San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
‘Headshot’ is a jab to gut – and heart
Boxing’s mix of artistry and brutality has inspired novelists like Ernest Hemingway and San Francisco’s Jack London, but for a variety of antiquated reasons, virtually all of the stories set in the ring have been written by — and about — men. Rita Bullwinkel’s new book runs counter to this history. Though that’s a point in its favor, it’s not what gives this novel main-event status.
A bracing portrayal of eight “girl boxers,” “Headshot” is like a fighter with excellent footwork — it has a sturdy base yet moves quickly. The author, an assistant English professor at the University of San Francisco, demonstrates a keen understanding of the sport’s dissonant soul, a onetwo combo of bodily harm and tactical mastery. Her prose, meanwhile, is aptly crisp and, at times, beguilingly strange.
Together, these ingredients yield a brilliant, unpredictable book, one that carefully explores its characters’ realworld yearnings while finding fresh ways to consider the central mystery of human consciousness: Nobody really knows what anyone else is thinking, especially during spells of stress, fear or exhaustion.
The action takes place in Reno, where Bullwinkel finds abundant contrasts between the city’s casino-goers — forlorn sorts clutching “large, plastic, alcoholic slurpees” — and her dynamic teen fighters, who trade “gutshots and armshots and ribshots and shots that curl up and then down.”
The girls have come from across the U.S. to vie for the Daughters of America Cup, a championship whose name evokes the historic condescension aimed at girls’ sports. In a cheerless gym before a crowd of mostly family members, they meet in single-elimination bouts that Bullwinkel uses as leaping-off points for penetrating depictions of each competitor.
Her cast includes buff Artemis Victor, with her eye-catching trapezius muscles; introspective Andi Taylor, a lean, skittering athlete; unflappable, self-consciously strange Rachel Doricko; and tireless cousins Iggy and Izzy Lang.
Bullwinkel closely monitors each fight’s intense physicality.
In “the size-up seconds” of an opening round, Andi spots a “tunnel of vacancy” separating “her right fist and Artemis’s left rib cage. It had looked illuminated,” custom-made for a punch. When Rachel clubs her opponent, Kate Heffer, the latter “can feel her rib bending inward like a cheap utensil, the teeth of a plastic fork pulled in opposite directions.”
She also pens revealing accounts of the tournament’s many grudges, head games and strategic modifications. Andi wants to punish Artemis, who wears lip gloss during their match, for her vanity. Rachel chews the tail of her Daniel Boone-type hat, hoping to freak out upcoming opponents. Rose Mueller makes a crucial adjustment — she stops leaning left — after Tanya Maw wallops her on that side. From these relatively curt observations, Bullwinkel pivots to her boxers’ closely held memories and eccentricities.
In her hotel room between fights, Iggy daydreams about intangible human characteristics taking physical form, imagining that the young fighters’ “understanding of themselves as girl boxers” and people took the form of a discus “hovering above the floor.” Each girl’s disc would serve as a sort of portal to “the layers of different imagined futures, and the different ways each girl has of being.”
In a dazzlingly unusual piece of writing, Bullwinkel extends this metaphor from one girl to another, imagining a disc for Artemis (it shows “piles of husbands-in-waiting”), Rachel (she’s shoeless, eating red meat) and others. The best of these passages read like subtly moving prose poetry that happens to be integral to plotting and character development.
Bullwinkel also uses more conventional methods to bring us closer to the girls’ perspectives.
In the ring, “their bodies were the only tools they had at their disposal,” but it’s their active minds
that give “Headshot” the stuff of champions.
Tanya, we learn, has a “Citizen Kane”-style Rosebud — a “red-blue” rug her family owned around the time her mother disappeared. Now, when she’s fighting, an image of the rug arrives unbidden in her mind.
Andi, meanwhile, is guiltplagued about her time as a lifeguard when she failed to prevent a 4-year-old from drowning. She repeatedly thinks of the trucks on his swim trunks, and the sentences he’d yet to learn: “Andi imagined all the words the redtruck kid knew in a single lunch pail.”
Bullwinkel discovers each girl’s “searing radiance,” differentiating them in fascinating ways. In the ring, “their bodies were the only tools they had at their disposal,” but it’s their active minds that give “Headshot” the stuff of champions.