Rita Bullwinkel: Headshot
The girl boxers impressing each other and the reader
What makes sports such an interesting literary or film theme are the people in the game — in this case, women fighters — bringing their lives, personal situations, and social backgrounds into the competition. Their fight is made of who they are.
Another often explored theme is underprivileged people on the margins, competing with their limited means of expression—their only value that the surrounding society often recognizes as an achievement. Headshot makes use of both of these aspects from the start. In that rough, competitive, survival mode is also a story close to an American reader.
There is another compellingly attractive, yet disturbing element in this writing, and that is violence. Despite the "friendly competition" and supposedly communal spirit of sports, the author does not elude the obvious aggression that underlies boxing, in this case of female teenagers. "The fact that they check [the gloves] every time makes Andi feel like she is capable of murder. She loves having an adult confirm that her fist could be a weapon." The fighting plays out in a supposedly safe sports environment with rules for protection, but one can see the opportunity and desire to disable the opponent in a socially acceptable game. My curiosity as a reader when starting the book and realizing the above was in the anticipated transcendence of the obvious attractiveness of the theme within both the style of writing and the story itself.
The style reflects boxing in short and direct fragments, as in fighting rounds or even shorter — the series of blows. Seemingly simplistic short sentences with repetitions induce tension and add a chunky feeling of heaviness. There is some harshness and a degree of judgment imposed on the girls and the extreme sport, but it is executed in a fairly neutral, spare way. "...her injury, these un-closable fists, will not be some battle relic, but, rather, a sorry, pathetic disability." This creates a tragic atmosphere: "They would only impress each other: other women who are trying to touch someone with their fists."
Something must be said about the way Rita Bullwinkel’s writing skillfully creates anticipation, making us guess about the winner of each match. She leads our sympathy toward one girl but makes the other win because of her persistent training and better possibilities in life. The boxing evolves against the background of their intimate lives and relationships, and it is that entanglement that makes the book an interesting read.
There is an agreeable matter-of-factness in storytelling that people in close contact with physical action possess. Sometimes the whole world (of despair) reveals itself within one bare statement: "Her father had died on the couch watching television." Most girls, at the time of the tournament, see their future in this sport if they manage to win. None of them, not even the winner, will actually make make it to professional boxing, which leaves us wondering about that alien and alienating time in their lives when everything in their teenage worlds evolved around fighting.
Pulling and admirably executed novel might miss something extra when building tension throughout the book, since most fights are interesting and intense, but there are seven of them. There is no clear catharsis, if one would expect it; the stories of individual young women after the short period of boxing develop unsurprisingly and even straight down unremarkable – the rest of their lives are told already in-between fighting. There is a certain (sport type?) austerity and strictness in the way the girl boxers are portrayed, which made me yearn for a bit of warmth. The last images of recurring new girl fighters in the future, also a very distant speculative future on different planets, and their connection with the animal world are imaginative and poetic, albeit short.
(Headshot is a Booker longlisted novel.)
