In her ecstatic 2007 review of Annie Dillard’s novel The Maytrees, Marilynne Robinson writes, “If there were such a thing as cosmic realism, The Maytrees would be a classic of the genre.” Dillard’s books, Robinson says, remind us that our everyday reality is “a celestial event, the business of eons and galaxies, however persistently we mistake its local manifestations for mere dust, mere sea, mere self, mere thought.” Infused with the “mystery and grandeur” of time while “brilliantly attentive” to the details of this world, The Maytrees is “a highly localized meditation on the question, Why are we here?” A renowned practitioner of cosmic realism herself, notably in her Gilead novels, Robinson considers humanity’s larger purposes through the lens of her generous Calvinism.
In different but equally revealing terms, the teenage girl boxers of Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot also wonder why they’re here—in this tournament, in this ring, trying to literally beat other girls. Their questions encompass the same cosmic mysteries that Robinson and Dillard ponder: What is love, and how do I express and obtain it? What are my responsibilities to others and to myself? What makes a good person and a good life? Do I control my own destiny? How does time work?
Filtered through the omniscient narrative voice—which knows not only all the boxers’ thoughts and memories but those of the spectators as well as the distant future of all humanity—the answers are varied and changeable. Andi Taylor is haunted by images of a drowned child; as the lifeguard on duty, she may not have done enough to save him. After losing her bout, she thinks, “What a foolish thing, to think fighting in anything can save your mind from a witnessed tragedy.” Andi’s opponent, Artemis Victor, has sisters who are boxing champions and takes pride in the “Victor” identity but “wants something more powerful that she can control herself.” Another boxer, Kate Heffer, took up the sport because some adults told her she had the right body for it. Midway through her fight, she realizes that “this match, which she thought was the moment around which other moments circled, actually has absolutely no meaning in her life.” She grows up to be a successful wedding planner.
Each girl creates a complete, complex world for herself, a singular combination of aspirations, speculations, fears, and memories, along with a destiny that only the narrator can see. As the girls travel through space and time, these worlds intersect at the tournament. Bullwinkel presents a striking image of the characters’ worlds layered on top of one another above the ring “like a stack of thin, scratched CDs. If you stand in the middle of the ring you can send your mind up through the hole of the worlds built by the other girl boxers. You can travel through the layers of different imagined futures, and the different ways each girl has of being.” The worlds diverge after the tournament, but through boxing, they have bled into one another: Andi’s memory of the dead child in his red-truck-printed trunks “lives inside Artemis Victor,” while Andi, driving home, “keeps thinking she sees water,” the image Artemis holds in her mind during her second-round bout. Our worlds affect others’, even across time and space, Bullwinkel seems to say, whether or not we’re aware of our influence. Each of our lives is immensely significant.
Similarly, in his reading of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, the novelist Paul Lynch uses a cosmic metaphor to convey the vastness within every individual: Faulkner’s novel is “a torrent of voices, each one a discrete universe locked into their own way of being” as their “misfortunes tumble one into the other,” leading to disaster. In an essay on his authorial influences, Lynch, winner of the 2023 Booker Prize for his alarmingly prescient Prophet Song, celebrates “cosmic realism” as essential “in an era of profound distraction and alienation from the self.” Lynch warns, “A society that has lost the keys to the house of the spirit is a society that invites destruction.” Writers like Faulkner, Woolf, Melville, Conrad, Borges, and Lispector, among others, tend to our spiritual house as they “hold within their gaze not just the table and chairs and the chatter in the room but the fundamental strangeness of our condition—the infinite spaces that enfold us, the eternal truths that define us throughout the ages.”
The same can be said of Bullwinkel. In Headshot, any mundane detail—a birthmark over a girl’s lip, the memory of a living room rug—can set off a cascade of meanings that extend far beyond this underattended tournament in a run-down gym. For me, the most compelling of Bullwinkel’s cosmic-realist riffs starts with the boxer Tanya Maw’s braids. Taught by older sisters to younger ones, a method of “wisdom transmission,” braiding takes many forms: the “Ur-braid” of three strands, “fishtail braids, and French braids, and loop braids, and rope braids, and ladder braids.” The narrator concludes, “There are endless ways in which you can make your many smaller pieces of hair into something bigger.” Separately and together, the boxers of Headshot make their own smaller pieces into something much bigger than themselves. In doing so, they elevate our gaze and our spirit.
There is one minor character who perceives the girls’ larger-than-life magnificence, a local journalist named Sam. In his eyes, the girls “fight like they are assassins. When they walk through the gym in between rounds, the dusty air parts in front of each of them like water parting for a god.” He “has watched every match of this tournament with the awe of a skeptic witnessing a miracle.” Like Sam, some readers may enter the world(s) of Headshot doubtful about the literary seriousness, let alone the cosmic significance, of a novel about teenage girls. But Headshot proves that these girls’ lives are just as profound as those of the Maytree family or Robinson’s ministers and that Bullwinkel belongs among the most celebrated portrayers of the wondrous human condition.•
Join us on March 20 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Bullwinkel will sit down with special guest Lucy Corin and CBC host John Freeman to discuss Headshot. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
EXCERPT
Read the opening pages of Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot, the California Book Club’s March selection. —Alta
WHY READ THIS
Contributing editor David L. Ulin recommends Bullwinkel’s novel, writing, “Headshot is a knockout. The prose is sinuous and supple; it dances like a fighter in the ring.” —Alta
EVENT RECAP
If you missed the event with author Manuel Muñoz, special guest Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, and CBC host John Freeman, read a recap or watch the video. —Alta
PARENTING IN A TIME OF FIRE
Alta editorial director Blaise Zerega reviews Rachel Richardson’s poetry collection Smother. —Alta
CHIMERICAL TERRITORY
Alta contributing editor David L. Ulin reviews Fernando A. Flores’s Texas novel Brother Brontë, which offers a “bitter satire about the dangers of capitalism unbound by morality.” —Atlantic
PAKISTANI FOOD
The owner of three popular South Bay and Peninsula restaurants (Zareen’s) reflects on her Karachi girlhood immersed in books and how Palo Alto became home. She is the author of the forthcoming Zareen’s Pakistani Kitchen: Recipes from a Well-Fed Childhood. —San Francisco Chronicle
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