Flesh v. The Ten Year Affair
presented by
MARCH 24, 2026 • QUARTERFINALS
Flesh
v. The Ten Year Affair
Judged by Neelanjana Banerjee
Neelanjana Banerjee’s writing has appeared in Alta Journal, Harper’s Bazaar, Teen Vogue, the Texas Observer, and many other places. She is the Managing Editor of Kaya Press, where she just launched Kulhar Books—an imprint dedicated to South Asian diasporic literature. She teaches Asian American Literature and Creative Writing at UCLA and Loyola Marymount University, and in the Literary Editing and Publishing Program at the University of Southern California. Known connections to this year’s contenders: None. / Instagram
Though I had read nothing by the author of Flesh, I did skim through some of the discourse about how this book was exemplar of a kind of “masculine literature” when it won the Booker Award in 2025. The discourse, as I understand it, was that the book centers the kind of male protagonist that was thought to have disappeared from the literary world as of late. The novel tells the story of a Hungarian man named István from age 15, when he moves to a new town with his mother, covering the highs and lows of his life over the next 30 or 40 years, through 10 self-contained chapters.
I have to admit: I had a knee-jerk reaction to the phrase “masculine literature,” meaning I may have said to myself “Welp, I know which book I’m going to move to the next round,” before I read either book. I was bemused that I had to pit Flesh against Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, in which our protagonist is—when we meet her—a young, Hudson Valley-based mother of two, who develops a crush on a man she meets in a baby group, named Sam. In one book, the protagonist’s inner life is just out of reach—mostly to himself—and in the other one, we are intentionally meant to feel the burden, and escape, of the protagonist’s obsessive overthinking.
But of course, “masculine literature” is just as much a nonsense term as “women’s literature,” unless you are filling out metadata for the Library of Congress. (I had to do a quick check to see if the Library of Congress is still a functional office under the Trump administration. Answer: for now.)
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In Flesh, the reader is thrown into István’s life with no backstory at all. In fact, the novel never once mentions István’s father (or lack thereof) and how that may have affected his life. There is also no mention that the novel is set in Hungary, and I wouldn’t have thought about it at all, except for later in the chapter when István starts helping a much older neighbor with some shopping and she serves him Hungarian foods as payment. She also starts a sexual relationship with him, which leads to him accidentally killing her husband, when a skirmish leads to the husband falling down the stairs.
This incident never comes up again. Perhaps it is we, the reader, who carry it alongside István, and function as his subconscious throughout his disassociated state. Is it that István himself refuses to examine these past events because of the traumatic nature of them? Is this a commentary on masculinity? Not sure, but the close third-person narration and lack of backstory make the book go by at a quick pace.
In the third chapter, István returns from serving time in the Iraq War, and most of the chapter details his first night out after returning. Near the end of the chapter, István has gone back to Hungary, gotten a job at a warehouse, and one day punches a wall so hard that he breaks his hand. It is only then we understand he is suffering. A lot of the narration, when it is about his emotions, is exceptionally vague, but occasionally a line comes through that feels like a bright flash in a dark cave.
They’ve been looking forward to this evening for a long time. It was something they talked about a lot at Camp Babylon—this first night out when they got home. Just a normal night out, essentially. And that’s what this is. Except there are moments when the very normality of it feels like a sort of outrage.
I finally surrendered to the book in its middle chapters when István moves to London and becomes a bouncer. It was such a subtle shift, but you can feel that he is excited to be out of his stuck life in Hungary. And I was also interested in the story of an Eastern European, working-class immigrant in London. There was such a parallel to immigrant stories that I am more familiar with in the United States, but in a different setting and world, so I was drawn in. Then he becomes a driver and bodyguard, and then marries a rich woman—a former client—and becomes a wealthy real estate developer that is way out of his depth. I was fully on the edge of my seat by then. I have to say, the book really snuck up on me.
Meanwhile The Ten Year Affair gave me a deep sense of familiarity, from the very specific smells of the baby group where the opening scene of the novel is set—“The room smelled like breast milk and baby heads and cruciferous vegetables boiled down to weakened, meal fibers one mom had brought in Tupperware”—to the us-against-them relationship that Cora, the novel’s protagonist, develops with Sam, another parent in the group, as they poke fun of the group’s crunchiest mom, who is proselytizing natural potty training methods. It was funny and relatable.
I’m not so far removed from my own baby group years, but beyond that—the novel is set in New York’s Hudson Valley, and Cora and her husband Eliot and their daughter Opal recently moved there from Brooklyn—the sense of déjà vu started to weigh down the book for me. I’ve never lived in Brooklyn, and I’m not sure I’ve ever been to the Hudson Valley, but wow, I feel like I have because I have read so many books that are set in those places about families that feel very similar to Cora’s.
But the book pushes back against the affair trope. Instead of Sam and Cora falling into the titular 10-year affair, which Cora badly wants due to her own husband’s depressive non-sexuality, Sam puts a stop to it, and thus Cora falls into an extended fantasy about the affair. “But the affair was there now. It was between them. Somewhere in the multiverse their alternates checked into a hotel room where the afternoon light came in at a slant and hit a champagne bucket just so.” But the multiverse affair idea doesn’t quite hit in the Cheeverish/Sliding Doors magical realism I wanted it to, more just in Cora’s rich fantasy world. The imagined affair and the pleasure that it gives Cora were my favorite parts of the novel, but I still found myself wishing they were actually having the affair. The rest of Cora’s life, her terrible marketing job and her sexless marriage with Eliot, started to feel really dismal to me by the end of the book.
Unexpectedly to myself, I am moving Flesh forward to the next round, because I really did find myself recommending it to several people so they too could experience the unnerving slipstream of István’s life.
Advancing:
Flesh
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
Kevin Guilfoile: I will probably recommend Flesh to several people, too, although when I think about doing it, I imagine the other person asking what it’s about and I’m not sure I can answer in a way that will convince them to read it. For two-thirds of the novel there is no plot in any technical sense. Things happen: There is a manslaughter and an affair with a married woman and also lots of mostly indifferent sex. (Every woman who meets István wants to sleep with him for reasons that are unexplained, and he mostly seems to not care much one way or the other.) There is no conflict that isn’t immediately resolved. There’s no antagonist. I’m not even sure there’s a protagonist, except maybe “alienation.” István himself is not a man of action. There’s a lot of drinking and smoking. Lots and lots of smoking. István simply allows things to happen and we observe them happening to him. And yet I found myself enthusiastically turning the pages. I read it in two sittings.
In the third act we actually get an antagonist and conflict and some genuine tragedy. It eventually resolves into a more traditional fictional narrative. But no one would ever teach you to write a novel this way. Of course, rules are for people who don’t know what they’re doing. Szalay certainly does know.
John Warner: Because of the “masculine literature” chatter and because it won a major prize, Flesh is a book that got on the radar of the civilian readers in my life: people I know who are not in the industry and who like to read, but perhaps could not imagine finding sustained pleasure in a month-long gathering of truly passionate book people that is made manifest by our little project here. These people ask me if they would “like” Flesh.
I have said all of the following to these people: Maybe, probably not, possibly, definitely not, I think so.
This is not because my response or the response of most readers to the book is ambivalent but because as both Judge Banerjee and you note, it’s a tough book to describe. It’s not even clear to me how it works—little plot, just the barest glimpses of character interiority, etc.—and yet at some point, just like Judge Banerjee, I “surrendered” to the book.
My best guess is that there’s real magic in Szalay’s style/prose that perhaps takes a while to connect with. There’s so much that seems absent, you wonder what’s present, but eventually it just seems right.
Kevin: There is something about Szalay’s prose style that reminds me of Denis Johnson. Or at least it has a similar hold on me. It just kind of mesmerizes the reader
John: I’m a little bummed that Judge Banerjee didn’t better connect with The Ten Year Affair because I really thought it was a great comedy of manners, a millennial update of the suburban stories of Updike, Cheever, et al., filtered through a predominantly female perspective. This is one of the hard parts of comedic novels finding broad purchase with readers: Not everyone shares the same sense of humor, and even our individual senses of humor may be calibrated differently at any given time. For me, the comedy percolating through the story gave me an even stronger emotional handhold for what I think is a kind of sweet and wise examination of the mundane challenges of getting older.
As someone a generation older than the millennials, I find myself often interested in what life is like for them. For me, Somers really captures this.
Kevin: I don’t know that this applies to Judge Banerjee (I don’t know what generation she belongs to), but several times recently I’ve been talking about a book or a movie with someone who is in their twenties or thirties, and it’s clear the difference between us is that I am old and thought it was funny and they are young and did not. Or vice versa. It’s like when I was a kid watching Laurel and Hardy with my grandfather except I’m now the guy who thinks Laurel and Hardy is funny.
John: When I was teaching, I sometimes fantasized about starting each semester with a checklist of pop cultural references I had metastasized into my regular lingua franca (Caddyshack, Vacation, Seinfeld, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, etc.), so when I’d say something like “So I got that going for me,” I wouldn’t be subject to an entire room of blank stares.
Kevin: Getting old is weird, man.
John: Amen to that.
Kevin: Unfortunately this is the end for The Ten Year Affair, as it does not have enough votes to advance to the Zombie Round. If the Zombie Round were held today, our reanimated reads would still be The Burning Heart of the World and Endling.
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