Every year, The Paris Review honors one newcomer to our pages with the Plimpton Prize for Fiction. This year’s prize winner, David Szalay, contributed two stories to the Review, “Youth” and “Lascia Amor e siegui Marte.” Each is part of a longer work, All That Man Is, which will appear in the United States this fall and has already garnered ecstatic reviews in the British press (Michael Hofmann, in the London Review of Books: “I read All That Man Is . . . furiously, unappeasably, in two days”; Melissa Katsoulis, in the Times of London: “It’s hard to imagine reading a better book this year”).
Szalay (pronounced SOL-loy) was born in Montreal in 1974 to a Hungarian father and a Canadian mother. He grew up in London, was educated at Oxford, and currently lives in Budapest. He is the author of three previous novels, London and the South-East, The Innocent, and Spring. In 2013, Granta named him one of its best young British novelists—an understandable misnomer, given his accent and his air of polite reserve. We met last March in Paris for a public conversation at the historic Shakespeare and Company bookstore, which over the years has served many Paris Review editors, interns, and readers as a home away from home.
STEIN
Let’s start by describing your new book. You call it a novel.
SZALAY
The novel consists of nine separate segments. The basic structure is that the central character in each segment is five to ten years older than the central character in the previous one. They’re not the same character. They’re nine different characters. The first segment is about a seventeen-year-old guy, and the final one is about a guy in his seventies. And the novel moves through the calendar year, segment by segment, from April through December.
STEIN
In a letter to your American publisher, you explained that you began writing the book in a state of doubt—“I was wondering whether to continue writing novels at all. I was fairly disaffected with the form and was looking at other forms of writing. That disaffection with the novel form—What is it for? What is its purpose?—is still there, to some extent.”
What did you mean, “disaffected with the form”?
SZALAY
That I sat down to think about writing a new book and just didn’t see the point of it. What’s a novel? You make up a story and then you tell that story. I didn’t understand why or how that could be meaningful.
STEIN
But the novels you wrote before this one are all very good, and fairly conventional in form. They look as though they were fun to write.
SZALAY
They were, they were. I’m not sure where it came from, this feeling. Maybe it was just a kind of anxiety at having to do something good again. Maybe that was just manifesting itself as a sort of general disaffection. How I came through that was to start writing in a shorter form. When I wrote the first segment of All That Man Is, which is now part 3, I didn’t think it would be part of a larger book. It was only after I finished that I started to think of writing other stories that would somehow complement it. It occurred to me that a kind of meaning could be achieved by the relation of one story to another—by the structure in which they’re set, by echoes between them, by a dialogue they have amongst themselves.
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.
STEIN
It should be said that in your earlier books, that’s often part of the pleasure—the way a minor character will take off and suddenly develop his or her own backstory.
SZALAY
I used to enjoy writing that way, in my first novel especially. I wasn’t troubled by these considerations. So there was definitely some kind of break, some kind of discontinuity, in my approach.
STEIN
And yet there are continuities, too. In all of your books, you like to begin a scene in medias res, then go back and fill the reader in. For example, in part 6 of All That Man Is, a man and a woman have a boozy dinner, with a certain amount of sexual tension between them, and then, just as the tension reaches its crisis, the man asks the woman, “You’re not going to drive, are you?” and the chronology skips backward, very delicately, so that without the reader’s noticing, we end up hearing the same line again, two pages later, this time with more context.
SZALAY
I recognize that it is something I do, perhaps too reflexively—starting with a dramatic moment and then going back to lead up to it. In a way, it’s a bit like something Hitchcock does. Hitchcock will, most famously perhaps in Vertigo, tell you a key piece of information, so that 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. I think that’s why I repeat a line the way you describe. I do it without thinking, and quite often I get mixed up in my tenses. I have to go back and sort that out later.
Something similar happens with point of view. When I was editing this book with my publishers, there were points where they felt I’d jumped too randomly into some peripheral character’s head. I write without being entirely aware of those kinds of considerations—tense, point of view, and so on.
STEIN
You’ve said that you wanted this book “to evoke the fluidity and complexity of contemporary Europe, its feel and texture.” Are there specific textures you had in mind?
SZALAY
The first story I wrote is about three Hungarians traveling to London—two guys and a girl. She’s going to work as a prostitute, and they’re, you might say, looking after her. That story, by its very nature, gives a sense of contemporary Europe, of the unprecedented movement of people between European countries and cultures—doing work, making money. When I had the idea of starting a book with that story, of writing other stories that would somehow engage with it, and of writing other stories that would enter into some sort of dialogue, if you like, amongst themselves, that was the aspect I fastened on. The book was going to be called Europa, actually, for most of the time I was writing it. Each story involves a European character, more specifically a European man, in a country other than his own. In some cases he’s on holiday, in others he has work to do, a couple of the older characters have retired to other countries.
STEIN
You seem to know your various settings very well. The story about the prostitute and the two men, for example—did that require a lot of research?
SZALAY
I saw three people on a plane, and they were the two guys and the girl. It was a budget-airline flight from London to Budapest. I saw them and I thought I’d write a story about them.