Let it be known that W.C. “Bill” Heinz’s “The Professional” is the best boxing novel ever written. He was the Balzac of boxing, a master of unadorned prose.
Let it also be known that Lucia Rijker, “The Dutch Destroyer,” was the best female boxer I ever saw, a stone cold Buddhist killer. I saw her once on the street in New York and she was a beautiful dark angel.[1]
And let is also be known, finally, that Rita Bullwinkel is a young writer and I am an old reviewer.
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Her novel Headshot is an excursion into an alternative boxing reality, a parallel boxing universe. Grounded in a grimy dreamlike setting, Bob’s Boxing Palace, in a grungy corner of Reno, Nevada, Headshot traces the paths of eight young women boxers through the 12th Annual Women’s 18 & Under Daughters of America Cup. It is a low-rent affair, the prized trophy nothing more than a “small plastic-gold cup” whose seams don’t even mesh.
Headshot has opening brackets like those in the NCAA’s March Madness where the fighters start their long (or shorter) journeys through the two-day tournament. It is there we are first greeted with some of the fanciful names Bullwinkel has chosen for her combatants like Artemis Victor, Tanya Maw, and the Lang cousins, Izzy and Iggy. Nowhere in the book is there a mention of the fighters’ weights so we must assume they are all in the same weight class. Or not. They fight eight rounds and are given the verdict on each round by the anonymous white-clad judges. Round lengths are not given. In real boxing young women fight four two-minute rounds. The decision is announced at the end of the bout, not round-by-round.
The book itself is not formed to fit prior novelistic precepts. It takes a bout at a time and examines it through the fighters’ consciousness or subconsciousness or the writer’s musings through a series of short – sometimes one sentence – statements separated by a single asterisk. Each bout is a “chapter” in that sense.
Each fighter gets Bullwinkel’s deep and abiding and sometimes wondrous attention in these seemingly random deadpan asterisk-separated comments that range from the prosaic to the prosaically profound to the surreal and nearly nonsensical. Try this on for size: “It will be water that destroys the world’s last handwritten scripts.” Don DeLillo is in the house.
Rita Bullwinkel riffs on the subjects that emerge from her and her fighters’ psyches. She’s in and out, like a slick boxer or a grooving horn player, moving among her character’s thoughts and images and her takes on them. Ornette Coleman is in the house, too.
Boxing language is precise and colorful, but it is disdained in Headshot. Instead, punches are simply called “hits” like in a video game rather than “shots” or “hooks” or “jabs” as in real boxing talk. The term Headshot is the only real boxing term in evidence and, as the title, perhaps refers to the omniscient presence of the author within the minds of her young women protagonists.
The book is three-dimensional in a literary sense because Bullwinkel includes significant parts of the fighters’ pasts, as well as glimpses into their lives beyond their forays into boxing. One young woman, for instance, is tortured by guilt over a young boy’s drowning while she was the lifeguard on duty. Another has taken to wearing a Davy Crockett coonskin cap outside the ring as an edge, a defense, she thinks. One will become a wedding planner, another a private detective, and another will open a boxing gym for young women, not for any particular love of the game, but simply to get by in life. Yet another will become an actress.
Headshot is a fantastic book because it dwells in and out of fantasy. It would have made a wonderful graphic novel. Witness: “Rachel feels like a thin veal cutlet. She’s hot and overcooked. Rachel feels just thick enough that she might be able to wrap her body around Kate, smother her, and suffocate her. I’m juiced, thinks Rachel.” I’m amazed, thinks the reviewer; not even Ali at his most poetic ever had revelations in the ring like that. Veal cutlet? Suffocate? Whoa.
Besides, in real boxing you don’t think in the ring. You start thinking in the ring and you get your ass handed to you in real boxing. Your corner people do the thinking in real boxing – you just execute unless you happen to be Ray Robinson and your body thinks for you in the ring. But in Headshot in the space of a brief part of a round, Rachel Doricko “thinks” four times about her situation in the bout.
Rita Bullwinkel herself was a Division One water polo player in college. She knows competition at a high level in a grueling and demanding sport. Yet in Headshot there is none of the jubilation that comes with a winning goal or a well-played match. It is almost like the actual boxing is beside the various points she makes, rather mechanical and lusterless and a rope ladder to higher considerations. Boxing has become mystical in her hands.
“Parts of their souls are carried inside each boxer who beat them.”
“They both look like their grip on the real has slid away.”
“The referee is less than a person. The referee and the coaches and the judges, they are all so deeply separate. They think they are involved with this game, that they have power, but Tanya Maw and Rose Mueller have hoarded all the power for themselves.”
This mystical glow of Bullwinkel’s boxing extends to the mind of the lone local reporter, simply known as Sam, who sits agog at ringside among the lonely dozen witnesses to the championship bout. “Even though only Rachel Doricko and Rose Mueller are in the ring, Sam keeps thinking he sees the shadows of the other girl boxers.”
Rose Mueller is the champion, winner of the cheesy trophy. “Rose Mueller spits her mouthguard onto the ground. Without her mouthguard in, Rose Mueler smiles. Rose Mueller was once the best girl in the United States at boxing. In the article Sam published in the Reno Gazette-Journal he wrote: Today, Rose Mueller need not dream of winning.”
The fantasies Bullwinkel instills in these young girls’ minds, fashioned from the fabrics of their lives, opens Headshot up to the multiple worlds within each of us. Potential thus abounds, yet the future is American pedestrian for these current strivers of boxing. For some, boxing connects to the rest of their lives; to others, it is a hazy stop along the way, sort of remembered.
Rita Bullwinkel flashes stretches of pellucid prose in her telling of Headshot: “The parents, and the coaches, and the piecemeal off-white, ramshackle chorus of men that the Daughters of America tournament has designated as judges, all of them are dull around the edges in a way that glares compared with the searing radiance of these girl fighters.”
Yet, withal, an air of abstract sadness hangs over Headshot. Bob’s Boxing Palace is a bleak stronghold of the old ways and the fighters are young and the writer is young and hope is all and the smiles are fleeting.
It is a long way from Bill Heinz and The Professional to Rita Bullwinkel and Headshot in the canon of boxing novels. It is, maybe, not as far from the Buddhist boxer Lucia Rijker to Bullwinkel’s mystical young women.
A tough call, but I see Headshot as a majority draw.
xxx
Note
1 The Dutch Destroyer…
