National Female Boxing Team | Basetrack 18 / CC BY NC ND 2.0
In her debut novel, Rita Bullwinkel portrays girlhood as a full-throttle battle, fought out over the course of a high school girls’ boxing tournament. Duking out their identities in the male-dominated space of the boxing ring, the protagonists of Headshot (Viking, 2024) both enact and undermine the familiar spectacle of young women “coming of age.”
Bob’s Boxing Palace in Reno, Nevada, is decidedly not flashy. The girls are there to fight. Parents, refs, and coaches are there to check their phones, daydream about alcoholic Slurpees, fall asleep, and generally wonder why they are in a shabby, unpromising stadium on the outskirts of a second-rate city. But between pummelings, Bullwinkel presents expansive portraits of eight teenage girls—the tournament’s competitors.
The 12th Annual 18 & Under Daughters of America Cup is held over two days in July. Artemis Victor, Andi Taylor, Kate Heffer, Rachel Doricko, Iggy and Izzy Lang, Rose Mueller, and Tanya Maw bring their pasts and futures, lived along varied strata of class, geography, and life experience, to the ring. The novel is split into competition brackets and bouts—Artemis Victor v. Andi Taylor, Kate Heffer v. Rachel Doricko, and so forth—until we arrive at the final showdown. Within the novel’s tight focus on each fight in the ring—and occasional drifts to the parking lot—Bullwinkel explores the pasts and futures of each contestant with an unflinching yet tender attention.
What connects these characters are their bodies: their grunting, ducking, perspiring bodies. Headshot is filled with the girls’ physical micro-choices: when to feint, when to strike, when to gracefully admit defeat, when to dredge up that last remaining ounce of courage. These choices, Bullwinkel seems to say, are the product of each girl’s philosophy and will eventually play out in other performances: wedding planner, actress, mother, administrative assistant. And the audience, even the bored parents checking their phones, read how the girls use their bodies for a sign of how they will step into and inhabit those roles.
In one particularly hard-hitting scene, Rachel Doricko, a brutal girl who visualizes her body as ground veal and wears a coonskin cap as a talisman to unnerve her opponents, meditates on language’s gendered stickiness, and then leverages that unease against her opponent, Kate Heffer:
Even when your mother is asking you to do her a favor (be a good girl) it sounds like she is asking you to wear a coat made out of clear plastic…thinks Rachel. How do words become so gross and synthetic?… Thinks Rachel. Good boy, says Rachel. Rachel tries extra hard to enunciate the good boy and Kate Heffer can hear the words through Rachel’s mouth-guard-clad teeth.
Bullwinkel’s narrative loosens from one boxer’s consciousness and latches to her opponent, an approach that has drawn comparisons to Virginia Woolf: “Mrs. Ramsey with boxing gloves,” M.J. Franklin wrote in a recent review.
The dexterity with which Bullwinkel moves through embodied female violence to zoomed-out omniscience is this novel’s strength. But there is also a moral safeness to Bullwinkel’s zany voice, the same moral safeness couched in the cutesy skaz of the undeniably lovable George Saunders. Bullwinkel’s and Saunders’s inarticulate characters navigate evil in quirky but intelligible ways.
Bullwinkel has described Headshot as “a suburban novel.” Like much of Saunders’s work, her book portrays our begrudging participation in the monotonous, violent spectacle of life. As Jed Perl recently noted in the New York Review of Books, writers engaging in the concept of spectacle do so in the wake of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967), in which the public are overloaded by seductive images. But Perl critiques those artists and writers who accept this condition as a given in twentieth-century art: “Spectacle is only one kind of human experience, one imaginative possibility among others.”
Behind the flattening roles they perform (the fighter, the good girl), Bullwinkel’s characters experience questing inner lives. They participate in spectacle, but what they seek is goodness, however ineloquent. In this, Headshot’s grunts, punches, and black eyes are optimistic. But having a center of gravity, reach-around advantage, and crazy eyes isn’t everything. It’s about playing the game.
