The Blind Spot

On Rita Bullwinkel's 'Headshot'

Laila Ali throws a punch at April Fowler at Turning Stone Casino, 1999. Photograph: Al Bello /Allsport.

Alex Perez pulls no punches in this review of Headshot, a much-lauded novel that was nominated for the Booker Prize. Perez is a critic like none other in America, and we’re very excited to have him in The Metropolitan Review. If you want to support our mission of reinvigorating the cultural scene, please pledge $50 today. We’re planning for a print issue that you won’t want to miss. Every $50 brings us closer to making that a reality. And we’ve got a brand-new $5 monthly option, if you are so inclined.

-The Editors

Boxing is the most honest of sports. The boxer, unlike the normal person, steps into the ring and willingly accepts that he’ll be punched in the face. Anyone can throw a punch at a heavy bag, but you’re not a boxer until you’ve eaten some punches and nodded like a demented little freak at the guy trying to take you out. Years ago, in the heat of my boxing fandom, I had my dad buy me a pair of gloves and I proceeded to throw jabs and hooks and uppercuts into the air. The great Mexican fighter, Julio César Chávez, was one of my heroes, and, so, for a brief interlude in the burgeoning days of my adolescent baseball career, I thought that I’d give boxing a go. I was already a jock, after all, so the transition would be easy. I was a tough kid, too. I’d watched hundreds of bouts alongside my dad, so, like a typical young man, I thought: I can do that. I can throw a punch. I can bob and weave and bounce off the ropes and attack my opponents with body shots and keep coming. I can surely take a punch.

Two weeks later, I convinced one of my friends to get his own pair of gloves, and so that’s how I found myself bouncing on my toes on the driveway, hands up. My buddy lunged forward and threw a straight right that slipped through my hands and caught me on the forehead. I instantly went down to one knee, and everything went dark. I could hear my buddy counting—1, 2, 3—but I couldn’t see him. I shot up before the ten count and that’s when my vision was finally restored. I tried to play it cool, but I was amazed that I’d gone down without wanting to go down. My head had told my body to go down and down I went. The truth was revealed: I could not take a punch. And even worse: I did not want to take another punch. I wasn’t that kind of guy, no matter how much I wanted to be. I didn’t have it. I wasn’t a boxer. I’d been exposed. Boxing had exposed me, and I couldn’t lie to myself.

I’d remain a boxing fan, drawn to the brutality and the honesty of the sport. Here is a man fighting another man. Here is a man fighting himself when he’s reached the limits of his physical capabilities—can he push beyond himself? Some guys can and some guys can’t. It’s for these reasons that boxing is a terrific literary subject and why some of our greatest writers — Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, Katherine Dunn, to name a few — have written about the sweet science. For my money, Mailer’s The Fight, chronicling the famous “Rumble in the Jungle” in which an aging Muhammad Ali defeated George Foreman, is the greatest sports book of all time. Oates and Dunn, in their respective non-fiction collections, document the travails of both all-time greats and journeymen fighters. And then you have Leonard Gardner’s classic, Fat City, the greatest sports novel ever written. The great boxing books ask two questions: 1. Why have these men chosen to fight? 2. Why did they continue? To delve into the psychology of the boxer is to get to something elemental about the human condition. There’s no lying to yourself when you’re taking punches and throwing punches, and especially when you go down. Which is to say that if you’re writing about boxing, it better be honest. It better be truthful, or you, too, will be exposed.

Rita Bullwinkel’s much-lauded debut novel, Headshot, takes place in Reno, Nevada, at Bob’s Boxing Palace, where the women’s 18 and Under Daughters of America Cup is being held. This is a fascinating conceit for a novel, because the psychology of a young woman who steps into the ring is ripe for exploration and should pay massive literary dividends if a writer hits the right beats. In theory, Headshot should be a compelling read, or at the very least, entertaining — female fighters! — but, sad to say, Bullwinkel fails on all accounts. It’s difficult to make boxing boring or psychologically flat, but Bullwinkel, a plodding writer whose prose betrays her in every round, somehow pulls it off. As I read the uninspired boxing scenes, in which the boxers hit their opponents “with their hand”— what else would they hit them with?!— I wanted someone to knock me out and put me out of my misery.

Headshot’s problems stem from its structural missteps and a flat, third-person omniscient point of view. Bullwinkel’s eight teenage boxers meet over two days in Reno and each section is a bout between two of the boxers, in which boxing, backstory, and flash-forwards make up the narrative. This is a fine enough way to construct a novel with eight boxers vying for narrative attention, and it makes sense from a writerly point of view. Have the girls fight in consolidated sections in which the necessary beats of a literary novel are hit. Slot the backstory — and the occasional flash-forwards — in between the boxing and you take care of the novelistic problem of delivering the necessary information.

The issue with this is that Bullwinkel is trapped by the structural ring she’s set up and Headshot never deviates or surprises. The novel is so predictably structured and controlled that the chaos inherent in boxing is rendered inert. Start of the bout, insipid boxing, backstory, flash-forward, repeat. Headshot is the equivalent of a lethargic fighter who walks into an opponent’s jab over and over again.

The structural problems are only a concern if a reader becomes aware of them, which only happens if a writer fails on the character front. On paper, the eight female boxers who make up Headshot should make for a psychologically compelling read, but Bullwinkel only gives us the requisite backstory strokes necessary for a literary novel. Bullwinkel knows what a novel is supposed to look like — she understands words like “backstory” and “craft” and “character motivation” but the book is bereft of any deep insight or magic. In the first bout of Headshot, for instance, Bullwinkel pits Artemis Victor, “the youngest of the Victor sisters, a family of boxers whose parents come to every single one of Artemis’s matches,” against Andi Taylor, who’s haunted by the “boy with the red-truck shorts” whom she failed to save while working as a lifeguard in Tampa, Florida. These two haunted girls, looking to exorcise themselves of their respective demons, are now meeting in the ring. Woman against woman. Woman against herself. Boxers with trauma, one thinks, should be compelling. Unfortunately, it’s not.

The rest of the boxers include a pair of cousins from Michigan, Iggy and Izzy Lang. Iggy’s defining physical quality is a “purple stain on and above her lip, which already makes her look like a marked animal,” and as an adult she’ll be a private investigator. You also have Rose Mueller from Dallas, who was locked in a shed in grade school and later ends up becoming a gym owner; in the first round of the tournament, she defeats Tanya Maw from Albuquerque, who was abandoned by her mother. Rachel Doricko, whose body is “sinewy and scrawny,” has a “weird-hat philosophy,” which amounts to her wearing weird hats and confusing people. She faces off against Kate Heffer, a “people pleaser” who “will wear pink and smile ear to ear for every single picture.” These touches of history and backstory could develop into the deep character psychology of these boxers if the structure allowed it, but they remain merely sketches throughout the slim two-hundred-odd pages of Headshot.

If the limiting structure is already a problem, Bullwinkel’s choice to narrate Headshot in an omniscient third-person point of view nullifies any chance of psychological dexterity. Headshot’s eight girls are so interchangeable, no matter their slight demographic differences and cosmetic physical differences, that you simply stop caring. You know that one girl has a stained lip, and another will end up an actress and that one of them will even win the tournament, but Bullwinkel delivers their stories in such a uniform way that it doesn’t really matter who’s who.

So, given all that, why so much acclaim for Headshot? Why was it longlisted for the Booker Prize? Why did Barack Obama include it on his summer reading list? Why was it a New York Times Book of the Year selection? Headshot has the aura of an “important” novel, and in our era, unfortunately, that is often all that’s expected of literary fiction. But more than that, it checks the correct surface-level boxes that excite the clueless contemporary literary community. A book about girls? Check. A book about girls written by a credentialed female writer? Check. Toss in the fact that it’s a boxing book, which introduces a different wrinkle to the typically sedentary autofictional tales reaching the average literary reader, and it’s unsurprising that Headshot would do as well as it’s done. But shouldn’t the writing matter? Shouldn’t the style matter? Shouldn’t literary merit matter? All stupid questions apparently. You’re supposed to shut up and take these dull sentences to the face round after round and nod along for two hundred pages, hoping for a knockout.

Boxing fans will wonder if the fight scenes are organic and true to the sport, but since one can’t expect a credentialed writer of literary fiction to step in the ring and eat some punches, I’ll go easy on Bullwinkel. What I’ll say is that, like the rest of Headshot, the fight scenes, at best, are slightly above competence level, and at worst, utterly lacking in style and vigor. Here’s how a typical exchange is captured between boxers: “Then Iggy swings hard and lands several point-earning hits.” That’s the extent of the boxing language and lingo. Not once in this supposed boxing book did a boxer land a jab or counterpunch or walk down an opponent. In Headshot, the boxers merely hit and hit and hit and hit … and hit. Here’s another scene: “Izzy advances forward, cornering Iggy into the rope of the ring, hitting her so many times the round is over almost as soon as it began.” Not to belabor the point, but why not write “into the ropes?” Why is “of the ring” necessary? Where else would she be cornering her opponent? The rope of a cinder block? The rope of a dog? The rope of a stoplight? This might seem pedantic, but this is less a boxing-writing issue than it is a simple prose problem. At times, the writing in Headshot is so bad that the book comes off as unedited, which is more an indictment on the cloistered literary ecosystem propping up these sorts of mediocre books than anything else.

Here’s one of the worst sentences I’ve ever read in a literary novel: “Bob and Rachel’s and Artemis’s coaches and the judges are barely awake enough yet to even process what about the way that Artemis Victor is boxing is unsound.” Did a banged-up fighter who went one too many rounds with prime Manny Pacquiao write that? Nope, a Booker Prize nominated-novelist wrote that atrocity. How many people read this sentence, and many others like it, and decided it was good? What did the critics think when they read this? The prize committees? Is everyone punch-drunk in the literary world? That would surely explain a lot.

The most fascinating aspect of Headshot, and the greatest example of the institutional failures of the literary marketplace that propped it up, is how the diverse world of boxing is flattened into a blob of nothingness. There’s very little examination of race or class in Headshot, which is bizarre considering that the boxing world attracts people across the social strata. It’s not a problem that all the girls in Headshot seem to be identical demographically, but you can’t even know for sure if that’s the case. The novel offers some token notes of class differences — one girl sleeps in her car, while the others are mostly middle-class — but it’s very strange that the world of boxing is given this treatment and few critics have noted this. The tournament is called the Daughters of America Cup — but what America is this? The fault for these shortcomings ultimately lies with Bullwinkel, but only an incredibly insular literary ecosystem can produce a book with so many blind spots.

Alex Perez is a fiction writer and cultural critic from Miami. His work has appeared in The Free Press, County Highway, Tablet, UnHerd, and Pirate Wires, among others. He is the editor of RealClear Books & Culture.