Flesh - David Szalay
This is the first of the Booker Prize longlist books that I've really loved (aside from Misinterpretation, which I read when it was on the Centre For Fiction First Novel Prize shortlist, so long ago that it doesn't really feel connected to the Booker longlist in my mind).
The main character here is often hard to like. He's taciturn, refuses to open himself up to anybody (including the reader), is wholly passive aside from a couple of moments of unexpected and uncontained violence, and yet there's something really compelling and sympathetic about him. I think it would be easy to look at him and say that he's a person who uses people, but I actually think it's the opposite - he allows himself to be used, constantly, by other people in his life who want to fill a void in their lives, who need a distraction from perfectly good lives that they're somehow dissatisfied with. He goes through life as a piece of clay, allowing himself to be moulded and shaped by people (usually, but not always, women) and then discarded when they eventually tire of him.
This is really a book about a form of masculinity that we don't often see in media. It's one that comes very close to the world of MRA activists and incels, and I'm impressed that Szalay manages to pull this off without it feeling like apologia for some really heinous viewpoints. I think the fact that Istvan never thinks of himself as a victim or blames anybody for his lot in life helps - though this is largely because he never actually reflects on his lot in life in any meaningful way. He is, really, a very pitiful character, and he spends a lot of the book trying and failing to access his own inner world, which he's completely cut himself off from. He has no vocabulary or toolbox with which to express himself, and so he just floats along with a vague sense of numb apathy.
The more I write about this the more I think it sounds like a book I should have hated, but actually I loved it.