The Catch v. Flesh
presented by
MARCH 26, 2026 • SEMIFINALS
The Catch
v. Flesh
Judged by Susannah Breslin
Susannah Breslin is the author of Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “I somewhat know Stephen Graham Jones and probably shouldn’t review his book.” / susannahbreslin.com
Reading Flesh by David Szalay is like reading Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, but with all the gore and splatter removed. The former is a study of masculinity rendered in banality; the latter is a vivisection of masculinity soaked in blood and littered with dead bodies. Between the two, which is a better way to dismantle the flesh and the limbs and the organs and the skeleton that keep the zombie of socially constructed masculinity going? Arguably, Ellis’s scalpel is a better tool, but there’s something about Szalay’s grabbing up of a spatula to interrogate what it means to be a man that serves the purpose better.
Yrsa Daley-Ward’s The Catch is a different thing altogether. It’s lush, experimental, almost frenzied in its willingness to dismantle the traditional form of the novel to examine what it means to be a woman through the characters of twin sisters. It’s not Darin Strauss’s Chang and Eng, but it uses a similar construct, a split narrative, such as it is, to tell a more unified story of what it means to go through life as two people (symbolically or literally). How does it feel to be torn apart and then attempt to put what’s broken together again?
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Sometimes as I made my way through Flesh, I drifted off to sleep. Is a novel that puts you to sleep a bad thing, necessarily? No, or not as I see it. The story follows István in a rags-to-riches tale that takes him from the drudgery of Hungary to the pitfalls of the battlefield, to the elite landscape of the wealthy in London. Everything is told with little affect, even the phone sex. (“‘I’m trying to come,’” she says. ‘Yeah?’ ‘Yeah.’”) As István climbs up the ladder of society, does attaining privilege make him happy? Apparently no. Did I like István, aspire to be him? Surely not. But this narrative is wholly absent the gunk that clogs the gears of so much prose these days: self-acceptance, self-actualization, any self at all, really. Ultimately, in Flesh, time is ouroboros, forever eating its own tail.
The Catch is in pursuit of something different. “It is hot,” this novel begins. I was pulled along by these twin sisters, Clara and Dempsey, who are separated early in life. Later, much later, the mother who vanished from their lives when they were infants resurfaces, forcing them to face everything that came before this. But is this resurrected mother really their mother, or is she someone else altogether, a kind of twin-targeting con artist looking to take advantage? There’s a kind of supernatural thread in this book, too, as their mother hasn’t aged a day. A novel inside of this novel seems to have powers of prescience. As I moved through the book, I wasn’t sure who to believe—or what this reality was.
I read these novels in this order: first Flesh, then The Catch. Throughout, I kept comparing and contrasting the books in my head. Were these two very different types of novels or were they two novels searching for a way to say something about a shared time? In both, identity is slippery. To handle the world in which he lives, István walls himself off from everything: other people, his own feelings, and a sense of connection. In a way, he’s like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Pilgrim has become unstuck in time due to his post-traumatic stress disorder after he’s captured during World War II and survives the bombing of Dresden. István takes a different tack to find his way in the world: He unsticks himself from society, a living bug slogging his way through thick amber. The Catch, for its part, ejects itself from the complications of reality altogether, preferring instead to interweave disparate stories, desires, and identities to make a whole. For these twins, they couldn’t be more different: one is a mess and one isn’t, and yet they both want the same: love.
In the end, I chose Flesh as my favorite. But that probably says more about me than it says about the book. Doesn’t every review, or reader’s opinion? To me, István is the one I relate to: walking on a circular track but trying to convince oneself that one is going up when one is really just heading back home.
Advancing:
Flesh
Match Commentary
with Meave Gallagher and Alana Mohamed
Alana Mohamed: Hello, Meave! It was very interesting to me that Judge Breslin said she related more to István, whose inner thoughts we are rarely privy to. Notably, she seems alienated by novels where the protagonist has a sense of self (“the gunk that clogs the gears”). I don’t necessarily feel that István was relatable, but I can see how the lack of interiority forces readers to relate to the aimlessness of it all.
Meave Gallagher: You are speaking for yourself there, bro. I felt zero forced to relate to István’s aimlessness.
Alana: Well, maybe “allows readers to insert themselves” is more accurate. And, really, the aimlessness is something we project onto István. Who knows if he feels aimless? He mostly feels, and I quote, “OK.”
Meave: The judge’s conclusion had me thinking, if life were a circular track and we inevitably end up where we started, why bother doing anything, or trying to change anything? And that’s demonstrably untrue for displaced people, who definitionally can’t go home again. Alana, I showed you the satellite images of my friend Mohamed’s village; his grandparents and their children, including his father, were displaced there during the Nakba, and by October 2025 it was rubble and dust. He would do anything to be able to go back home to his olive and almond orchards, his sheep, the school where he taught, the house his grandfather built. Look at what the IDF did to the mosque where his late father was the imam and muezzin and tell me life only brings you back to where you started.
Belaboring the point, even if you do physically end your life in the place where you began it, are you the same person you were when you started?
Alana: Meave, I cannot tell you how angry it makes me to see that IDF graffiti all over people’s homes and places of worship! And yes, that last line is a thinker. To your point, maybe a Hungarian immigrant might find himself back where he started and that might be tragic, but for displaced people, getting home would be forward motion. I can’t quite remember, but isn’t the Hungary Flesh starts out in different than the Hungary it ends in? The end of communism versus becoming part of the European Union?
Meave: Good point! I know almost nothing about Hungarian history, but looking at Wikipedia for dates alone, the Republic of Hungary declared itself in October 1989, held its first parliamentary election in 1990—a center-right coalition government won the majority—Soviet (Russian) troops fully withdrew by mid-1991, and Hungary joined NATO in 1999 and the EU in 2004. Those are massive changes in 14 years, down to the currency. NATO membership is partly why István ended up fighting in one of the US’s terrible wars! Not that he admits to anything having any effect on him whatsoever, but a friend of mine fled anti-Armenian pogroms in Baku for the USSR, then spent years trying to get sponsored by a US church as a Christian minority to immigrate here, and those events profoundly affected her. Then again, she’s a woman, and everyone knows women are naturally more in touch with their emotions lmao I can’t keep up the bit, sorry.
Alana: Wikipedia saves us again! And ha! I agree that it’s a little reductive to frame the gap between what a character does and what a reader understands as indicative of masculinity specifically—how many of us really understand why we’re doing what we’re doing in the moment? But to your larger point: What does it mean to walk in a circle and arrive home when home is constantly changing? I’m not sure!
Meave: Before we go, RIP The Catch. You were a fever dream of an opponent and I liked you much more by the end than when I started you. Extra flowers for Daley-Ward for narrating her own audiobook like a champ.
Zombies start tomorrow, chat! Alana and I will meet you here when The Passenger Seat takes on freshly revived The Burning Heart of the World, with brave Judge Leon Hendrix presiding. Who’s hungry for brains?
Kevin Guilfoile: That’s right! For the final Zombie update, The Catch does not have the votes to bring it back for the Zombie Round. This means that The (reanimated) Burning Heart of the World will take on The Passenger Seat in tomorrow’s Zombie tilt. Then on Monday, an undead Endling will have a chance to feast on Flesh. Or will Flesh make a meal of burnt Endling(s)? We are headed into Act III, y'all. See you there!
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