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 mille-feuille 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.”
