Headshot (2024)

Why this one?

This is another 2024 Booker Longlist selection. In this case, one where the concept seemed intriguing and the cover looked cool.

Rita Bullwinkel (c. 1989- ; active c. 2020- ) is an American author, journalist, and currently guest professor of Literature at Leipzig University in Germany. She grew up in the Bay Area, California, US, and played a range of competitive sports in youth, notably water polo. She published her debut short story collection Belly Up in 2022, for which she won a Whiting Award. Headshot is her first novel.

Thoughts, etc.

Headshot is a short novel, tightly structured around a female youth boxing tournament, which takes place over a single weekend in Reno, Nevada. It follow’s the tournament’s eight participants through the tournament’s order of play, from the initial knockout matches, to the semi-finals and the final. Through each bout, we are transported back and forth in the boxers’ lives, in snippets that illuminate both their backgrounds and, more surprisingly perhaps, their future lives.

It’s a novel with a few clear points to make, which I’ll come onto, but on the surface level it’s really a series of rather disconnected character studies that meet around the tournament. There are tensions set up within the tournament: a confident and popular prom queen type fights a nervy girl from a much poorer background; two cousins with a history square up against each other; a wildchild who tries to unnerve her opponents by wearing a raccoon hat takes to the ring against a slightly obsessive character who counts memorised numbers to aid focus. These backstories do help to engage us somewhat with the fighters and occasionally root for one over the other, depending on our own prejudices perhaps.

What I think Bullwinkel is most interested in is showcasing the different motivations each of the young women has for having found themselves in this particular tournament. For some, it’s an escape from mistakes in their past that haunt them, for others, there’s something of a family motivation. Others still have an incessant drive to win, and some appear just to have fallen into the sport for the want of anything much better to do. I think it’s also important that the majority of the participants have found their own way there, rather than being set up for success by a pressuring family member (father, say) or school coach - well-worn tropes that have been somewhat damaging to perceptions of female sport (Bullwinkel herself in interviews cites Bend it Like Beckham and the Williams sisters’ narrative as key examples of the trope in which a male relative or coach is seen as responsible for much of the glory of the female stars, real or fictional).

While the flips back in time were largely logical and contributed to our understanding of and empathy with the participants, the jumps forward were somewhat more mystifying, to my mind at least. We learn that for most (if not all? I forget) of the boxers, this rather drab seeming tournament (with minimal media interest, virtually no audience and shoddy plastic trophies) is not the beginning of something, but rather the end of their short sporting careers. I think there’s something here that’s intended to subvert the idea that a sports-centred novel should inevitably be about the journey to greatness, and I get the logic of that point. I think it might also be an attempt to emphasize the fact that moments like this can nonetheless represent an important formative moment for those who experience them, and can perhaps colour the rest of their lives in less than obvious ways. Bullwinkel herself did not pursue her sporting specialism beyond this sort of age, and perhaps there’s something of her own story in here - a desire to claim back these young moments of development as not significant just for the success they may or may not have led to, but for the impact they have on a life which can then turn off in very different directions.

All of this is interesting… in theory. I think ultimately these leaps forward also served to slightly undermine our interest in the sporting contest that is so central to the book, repeatedly reminding us of the low stakes of what we’re reading about. The ‘plot’ element of the book around which it is so stiffly structured is therefore hard to fully engage with - in general (though there were exceptions) I struggled to care who won the tournament or its individual bouts as a result. Another issue I had with this one was it spread itself a little too thinly. In relatively few pages we get to know eight characters, all of apparently equal importance, over seven fights, and with snippets of each character’s past and future. It’s true that a few of those characters are very memorable, but I can’t help feeling that I’d have got more out of a story that took one of these more memorable characters as its focus and relegated the others to supporting roles. I know this isn’t the point of what the author was seemingly keen to do, but it would have to my mind made for a more satisfying reading experience, where what I was left with from Headshot was a few memorable ideas and excellent but sparse vignettes of a few of its best characters’ lives, rather than a compelling narrative that hung together as a whole.

Score

6

This is a book that seems to have been doing very well with the critics, but for me it’s a book of promising concepts and characters that suffers for trying to do much in its overly rigid format. It has its moments, but it’s not a book I would be especially keen to see on the shortlist.

Next up

One that I’m really very much looking forward to: Hisham Matar’s My Friends.