All That Man Is

Szalay gives his nine protagonists no shared plot, no overlapping cast, and barely a shared country: a British teenager named Simon interrailing through Germany with a paperback of Camus in his bag, a French graduate on a package holiday to Cyprus, a Hungarian bodyguard escorting a woman across borders for a job he can no longer pretend not to understand, a Danish newspaper editor named Kristian deciding whether to run the story that will end a government minister's career and marriage. What holds the book together instead is a strict architecture: nine ages, seventeen through seventy-three, rising chapter to chapter, so the collection reads less like nine different men than one life cut into cross-sections and reassembled out of biological order. When the book reached the 2016 Booker Prize shortlist, the judges ruled it eligible as a novel rather than a story collection, over the objection of critics who pointed out that scarcely a character, place, or plot thread survives from one section to the next.

The case for reading it as a single work rests on what does carry across the borders: hired rooms, unfamiliar currencies, men conducting their most consequential conversations in languages that are not quite their own, and a mounting awareness of the body's decline that tracks with the rising ages. Aleksandr, a Russian former oligarch stripped of his fortune by a ruinous court case and a collapsing marriage, gets the eighth section, alone on his own superyacht in the Adriatic weighing an ending for himself he doesn't go through with. The ninth and last belongs to someone quieter, Tony, seventy-three, a retired English civil servant driven home from hospital by his wife Joanna after a car accident, and it's Tony's chapter, not Aleksandr's, that actually closes the arc: he turns out to be Simon's grandfather, the one thread the book lets run all the way from its youngest man to its oldest, planted quietly enough that a first reading can miss it.

The collection's most acclaimed section follows Kristian, editor of a Danish tabloid, through the hours before he publishes proof that a government minister has been conducting an affair, a decision he frames to himself as public accountability while privately measuring exactly how much career and marital wreckage the story will cause and how much readership it will bring his paper. Szalay withholds any sense that Kristian is unusually cynical for his trade; the chapter's discomfort comes from how procedural the cruelty is, a job performed competently rather than a villain announcing itself.

Aleksandr's chapter reads like the book's big finish because it's the most physically dramatic thing in it. But Szalay hands the actual last word to Tony instead: a hospital discharge, a wife's careful driving, an old man totting up how little of his working life he can now account for. Putting the quiet chapter after the dramatic one is the book's real argument about age, catastrophe gets the better story, but ordinary diminishment is what nine sections have actually been building toward, and the detail confirming Tony as Simon's grandfather arrives in the chapter built to feel like nothing is happening.