Fighting to be the best in the world
By Simon Demetriou
We are told early on in Bullwinkel’s terrific debut novel that it ‘was not as if women’s boxing was, or ever had, or ever would be something respected enough to put every ounce of your energy into’, and yet the novel is made up entirely of a sequence of under 18 girls’ boxing matches, every one of which acts as a visceral evocation of individuality and sameness, achievement and futility. This is a remarkable book, whose longlisting for the Booker Prize was well deserved, and whose absence from the shortlist is, in this reader’s opinion, an indication of why literary competition is less pure than Headshot’s pugilism.
At the Daughters of America Cup, held in the preposterously misnamed Bob’s Boxing Palace in Reno, Nevada, eight young women come together to fight for the ideal of being, in their own mind and that of the Women’s Youth Boxing Association, ‘the best in the world at something’. Within each bout, Bullwinkel’s shifting third-person narrative takes us into the intimate realities that make each of her characters, from the punishing immediacy of the ring to the pasts and futures that these moments in time are both remote from and critical to.
We see, for example, Artemis Victor, third in line to a female boxing dynasty, fighting not just her opponent, Andi Taylor, but the knowledge that even if she wins she will still be in the shadow of the eldest Victor sister, who already won this tournament. Andi, meanwhile, cannot escape either from Artemis’ fists, or from the haunting memories of the two dead bodies she has witnessed, one big, one small. Rachel Doricko, whose ‘firm belief that there was nothing she could do to be significant to the world’ nevertheless yearns to be just that and adopts the brilliantly self-made ‘weird hat philosophy’ to help her to that end. Her opponent is Kate Heffer, conformist and memoriser of Pi, who boxes only because everyone looks at her body and sees a boxer rather than anything else.
What makes this novel so powerfully moving is that each fighter is simultaneously there by choice and by obligation; they have committed so much and come so far for these moments, yet the reasons for doing so are personal tragedies, whether large or small, beyond their command. Equally, we see that these fights spring from an integral part of each girl’s nature, while being more or less irrelevant to the lives we find out they will go on to lead. The violence they inflict upon each other is at the same time brutality and beauty, a wish to annihilate the opponent and a profound means of connection with them.
Headshot is paradoxical, and perfect.