{"id":6902,"date":"2026-02-09T21:21:15","date_gmt":"2026-02-10T03:21:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/?p=6902"},"modified":"2026-02-09T21:21:15","modified_gmt":"2026-02-10T03:21:15","slug":"booker-winner-david-szalay-credits-amis-and-updike","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/2026\/02\/09\/booker-winner-david-szalay-credits-amis-and-updike\/","title":{"rendered":"Booker winner David Szalay credits Amis and Updike"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>In “David Szalay: ‘If you want to be a proper writer, you have to deal with the sordid<\/a>; The Booker prize-winning author of Flesh on class, punctuation, and what he learned from Amis and Updike,” Observer book critic Anthony Cummins wrote,<\/p>\n

“Asked about the influences on\u00a0Flesh<\/i>\u00a0during the post-prize press conference on Monday night, Szalay \u2013 fielding questions from reporters from Italy, Canada and China \u2013 said that there were lots but wasn\u2019t able to name any. In fact he\u2019s already namechecked several, including Virginia Woolf\u2019s experimental novel\u00a0Jacob\u2019s Room<\/i>, but it\u2019s long been a source of speculation whether he had Stanley Kubrick\u2019s film\u00a0Barry Lyndon<\/i>\u00a0in mind when writing\u00a0Flesh<\/i>. Szalay says he has seen it \u2013 when he was about 20 \u2013 ‘and the rags-to-riches arc was an influenc’. The novel Ultraluminous<\/i>, by the American writer Katherine Faw, is another . . . .\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s also that I\u2019m always on my guard against dealing only with supposedly elevated subjects’.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read the whole article<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":818,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,11,53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-reviews","category-updike-in-context"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/818"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6902"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6902\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6905,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6902\/revisions\/6905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}