Back when I taught creative writing, I’d ask my students, as their midterm, to write a craft paper arguing for the most important element of literary fiction. Of the following choices, which matters most: character, voice, plot, or place? Skilled authors can wield every element, I’d say, though we all play favorites, as writers and readers. Perhaps you’re happiest when lost in a twisty, surprising plot. Or, you long to get swept up in the rhythm of beautiful sentences. Maybe you side with Norwegian author Linn Ulman, who said, “Place dictates who we are and how we see—this is true in life, as well as fiction.” Most of the students chose character or voice—perhaps guessing, based on the authors assigned (Rebecca Lee, Jamaica Kincaid), which elements I favored and would therefore grade highly. A few argued plot. Fewer, place. I read each paper eagerly, selfishly, wanting to be convinced, as if reviewing market research, of where best to spend my own time. One semester, the in-class discussion devolved into a shouting match: character, voice, CHARACTER, VOICE! A delight.
It’s a rare novel that makes it through the gauntlet of contemporary American publishing with its style boldly intact. When I think of recent stylish novels, the risky ones—driven by a single element above all else—I turn to literature in translation: place-based Irene Solà, voicey Olga Ravn. What a joy, then, to discover Headshot, by Bay Area author Rita Bullwinkel, a book that winks at its one-line description: “a novel about girl boxers.”
Headshot is a character-driven book that captures “the searing radiance of these girl fighters.” Certainly, Bullwinkel has established a strong sense of place—dingy Bob’s Boxing Palace, which “looks like Styrofoam, like you could sink your nails into it and chip off a little bit of the building and make the chipped-off bits blend in with a bowl of cottage cheese.” The plot follows a tournament bracket, although Bullwinkel has shared, in an interview with Full Stop, that she didn’t know who would win each fight until writing: “I found out the victor at the same time as the reader. I was always surprised by the winner.” The tournament is less plot, therefore, than container; it’s the “edge that asserts itself,” to quote Anne Carson (who has, by the way, recently taken up boxing).
Bullwinkel writes her characters with a neurosurgeon’s precision, with the strict focus of someone who has seen the brain’s inner workings and knows how thoughts are made and memories stored. We inhabit the minds, memories, and even futures of the eight best girls in the Women’s Youth Boxing Association—united by their athletic prowess, their obsession with boxing, hitting, winning. Take Rachel Doricko, for example, the girl who steps into the boxing ring and declares she’s a toaster:
Rachel had a theory about other humans: people are the most scared by what makes zero sense to them but that they cannot, no matter how hard they try, avoid. Because of this, Rachel tried to live her life in as frightening a way as possible, dressing like a man and an animal. She had a Daniel Boone–style raccoon hat that she wore everywhere, which worked quite well. It is amazing the power that a strange hat will give you.
Rachel, with her feral internality, stands in stark contrast to her opponent, Kate Heffer, who spends the match counting the digits of pi and noticing the gym’s bare, dirty windows. As the narrator flits backward and forward in time, we learn that Kate likes boxing because she is good at it and that she’ll one day become an event planner, “delighted by the fact that she has bent time to her will, orchestrated the event, and then the event has taken place.”
Boxing—much as reading and writing fiction can do in the real world—has taught these girls to be perceptive. Artemis Victor “has an insanely good eye for reading people, for knowing what they are thinking under the words they are speaking.” When the fighters aren’t in the ring, they watch the other matches to better understand how each girl moves, learning to anticipate a future opponent’s hits. Their insight also comes from intense, sustained eye contact: “It can be intoxicating to play a sport that requires one to look in their opponent’s eyes. Tanya Maw wonders, while staring into the eyes of Rose Mueller, if this is why she is interested in both boxing and acting. There are so few activities that allow the intimacy of staring.”
If one of these girls speaks for the power of the book itself, it is Rose Mueller, who was so badly bullied as a child that she had to change schools. Yet it isn’t anger or retribution that fuels her. It is understanding: “In boxing, Rose Mueller told her father, it seems hard for there to be any mystery.… I need to learn to be in a space where I can see people and understand what is going on in their minds.”
Headshot reminds us of fiction’s ultimate pleasure: briefly leaving one’s own consciousness and problems and getting lost in another’s. I suppose, then, I’ve written my own midterm—nearly a decade late. Where except in character-driven fiction is this mind reading possible? Where else could we enter a character’s memories, then flit toward the future, watching a girl morph into a grocery store manager or wine distributor or wedding planner?•
Join us on March 20 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Bullwinkel will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Lucy Corin to discuss Headshot. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
