“Headshot”: a new voice in fiction with a mean left hook HEADSHOT
It takes focus and discipline and a certain single-mindedness to become a good prize fighter. It takes those same qualities to write a book as fresh and strong and sinuous as “Headshot,” Rita Bullwinkel’s first novel, which is set in the world of young women’s boxing. To put this another way: Make room, American fiction, for a meaningful new voice.
The young women in “Headshot” have driven a long way, many of them, to Reno, Nev., for a national 18-and-younger championship. Some have slept in their cars. The novel follows eight of these boxers, fight by fight from the semifinals on, in chapters divided into short sections. The event is at Bob’s Boxing Palace, a grandiose name for a cheerless warehouse. Its ring looks secondhand, as if it were bartered for on Craigslist, the author writes.
To remark that Bullwinkel is observant about Reno and its casinos would be an understatement. “The people are like moths being lured to their own deaths, but instead of death all that awaits them are large, plastic, alcoholic Slurpees,” she writes, an oddly incisive description of the American experience writ large.
She is just as shrewd about the secondrate referees, one of whom resembles “a hated magistrate trying to give a speech to the masses during a time of war.” Whatever she turns her attention to glows under her scrutiny.
A tournament bracket turned on its side, Bullwinkel notices, resembles a family tree, though almost none of these boxers are related. Some are still girls, really. But without straining, the author locates commonalities. Few are from stable families. They are flowers that bloomed in muddy vases. Several were the kind of children “who were made to believe by other children that they may not deserve to be alive.” They have something to prove, even if only here in “the abyss of boxing.”
These women revel in their toned bodies, radiant with heat. A black eye is likened to war paint. A vein slithers like a baby snake under the skin. A left hook to the side makes sweat pop “like a shower of diamonds.” This is kinetic writing, but it would mean little without this novel’s undertow of human feeling and the rapt attention it pays to life’s bottom dogs, young women who are short on sophistication but long on motivation.
The tournament bracket provides this novel’s scaffolding, each chapter a bout. We witness the boxers’ different styles and their variegated interior monologues. One mutters and grunts through her fights, the way Erroll Garner did under his piano riffs. Others walk in with all guns blazing.
One fight is “like watching two people talking where one person is doing all of the mouth work, and only every once in a while, the other person interjects.” In this description Bullwinkel is in sync with A.J. Liebling, who saw that boxing “is a dialogue. An infelicitous line invokes a disastrous rhyme.” Boxing is a pulverizing sort of waltz; you pair up with your opponents as if they were Bluetooth devices and then do everything you can to disconnect them. The essential otherness of one’s fellow humans is deeply felt. Boxing can be sexual this way.
Bullwinkel is the author of a book of stories, “Belly Up” (2016), which only hinted at the power on display here, though it too contained some boxing writing. She was recently named editor of Mcsweeney’s Quarterly. The writing in that determinedly whimsical publication has been known to cloy. There is no whimsy in “Headshot.” Instead, there is astringency.
One sign of this book’s power is that its drama does not accrue from questions of who will win or lose. This is not a “Rocky” narrative — though it is hard not to think of Rocky when considering a narrative from a writer named Bullwinkel. The drama is intense but interior. We are inside a torrid millefeuille of perception. This novel is about how intoxicating it is “to play a sport that requires one to look in their opponent’s eyes.” It is about pride and control and the way a fighter’s “blood and her salty tears and slick sweat make it look like she is leaking pink Kool-aid from her nostrils.” It’s about the joy of violence, joy in the unambiguous event. Amid the chaos there is control. Bullwinkel writes:
There is a glorification, in the world outside of boxing, of desperation and wildness while fighting — this notion that desire and scrappiness can and will conquer experience. No boxing coach has ever asked their athlete to be more desperate.
What are these young women fighting for? Even they are uncertain. Women’s boxing will never “be something respected enough to put every ounce of your energy into,” one fighter thinks. Another fighter, a dilettante from Seattle who gets into boxing because it sounds quirky and cool, has her mother say to her, “Only vulgar girls become the best in the world at boxing.”
In “Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine,” his 1999 story collection, Thom Jones wrote that “the thing that makes you good in the ring is the very thing that makes life outside the gym impossible.” Bullwinkel is agnostic on this point. To lose a match might feel like a verdict on your whole life. But she fast-forwards and gives us glimpses of these young women decades later, when they are pharmacists or grocery store managers. (The word “college” rarely appears in this book.) For most, boxing left little impact except for long-ago broken fingers that can still ache.
The impact of this novel, though, lasts a long time, like a sharp fist to your shoulder. It is so enveloping to read that you feel, at times, that you are writing it in your own mind. It contains no bogus psychologizing. Its wide-awake characters put me in mind of singer Ian Dury’s immortal comment: “I’m not here to be remembered, I’m here to be alive.”