“Eight two-minute rounds, with time-outs and pauses between rounds, is barely enough time for anything at all to happen. And yet, it seems like within each two-minute round, anything could happen.” This summary of a boxing match towards the end of Rita Bullwinkel’s impressive debut Headshot goes some way to explaining the power of the novel.
The story of the eight best teenage girl boxers in the United States, facing off against each other in a championship in Reno, Nevada, has the inherent momentum and tension of fierce competition, the ominous sense that anything is possible.
Though the girls emerge as uniquely individual fighters, they are united by a shared desire to be seen, relentless drive and phenomenal fitness. Set over the course of two days in a grimy arena, the novel unfolds as a series of taut, minutely detailed passages that succinctly relate the grit needed to succeed in the Daughters of America tournament. The irony of that name, for what turns out to be an unglamorous, underfunded and underattended event, is an indicator of Bullwinkel’s style on the whole. Her writing is deft, incisive, at times stunning, the literary equivalent of a sharp left hook.
Elegantly structured around a series of knockout matches where eight girls become four become two, until an eventual champion is crowned, Headshot bears the hallmark of a book that is easy to read because the writer has done the work for us. The apparent simplicity of the structure, alluded to with a tournament map at the start, is reminiscent of a tightly written play, where the scenes have been arranged not just to tell a story but to impart a deeper meaning.
Throughout the book, an omniscient voice switches effectively between the girls whose names, such as Artemis Victor, Tanya Maw, Andi Taylor, feel alternately mythic, visceral and real. Their back stories are as distinctive as their fighting styles. Offering the reader respite from the pressure-cooker environment of the single setting, Bullwinkel flashes into the past and future with a time-bending inventiveness that works to show life outside the confines of the ring.
The granular detail of the sport puts the reader in the ring with these girls in the moment they go into battle, offering a blow-by-blow account
Despite or perhaps because of this scope, there is a remarkably condensed quality to the storytelling, lives reduced to their essence, similar to the work of Kathryn Scanlan, who is also published by Daunt. Bullwinkel’s writing has appeared in Tin House, The White Review, Vice and Guernica. Her short story collection Belly Up won a 2022 Whiting Award and her fiction and translation have been nominated for Pushcart prizes
Headshot is a most unusual coming-of-age story, a portrait of girlhood as seen through competitive contact sport, which is about as far away from the cliche of teenage girls as you can get. We see “the searing radiance” of the fighters, “who are the opposite of humans in decay. They are accelerating away from death with speed and precision”. One girl likens her approach to water; another “boxes like a cement truck filling a building’s foundation”, but as Bullwinkel notes, there is something collective about their energy.
The granular detail of the sport puts the reader in the ring with these girls in the moment they go into battle, offering a blow-by-blow account: “Andi saw Artemis’s glove hit her chest more than she felt it. She saw the red fabric of the glove move under her eyes and in between her shoulders. It was like she was flying over a red piece of fabric.” Like all good novels, we become immersed in a world, understanding how joy and violence intertwine.
Occasionally the viewpoint switches to an adult – a coach who claims a victory as his own, a mother who has driven 29 hours to get her daughter to Reno – but mostly it stays with the girls, who cumulatively have the power of a chorus or ensemble, as if the Lisbon sisters had taken up competitive boxing: “The judges are same-faced but different every time. Men, all of them, who to the girls look uniformly ancient but are actually aged from 26 to 55.”
The sheer physicality of the sport comes through in the visceral descriptions of the movements, the blows, the effects on the body, the dangers posed to the “small, kidney-bean-sized balloon inside every girl’s head”. Unlike other sports, there are no instruments, just protective coverings and body parts. The girls are putting themselves on the line and, for the most part, they seem to enjoy it. “The desire to please people is the desire to not be singular”, notes one in the middle of a pummelling. In Headshot, Bullwinkel has created eight memorably unique teenage girls whose aim is literally to be singular, which is to say, number one.
