Colin Sheridan: The Booker shows what we're willing to celebrate — a new, questioning, masculinity

The 'death of the introspective male novel' has been greatly exaggerated — see Karl Ove Knausgaard’s newest nine-volume, 6,000-page meditation on the misery of being alive

David Szalay's 'Flesh', winner of the 2025 Booker Prize.  The brilliance of the novel — what judges called its 'singularity' — lies in how it refuses the old macho tropes while borrowing their scaffolding.  Picture: Ian West/PA

In the wake of Flesh by David Szalay claiming the 2025 Booker Prize, one can’t help asking: Have we finally halted the slow collapse of masculinity in literature? 

Was that supposed decline simply a ruse, or simply another correction, perhaps even an over-correction, in an industry long overdue for one? 

Prizes, after all, often act as barometers for cultural mood. They reflect not only what the judges value but what the literary ecosystem is willing to celebrate. 

When a male-centred novel takes home the biggest English-language award during a decade often described as the “era of the female novelist”, the moment deserves a closer look.

Like many readers, I grew up on the late 20th century’s alpha-male syllabus: Martin Amis’s brash swagger, Norman Mailer’s steroidal prose, John Updike’s industrious libido, Gay Talese’s journalistic virility. 

They were brilliant and problematic, intoxicating and infuriating. I admired their sentences but winced at their assumptions. I loved their craft but clearly saw the rot — the misogyny, the entitlement, the unexamined male gaze that passed itself off as cultural truth. 

For decades those books defined “the male voice,” and for better or worse, the literary world took that definition as gospel.

But in the past decade, literature has seemed to recoil from that archetype. The traditional “man’s man,” the navel-gazing egotist, the protagonist who treats women as scenery and the world as his mirror — these characters have been steadily retired. 

And that thinning out is not, I think, a crisis. It’s a recalibration.

Masculinity is not vanishing from fiction; rather, the version that once strutted through the canon unchallenged is moulting. 

What is fading is the version of manhood whose sense of self depended on domination, narrative control, sexual conquest, and the assumption that his interiority was inherently significant.

The book follows István, a working-class Hungarian teenager, through sexual experiments, military service, and the seductive but hollow orbit of London’s ultra-rich. 

The brilliance of the novel — what judges called its “singularity” — lies in how it refuses the old macho tropes while borrowing their scaffolding. 

István has desire, ambition, bravado, shame, anger, longing. He is recognisably a young man — but the narrative insists that even he doesn’t quite know what that means. 

Critics praised it not only for its craft but for its “rare willingness to examine the destructive corners of male character.” 

Which raises the question: Is Flesh a sign that literature is willing, once again, to take men seriously — just differently than before?

Perhaps. But before we fuel a panic about the supposed marginalisation of male voices, we should look at the facts. 

Take the Booker itself: Across its 56-year history, 18 winners have been women, only four in the past decade. 

That still leaves the lion’s share as male. The idea of an “over-correction” toward women writers is shaky at best. If anything, what we are witnessing looks like a modest democratisation of the prize landscape rather than a revolution. 

Women authors winning prizes they had historically been denied does not represent a guillotining of male literary culture. It represents an expansion — of empathy, of curiosity, of readership.

And this is where we must disentangle two threads that often get conflated: The diversification of literary prizes and the supposed disappearance of the old-school male protagonist. 

The former is a matter of recognition and fairness. The latter is a matter of representation, and representation follows cultural mood. 

When Sally Rooney writes sexually confident, politically alert college women and the world devours those novels, it’s not necessarily a statement against men. It’s a reflection of reality. These women exist; they want to be written about; readers want to hear from them.

Sally Rooney. Picture: Kalpesh Lathigra

Yes, there are still plenty of jock-misogynists wandering the world, but readers have grown less tolerant of giving them the narrative microphone without scrutiny. 

Masculinity isn’t being cancelled; it’s being contextualised. The assumption that male experience is the default narrative setting has dwindled. And that’s not decline — that’s a maturing of the form.

This brings us back to Flesh, which occupies an interesting middle ground. 

It doesn’t resurrect the old model of masculinity; it interrogates it. It doesn’t place a man at the centre because “that’s how literature works”; it places a man at the centre because his confused, volatile, unsteady becoming is the story. 

If the novel signals anything about the future of masculinity in fiction, it’s that male characters must now justify their centrality. They must earn it.

And this, perhaps, is the real source of anxiety among certain male writers — not that masculinity is disappearing, but that the automatic presumption of relevance has evaporated.

Personally, I don’t mourn that loss. My early love for Amis, Mailer, Updike, Talese never blinded me to their limitations. Their audacity was undeniable, but so was the tunnel vision.

I could admire their craft while seeing the cracks — and the casual sexism embedded in their visions of the world. 

Many readers have welcomed the correction away from that. 

But we should also avoid swinging so far that male complexity, vulnerability, shame, awkwardness become unwelcome in fiction. 

That would be a loss just as profound as the dominance that preceded it.

Which leads us to the broader cultural map. On one side: The “decline” narrative, in which the male voice is shrinking, the male protagonist is weakening, and classical masculinity is losing its foothold. On the other: The “correction” narrative, where the field finally opens to new voices, new lenses, new forms of authority. 

And somewhere between the two sits a novel like Flesh: Recognisably masculine, yet radically self-scrutinising.

For male authors, the message is clear: Your time is far from over, but the terms have changed. The protagonist can no longer be the man who strides into a room simply assuming to matter. He must be someone capable of change, doubt, contradiction. 

Someone whose vulnerability is part of the story rather than its kryptonite. The Booker win for Flesh is, in this sense, a quiet instruction: Yes, you can still write about men — but write about men who are in trouble, in flux, in emotional weather. That is the terrain now.

And if one needed a comic reminder that the “death of the introspective male novel” has been greatly exaggerated, one need only look to Karl Ove Knausgaard’s newest nine-volume, 6,000-page meditation on the misery of being alive. The decline of the introspective male novel? You should be so lucky.

What we are really seeing is not an extinction but an evolution. A broadening of the form. A willingness to ask more of male characters than swagger and self-regard. 

The house of the literary novel — once a fortress of confident male narrators — has been unlocked, the furniture rearranged, new tenants moved in. Masculinity is not being evicted; it is being held to higher standards. And those standards, frankly, make the literature better.

The win for Flesh suggests that masculinity in fiction is not in crisis; it’s in conversation — with the past, with itself, and with the future the genre is still discovering. And that is a challenge worth accepting.