All That Man Is

Boy, I hope this isn't all that man is. Szalay's nine stories of men across Europe—often in the act of traveling across Europe's open borders with no real direction in mind—make up a loosely-knit novel perfect for the Brexit age. Ranging in age from their teens to their seventies, his men share a dispirited, short-sighted ennui, looking for cheap or absurdly expensive pleasures and often not even finding those. Szalay observes them with the merciless wit of Martin Amis but in a mournful rather than manic tone that, somehow, is fascinatingly readable from beginning to end. If it wins the Booker Prize (for which it's a finalist) this month, it will read as a eulogy to a lost idea of Europe, abandoned not from anger but from indifference.