In “David Szalay: ‘If you want to be a proper writer, you have to deal with the sordid; The Booker prize-winning author of Flesh on class, punctuation, and what he learned from Amis and Updike,” Observer book critic Anthony Cummins wrote,
“Asked about the influences on Flesh during the post-prize press conference on Monday night, Szalay – fielding questions from reporters from Italy, Canada and China – said that there were lots but wasn’t able to name any. In fact he’s already namechecked several, including Virginia Woolf’s experimental novel Jacob’s Room, but it’s long been a source of speculation whether he had Stanley Kubrick’s film Barry Lyndon in mind when writing Flesh. Szalay says he has seen it – when he was about 20 – ‘and the rags-to-riches arc was an influenc’. The novel Ultraluminous, by the American writer Katherine Faw, is another . . . .”
But, as Cummins added, “Szalay attributes his attraction to unsavoury subject matter to reading Martin Amis and John Updike in his teens. ‘Maybe I took from them the lesson that if you want to be a proper writer, you have to deal with the sordid. But I think it’s also that I’m always on my guard against dealing only with supposedly elevated subjects’.”