' FLESH ' : BOOK REVIEW

FLESH. By David Szalay. In his indispensable book of political reportage, ''Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 72,'' Hunter S Thompson wrote that the only objective journalism he'd seen was on :

'' A closed circuit TV setup that watched shoplifters in the General Store at Woody Creek, Colo.''

Thompson's comment came back to me while I was reading '' Flesh, '' the new novel from the uncommonly gifted Hungarian-English novelist David Szalay.

To read this cool, remote book - among its primary subjects is male alienation - is to feel you are eye-balling the action on a bank of surveillance cameras. There will be no conspiratorial glances at those cameras, no metafictional winks.

''Flesh'' is the sound a writer makes when he has lined up and shot his darlings as if they were the Romanovs. I terms of his style, a better title would be '' Bones ''. '' The novel works because Szalay's simplicity is, like Hemingway's, the fatty sort that resonates

This book is the rags-to-riches story of diffident and lonely young man, Istvan, who grows up with his mother in a housing estate in Hungary.

A lot happens to Istvan : As a teen he will commence a clandestine affair with a much older woman ; he will be held accountable for her husband's death.

He will serve time in juvenile detention and alongside Norwegian soldiers in Iraq. He will learn that he can handle himself in rough situations.

There is no one to root for, ''morally,'' in '' Flesh.'' You wonder if perhaps the plot will come down, to borrow the title of an Anthony Powell novel, to a question of upbringing.

But extremes meet here : Rich and poor seem equally empty and meretricious. We are living in a world that lacks moral champions, and Szalay's book makes you feel their absence like a psychic ache.

I admire this book from front to back without ever quite linking it, without ever quite giving in to it. Sometimes those are the ones you itch to read again.

Sometimes once is more than enough.

The World Students Society thanks Dwight Garner.