To begin, let’s consider the title. Rita Bullwinkel’s first novel, Headshot, takes place inside the head. Or no, not head but heads: eight, to be exact, belonging to the teenage boxers who have come to Reno to participate in the 12th Annual Women’s 18 & Under Daughters of America Cup at a tired gym called Bob’s Boxing Palace. Among the many pleasures of the book is the deft way Bullwinkel navigates those interior spaces, in which each character is necessarily alone. From Artemis Victor, who understands that even if she “wins the tournament and becomes the best in the country…she’d still be second best to her oldest sister,” to Rachel Doricko, who seeks to psych out her opponents by “wearing a hat that had a raccoon tail on it,” these women are driven by private concerns.
That’s one of the key points here, our essential solitude, even (or especially) when we are in competition, even (or especially) when we are most fully engaged.
This article appears in Issue 30 of Alta Journal.
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Boxing, after all, requires focus. It is a sport of the body and the mind. In that regard—no pun intended—Headshot is a knockout. The prose is sinuous and supple; it dances like a fighter in the ring. “Before each bout begins,” Bullwinkel observes, “the girls of the Daughters of America tournament do not speak to one another. Language has no place inside the gym.” And yet, how else other than through language are we to know them? How else are they to know themselves?
For Bullwinkel, this is a central tension, and it infuses the novel in a variety of ways. There’s that interiority, but also how it yields, in places, to a collective point of view. “Andi Taylor’s dead red-truck kid lives inside Artemis Victor,” she writes, “and Rachel Doricko clenches Kate Heffer’s counting number in her hands. Andi Taylor is speeding home to Tampa…but Andi Taylor is also pulsing inside Artemis Victor mid-swing.” Bullwinkel is reminding us that everything is always happening at once. We exist in the past and the future even as we are in the present. We carry all our lives with us all the time.
Such an idea is activated in the novel’s sense of time, which is attentive to the interplay of the boxers yet also encompasses the long-term patterns of their lives. “Though Artemis doesn’t know it now,” Bullwinkel informs us, the fingers she has already broken have “pushed the fragility that is her human hand over the bridge and into the realm of permanently damaged. When Artemis is sixty she won’t be able to hold a cup of tea.”
Ramifications, in other words, the long and the short of things, which is another kind of headshot, the aha moment when our deepest vulnerabilities are revealed. “Like a boxing match,” Bullwinkel writes, “the backwards and forwards movements of how girl fighters spring up over time is not linear.”
Girl fighters, yes, and also every one of us in this punch-out of a world.•
Join us on March 20 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Bullwinkel will sit down with CBC host John Freeman to discuss Headshot. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
