One of the most boring things in the world is listening to an athlete be interviewed. This is not because athletes lack intelligence or personality. It’s because what makes athletes great is their ability to spend countless hours repeating actions so frequently that when their body has to perform them, they do not have to think, Take the shot, curl into a flip turn, stay at this pace. Feint left, hook right. They simply do them, beautifully. And thus something miraculous and natural-seeming emerges out of a bonfire of hundreds, if not thousands, of hours—for some sports, hours spent alone.
If you’ve played sports seriously enough to have recognized yourself in this description, you will also know that practice or training means that in the moment of a game or race or performance, time slows down and your interior space can feel enormous, like an empty cathedral in which light pours in. Never in fiction have I felt this gargantuan space of consciousness described with such blazing genius as in Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot.
The premise of this novel is as simple as its execution is dazzling. Eight teenage girls have traveled to Reno, Nevada, to participate in a national boxing championship. Some have driven themselves; some have been brought there by family members. Each chapter is a match in which we meet two of the girls, and in each subsequent chapter, we meet two more while the previously introduced ones appear on the sideline. In this way, a boxing match becomes a 21st-century Canterbury Tales.
There are a couple challenges that Bullwinkel faces that Chaucer did not. First, as she puts it, “language has no place inside the gym. Inside the gym the language used is the language of animals—the language of smell and feeling and sound.” Bullwinkel has to write without appearing to write and has to have her characters think while their bodies are engaged in action. In the very first sentence, when we meet Andi Taylor, she is simultaneously pounding her flat stomach, pumping her hands together, and “thinking not,” as Bullwinkel puts it, of a cascade of things that have come to define her.
Pulling off this pirouetting use of close third-person narration requires a deftness of touch, which Bullwinkel possesses in abundance. Swerving and looping, darting in abruptly and then coming to a stop, her sentences have a swift, sure delivery. Writing is an unnatural act, but the word natural comes to mind while reading Bullwinkel’s prose. It is, in fact, the only way to describe how this book manages to both be inside and outside its characters’ heads at the same time while rarely presenting them in their speaking voices.
Of course, one of the reasons why we don’t hear their voices is that they have mouth guards in and are punching one another in the face. But there’s more to their silence than that. Bullwinkel’s characters are teenage girls, and in the discursive associative flow of thought that this novel conjures, during each match, one punch at a time, we learn a lot about how these girls feel about being girls, how they’re made to feel, what expectations they face, and what led them to pick up gloves.
Just like athletics, the social conditioning of gender is achieved through repetition, by making a performed thing mindless. Slowing time down as it is experienced in competitive athletics allows Bullwinkel the capaciousness to evoke and question and poke fun at this parallel training. She is not a gender warrior or on any kind of mission but the fiction writer’s one: that is, restoring and evoking the complexity of experience.
She is a superb drawer of characters too. After reading Headshot, you will feel as if you spent eight hours in a run-down Reno boxing gym and eight lifetimes inside these young women’s bodies. Each boxer has a signature move, a way of advancing and retreating, a physique, a skill set, and a mentality about how to land a punch. These are all things, if this tournament was happening before us, that we might notice. But to have them all rendered so clearly in this compact space—the novel is fairly 200 pages—feels like watching the fights in ultra-high-definition.
Reading the novel, it’s not hard to wish that someone at Sports Illustrated has taken note of her skill. Bullwinkel has what so many sportswriters believe they have (but she actually possesses): an absolutely genius-level ability to describe using metaphors. Take, for instance, one description of a fight.
They saw her fight the match. She watched the witnesses watch her. But maybe instead of seeing a girl fight they just saw the steady small, incremental gains of a wildfire, Rachel moving over the mountain of Kate’s body in a thick long black line over the course of the match, wearing Kate down, making Kate soggy, until Kate was just a burnt thing left in the debris, one of many, innumerable things that the fire had passed over, fundamentally changed from a living, breathing thing into the shell of a burnt trunk that crumbles to the touch and leaves black charcoal and marks against any hand on which it rubs.
Not only is this extraordinary descriptive writing, but it proceeds from a deep dive into the fighter Rachel’s match-time consciousness, in which she, the survivor of a house fire, imagines herself bearing down on her opponent, Kate, a conformist from Seattle, like a wall of fire. There is no way around it. Boxing is a violent, aggressive sport. To dip in and out of these eight fighters’ heads is often to see how they, in the moment of gaining the upper hand, decide to crush their opponent. For some, like Iggy Lang, it comes as a surprise that she should be winning. She even shouts to her cousin Izzy, “This was your tournament.” For others, like the fabulously named Artemis Victor, inflicting the defeat comes with the width of a will to power.
It should be said that girls are not often portrayed this way without being pathologized. This is one of but many freshnesses about Headshot. I have not been a girl, but I’ve spent enough hours at weekend athletics tournaments in judo, soccer, gymnastics, and other sports to know that there is a whole range of experience that has not been included in the experience portrayed in fiction. Here’s another one. As these are athletes, Bullwinkel spends a lot of time describing their bodies. We watch each fighter size up the other, observe the muscles in their back, their calves, the bunched muscles around their abdomen. Inhabiting this gaze many different ways, Bullwinkel doesn’t make it sexual.
There are different fantasies and emotions here that she is interested in exploring. One of them involves what each fighter wants to achieve by winning, who they imagine sitting in the audience witnessing their tremendous victories. Artemis Victor comes from a family of fighters, and there’s something anguishing about how badly she wants to step out from beneath the shadow of her sisters. Andi Taylor is haunted by a little boy who died while she was lifeguarding. In the course of a match, she thinks about him and about a fellow lifeguard at the community pool. She wishes that the older boy were watching her fight. Meantime, she will get bowled over by her opponent. “The air around Andi feels gone, or thin, or in short supply. Andi feels weak and unable to see straight. Her eyes aren’t working the way she needs them to.” Tanya Maw, who is also an actor, simply wants to become someone else. She approaches fighting as though she is trying on a role for six rounds. Many of the girls just want to be very good at something and to be seen for being good.
This is different from being a good girl, as Bullwinkel points out. “What a sad thing, to be a good girl, thinks Rachel” in one flashback, during the fight, remembering how her mother told her to be a good girl and leave the house as a fire was approaching. “Good girl, thinks Rachel, is mountains and mountains worse than good boy. All a good boy has to do to be good is put on a clean shirt. Nobody wants to be a good girl, thinks Rachel. There can’t be a single girl in here who wants to be just fine.” During Rachel’s match with Kate, the previously mentioned Andi is sleeping in her car.
You know things are going poorly for a character in Headshot when they begin to think about their bodies as separate from themselves—like parts of an apparatus that is faulty or broken. This book is as good on victory as it is on defeat and the slow breakdown of the body under extreme stress and pressure. The way the nose feels after a direct hit, how the legs jelly, the way the mind scrambles and in that thrashing form dissolves, exposing yet more of the body for point-winning shots. The way air feels when you can finally gulp it back down, relief.
In sidebars and skittering flash-forward glimpses, Headshot gives us a preview of how the rest of each one of these teenage girls’ lives will go. Some are destined for humdrum jobs and the sad death of their parents; others will suddenly achieve glory in old age, as Tanya does as an older actor typecast as a granny. At last she can speak her mind. Hearing these potted future lives is a bit like binge-watching the late Michael Apted’s 60-year documentary project, Seven Up!, which follows the lives of 10 boys and 4 girls from England from 1964 forward.
Following these 14 as they narrow to 13 and then fewer is one of the most harrowing and beautiful experiences in cinema. Bullwinkel has pulled off something of a similar feat here in miniature. She presents us with 8 teenage girls at the beginning of their lives, and only here do we see inside their lives, and watch how they respond to success or failure. “In this way, decades into the future, boxing will be for Andi Taylor a kind of failed identity marker—something she tried on and wore around but that she later realized wasn’t her, or didn’t fit with the rest of her life, or her as a boxer didn’t fit the way the world needed her to be in order for her to survive.”
There’s something more fundamental at play here, though. Bullwinkel is reclaiming a space often taken for granted. She is using the quantum physics of fiction to do so. “Girls are born with all of the eggs they will ever make,” she writes at one point. “Tiny future fighters are nested inside the infant bodies of baby girls. Men are dead ends, but girls are infinite backwards and forwards.” Headshot takes this potential and runs with it, and it will leave you reeling.•
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.
