words by Lara Tokar
Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot is an original concept, its entirety taking place during a boxing tournament in Reno, Nevada. It follows 1v1 matches between the eight best 18 and under female boxers in the USA, each chapter covering one match, until one girl is left and she wins the tournament. Coming from different walks of life and different parts of the country, the girls are a mismatched combination – except for the two cousins with rhyming names, Iggy and Izzy, who are set to fight each other (it feels a bit too contrived to imagine them both being good enough to qualify for the national final and be scheduled to fight each other, but I digress).
During the bouts, the narration exposes the girls’ thoughts to the reader, their past and traumas, as well as, interestingly, their futures, revealing in glimpses the jobs they will have, the people they will marry, and even how they will die, repeatedly driving home the point that this tournament means nothing in the grand scheme of their lives. I can’t recall reading another narrative that explores the future as it does the past – it definitely adds to the originality of the overall structure following the matches. This originality sets the scene (or, the boxing ring?) for excellent commentary regarding young women in competitive sports, but sadly fails to follow through.
About five pages into the novel, I already knew the writing style was not for me. It did not prove me wrong at any further point. Most of the text is written in short, punchy (pun intended) sentences and the occasional longer sentence is made up of short clauses. There are a lot of paragraph breaks, often leaving as few as two, sometimes just one, sentences to stand alone as a paragraph. This sort of style and syntax works well when dabbled in at certain points of a novel, especially when the author wishes to highlight or dramatise one point. Naturally, every sentence in a novel cannot be spotlighted and it’s exhausting as a reader to witness this constant attempt. With the repeated employment of this style, one thing is evident: the novel finds itself much more shocking than it actually is.
Compounding this, the novel is overloaded with similes and metaphors. Constant, over-extended, overly-dramatic analogies. Sometimes they are bizarrely about food, for example comparing the building of the tournament to “styrofoam” that you could blend in with “cottage cheese” or comparing one of the girls’ faces to a ketchup-covered paper plate that is “soggy and almost unrecognisable, and certainly no longer of use”¹. Other times they start off with potential but are expanded on for too many paragraphs, losing the effect by the end. Add to this the occasional Riverdale-esque point such as “the referees and the coaches … are never involved in the politics, in the colossal dramas that unfold in the minutes between [rounds of a match]”² (the epic highs and lows of high school football, anyone?) and we are left with a novel that is often trying to be something – surprising, dramatic, powerful – rather than simply being so.
The novel goes in depth about the girls’ inner psychology, taking events that have happened in their life, breaking down their views and values, and then applying this to their approach to fighting. This is a fantastic idea, but it is drowned out by the dramatic writing style. One of the girls’ trauma is that her house burned down in a fire when she was younger, so the fire becomes her eternal metaphor. She sees the fire everywhere. She imagines her opponent devoured in flames, as she does everything else in her life. The trauma of another girl is that she witnessed a 4-year-old boy die when she was working as a lifeguard. The boy, and his unfulfilled life, follows her everywhere. The over-extension and repetition of metaphors, creating thin threads between fighting and trauma in a way that reminded me of short stories I had to read for my GCSE English class, makes each girl’s narrative redundant, predictable, and even trite.
My biggest disappointment with the novel, however, was its approach towards sport, and particularly women’s sport. Novels about women in competitive sports (especially in male-dominated ones like boxing) are not common and are therefore highly exciting when come across. In Headshot, there is the occasional reference to how the characters are the only girls in the boxing gyms they attend, how male coaches, judges, and journalists could never understand what it feels like to be a successful female boxer, how being a ‘good girl’ cannot possibly be desirable or how others around them view their choice of sport as masculine. These, though, are passing remarks, mentioned and then dropped without being developed or expanded, unlike a few metaphors that could have really been left behind instead.
What is especially interesting is that these girls are meant to be the best boxers in the country and yet, according to their internal monologues and the trajectory of their lives, this does not actually matter to any of them. No one plans to continue boxing, not even at university. When the girls lose, nearly every single one of them finds herself comforted by the fact that she’ll never do this again. With the breaking down of their futures one message is clear: these matches do not matter at all. So, why are we reading about them? Why should we, as readers, care about the progression of a tournament that we are told is irrelevant? And, more importantly, is this how male sports are treated in fiction? Does it also not matter in the trajectory of male characters’ lives?
There are other instances that made me similarly question if male athletes portrayed in fiction would be treated in the same way. For example, during one round of boxing one of the girls thinks “I am prettier than you, and I am going to beat you, too”³. It just made me pause and think – is this what girls are supposed to be thinking about while boxing? I would entertain the argument that perhaps the fact that all the main characters are female athletes practising a sport not very common among women is a mere coincidence and the novel never set out to explore gendered dynamics in sport, and yet, strangely, the novel ends on a chapter entirely to do with womanhood and female athletes of the past and future. This would be a great ending if there had been more time taken to set the topic up earlier in the novel.
Overall, there are some moments that work really well. For example, during a whole match/chapter, the narrative revolves around girls’ “hand-clapping games,” about how they are slightly different for each girl because they are taught by different older sisters and spread around different school cafeterias. The reminder that the girls share a “clapping canon” despite not knowing each other is quite sweet, and it creates a resonant juxtaposition as the girls use their hands to punch each other rather than to clap⁵. It is unfortunate that these moments are overshadowed by a constant attempt to shock the reader. Had the novel chosen to adopt a more conventional structure as well as a more careful selection of the moments to throw punches, it would have been able to offer so much more to the reader, rather than, unfortunately, missing most of the swings it takes.
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Lara Tokar holds a BA in English Literature from the University of Warwick and an M.Phil. from Trinity College Dublin. A lifelong reader, she likes to read, annotate, and discuss literature spanning many centuries, genres, and styles. When not reading and writing, she spends her spare time attending concerts and theatre events, following popular culture news, and going on active adventures.