A “knockout” debut from Rita Bullwinkel
Intensely in the present, Rita Bullwinkel's Headshot, longlisted for this year's The Booker Prizes, is a spectacularly intimate novel on boxing. It comes at a time when boxing, ever the epicentre of crooks and clowns, is reeling with the latest hangover of celebrity white-collar fights and crossovers with other combat-sports. But Bullwinkel's novel deals not with that circus but with the rugged terrain of junior amateurs and their hopes and dreams.
The Daughters of America Cup for "Women's 18 & Under" which takes place at Reno, Nevada in a rickety, depressing gym called Bob's Boxing Palace is the scene of the novel. Headshot is essentially a rundown of this knockout tournament, where eight young girls fight in a bracket until one is declared the winner (the author, in an interview with writer Lincoln Michel, characterises this bracket as akin to a map at the start of a fantasy novel, which is quite an apt description). As we go through the fights one by one, Bullwinkel takes us into the inner anxieties of these girls.
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Boxing, by its very nature, attracts the ambitious and the neglected, and these eight girls, whose lives the readers are briefly submerged into, are all severely affected with aspirations and trauma that do not otherwise occupy young people of that age. In the first fight (or chapter, if you will), Artemis Victor is the third of three sisters who had boxed, eager to out-accomplish her family against Andi Taylor, who had driven here on her own and had slept in the car. Andi, who had registered for the contest by saving money as a part-time lifeguard, is sharply disturbed by the drowning of a child at her workplace. Both fighters bring their messy lives to boxing. The play of violence, they hope, will make things right. But the fight game, as has always been the case, is cruel. None of the girls continue pursuing the sweet science, and their lives after the conclusion of the Daughters of America Cup is provided like commentary tidbits at a fight.
Indeed, Headshot's storytelling plays true to the frenetic, visceral and surprising narratives we see in boxing programming. There are moments of vivid honesty. Bullwinkel describes the crowd at the event as "not made up of fans but, instead, mostly of other participants in the tournament…" That is quite the reality at events such as these.
Instances such as this elevate Headshot from a novel that treats boxing as a mere plot device to one that sincerely tackles the sport's relationship with the human condition. However, the novel does often go into puzzling directions. For instance, the Daughters of America Cup has each fight last for eight rounds. That is a lot of rounds in amateur boxing, which is standardised to four two-minute rounds for women and three three-minute rounds for men. And while amateur boxing has its variants and small-town peculiarities, it is still unthinkable for participants as young as 15-year-olds, with a year or two of practice, getting scheduled to fight eight whole rounds when professional fighters start with four these days.
Curiously, too, Headshot only mentions weight-classes twice and never in the context of a constant anxiety and struggle that deliberations of one's weight brings to boxers.
The eight girls in Headshot clearly hope to escape the chaos of their lives in the ring. Rita Bullwinkel brings up hand-clapping games in the latter half of the novel, perhaps to contrast with boxing. "In girls' hand-clapping games", she says, "there are no winners. You may be chided for missing a beat, or for forgetting one of the lyrics, but there is no victory that lies ahead for just one of the participants." In boxing, there are winners and losers, even in draws. Where hand-clapping relies on coordinating the rhythm, one succeeds in boxing by breaking this rhythm. The former deals in the comfort of synchronisation, whereas the latter provides discomfort through syncopation.
Headshot does a fantastic job of showing this. Bullwinkel's novel eschews any notion of permanence by resolutely focusing on the present and the now. And no matter how much the girls in Headshot hope for the harmony of clapping games in their fights, to have that desire in their boxing bouts is misplaced desire. Boxing only brings bruises and chaos. It is jazz until the bell rings and the round ends.
Shahriar Shaams has written for Dhaka Tribune, The Business Standard, and The Daily Star. Find him on instagram: @shahriar.shaams.
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