novel, All That Man Is,
It seems somewhat fitting that David Szalay found out about his Man Booker Prize nomination, which came as a big surprise to the Canadian-born writer, while vacationing in Europe. After all, his longlisted novel, All That a Man Is, is a snapshot of nine men passing through various stages of life while collecting European stamps on their passports.
Szalay, along with Canadian writer Madeleine Thien, who was born in Vancouver, and her acclaimed novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing are among a total of 13 English-language authors longlisted for the approximately $87,000 2016 Man Booker Prize.
Szalay was born in Montreal in 1974 to a Canadian mother and Hungarian father, but moved to the U.K. as an infant, where he grew up, and later attended Oxford University. He has family in Canada, but hasn’t visited in several years, though he says he still feels a connection here. It’s a connection that may deepen as the Canadian awards season heats up this fall — like former Governor General’s Literary Award winners Eleanor Catton, who lives in New Zealand, and Patrick DeWitt, who resides in Portland, Ore., Szalay’s birthtown makes him eligible for this country’s biggest book prizes.
All That a Man Is was born five years ago with Szalay’s idea about a group of characters, of all different nationalities, connected through their travels. As a U.K. citizen who has lived in Belgium and Hungary, Szalay related to the feelings of being a perpetual outsider. In his own travels he had observed how the “countries and cultures of Europe rub against each other, and the way that Europe is now very much a continent of displaced people.”
Yet Szalay, already the author of three well-received novels, felt a bit stuck. He had reached an impasse with his writing, and was not interested in pursuing another traditional narrative structure. “There was something about writing about one central character, or even one group of people in a single story interacting with each other, that I chafed against,” Szalay says. But then he had another idea: presenting the novel as a series of stories featuring men of different ages.
Although there is no direct connection between these nine men, Szalay views them collectively as a “single composite character.” All That Man Is starts chrono- logically with a stoned 17-year-old on vacation in Poland desperately trying to have sex, through to the poignant story of a senior citizen in his 70s who, while contemplating the nearing end of his life, ends up in Bologna, Italy, recovering from a car accident.
The first story Szalay wrote, about a muscular Hungarian fitness instructor who finds himself lost, contemplating his future while working as security for a sex worker and her boyfriend in London, “came very directly from my own experience of moving from one country to another,” he says.
The timing of All That a Man Is makes it a standout in the literary landscape and a strong potential awards contender. Beyond the fact that the novel is grounded in its philosophical themes and cultural references, Szalay’s often bleak but introspective observations conjure comparisons to Martin Amis: it’s a view of contemporary manhood we haven’t seen in awhile. The depth of his characters, and how they deal with emotions (often poorly), also run counter to popular depictions of contemporary masculinity, in particular, Hollywood’s seeming obsession with the jokester man-child stereotype.
Szalay says he wrote all these men with a sympathetic view, in particular as they faced the aging process — although that sympathy might be tested for readers in their various interactions with women as lovers, wives, employers and objects of desire. “Taken as a whole, I know that the characters come across in a reasonably unattractive light,” he says. “But I wasn’t really thinking of a particular person or type of person. I really just wanted to write about men, generally.” Sue Carter is the editor of Quill & Quire.