I recommend a novel I picked up earlier this year called Flesh by David Szalay.

It won last year’s Booker Prize in the UK, and it struck me as essential for us. The story charts a Hungarian man’s erotic life, about how intimacy traumatises and defines him as a teenager, and how he deals with the unfolding sexual encounters that constitute his adulthood. An amazing synchronicity, that I found this while writing the libido/taboo stories back in April.

To hear nothing more about the novel, leave now.

Below, I share a back-and-forth with a Guild member and it contains spoilers. The reason I’m sending you this message is because, regardless of whether or not you read Flesh, there’s something of the essence in this written exchange…

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Please welcome back to the journal… Jackal.

‘I finished Flesh yesterday. When you first brought it up, you said something to the effect of it being a shared story of ours, and that we could all learn from it. What did you mean? What stands out to you as being emblematic in Flesh of the experience of men or Amorati?

The flak I’ve seen it get online is about István’s behavior being misogynistic and “toxic”. I would love to have “toxic masculinity” and the modern perception of men with the rise of feminism, be a subject for a call at some point. I imagine I am, despite myself, quite affected by the negative cultural rhetoric.

I felt sadness and despair reading that response from critics, in much the same way as I do reading about real men. To me, István is the everyman in that he wants to be a good man. He’s had no model for it, and no one is there to guide him. And I think his experience as a man, outside of brief moments of sexual gratification, seems pretty bleak.

His love and appreciation for one woman seem to show up eventually, but too late. And his connections with women in general seem rather bland and sad.

I think he’s confused and conflicted about sex — what it means to him, what it means to women, what to do with his attraction, and their attraction, whether it’s mutual or unrequited.

It was a tough read for me. I felt a lot of strife, as I am conflicted by all these things I’ve mentioned, too.

Perhaps the most vulnerable thing I could say is this:

I want the Zan/Jordan/Amorati view of women and romance to spring forth from me, naturally, truly. That is, a wondrous, romantic, ecstatic, magical take on sex and relationships.

But my experience is more clouded — like what’s portrayed in the book. Beautiful at times, yes, but more often torturous and confounded.’

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Thank you, Jackal, for your thoughtful response. Here’s the deeper cut around why the novel was so valuable to me:

Intimacy, seduction, and all the power exchanges that surround it, and all the emotions that surface during these relational moments, are so complex and so overwhelming (and painful, and humiliating) that many of our sexual and intimate experiences spin us so severely around and we never, as men, acquire the language to make sense of them. We just stew in the feelings of a mixed-up love-life ad nauseam, which then become a pattern, and our erotic life spirals out of control, or simply becomes a thing of sheer chance to us.

Hence what you overhear in comments-sections and pubs: women are crazy, you never know when you’ll get lucky, some men just have this ‘handled’.

So, the experience of the Amorati we work with (or the experience of any man who wants to make sense of his heartbreaks, and somewhat change his relationship fate) is that he typically comes out of an experience where he’s been out of control in his desire for a woman… without the power or language to properly articulate what happened… let alone have a moral or empowering sense of agency with the one he desired.

Maybe our fathers should have talked us through it all. But our fathers, like István’s, were mostly not there. There is simply no erotic or emotional literacy taught to men, and here we are.

István is not misogynistic out of his own self-propelled hatred. István is a husk of a man, a man of zero interiority, which makes the whole premise of the book fascinating: how can you give a deep feeling of the interiority of a man who himself has no interiority? That’s the genius and the artistic ambition of Flesh. If you remember, István says the same things over and over until it becomes farcical. He grunts. He shrugs. ‘Okay’.

In fact, he’s such a husk of a man that he shows (almost) zero agency in any of his dealings with women. He has no identity I can make out until his London lover (later, wife) gives him one. Even then, it’s temporary. With the girl at the lake, István tries to kiss her. He’s acting on desire, sure, agency, great. He’s inherited a vague understanding that, alone at a lake with a girl who’s been around, we must, at some point, lean in for a kiss. But we know what happens. We’ve all been in that situation. He read it wrong and she turned her cheek. Or, somehow, confusedly, his very hesitation made a ‘no’ out of the girl when, with a more confident guy, she might have been a ‘yes’.

I might even argue the author is more misogynistic than István: he’s created a world in which all women, in István’s formative years, have created a codependent shell of a figure, first using him in lieu of a sick husband (the neighbour groomed István as a 15 year-old); his mother, single, didn’t know what to do with an adolescent male. At no point did István get a moral teaching (other than received military ‘use cases’ for party girls and prostitutes), or a sense of who women are. They are just beings who happen to him, frustrate him, but give him a curious sense of warmth while he typically feels ambivalent and disgusted until he’s too far in.

The scary thing about the novel is that these are the men running London from the underground… as well as the men running London from helicopters and mansions. The numbed-out spun-around zero-clue husk-of-a-man is everywhere. Don’t we all have a little István inside us? A self that is long dead, unsure how to act, but taking whatever he gets?

Critics who blame István for misogyny are missing the numbness at his core. The problem isn’t the individual but all the cultural forces that lead to childhood, teenage, and later adult male numbness. István, like most of us in our economic system, is essentially cannon fodder. Which of these critics have looked into István’s eyes?

Amidst all this, I found the novel funny as hell. But I like my humour oil black, because the world in which we live is black as hell. The book is a tool, is a mirror.

I am trying to provide psycho-sexual literacy for men who otherwise have interiors like István’s. That is the basis of everything that I do. I have been István, I might be him again. The power of sex and our longing for love and inclusion in the breast and heart of a woman is so powerful, so severe, and the human condition so complex — that it takes a LONG LONG TIME to wake up and gain any insight about what is actually happening in the fields and webs of attraction that entangle us. So here I am, finally not completely drowning in the cold vast ocean of my intimate hopes, inviting a few more survivors onto the raft.

With literacy, things with women become poetic, humorous, and then possible for us to work with, even thrive with. Still, it might take time to clear the clouds and the angst and your confoundment. Either way, reading István’s childhood in Hungary was like reading my own… I had those feelings, those circumstances, the way even prostitutes on the muddy highway foreshadowed my own desperate demise. What art!

The real question, I sense, is this: in a bleak world, with men and women lost in the mire as they are, from where within you might this wondrous, romantic sense of faith—the belief you mentioned—spring forth?

And despite how fucking terrible things are between the sexes (it has never been worse, only worsening further, and further worse with every year!), can you SEE, ALREADY, TODAY, women who are beautiful, open, available, filled with poetry and humour, and ready to meet you in an unclouded moment, now? Because I can see these women (or, better said, these moments with women, who similarly move in and out of the clear sun as we do), I can handle the confoundment and the torture.

I discovered, early on in my Amorati phase, that the life-raft is not only our conversation with men. From the start, I built a little pod of women, sane ones, who contributed to my mental health. My final words: guard these friendships over decades, these little pods of sanity, because your life depends on it.

~ Jordan