Reading the Booker Prize - Headshot, Rita Bullwinkel
- Publisher – Viking
- Published – Out Now
- Price – £9.99 paperback | £5.99 Kindle
I told myself that I was going to wait to start reading the Booker Prize longlist, but this sounded so good that I had to download it and read it straight away. And I liked it enough that I ended up ordered a physical copy too.
Here's the blurb:
An unexpected tragedy at a community pool. A family’s unrelenting expectation of victory. The desire to gain or lose control; to make time speed up or stop; to be frighteningly, undeniably good at something. Each of the eight teenage girl boxers in this blistering debut novel has her own reasons for the sacrifices she has made to come to Reno, Nevada, to compete to be named the best in the country. Through a series of face-offs that are raw, ecstatic, and punctuated by flashes of humor and tenderness, prizewinning writer Rita Bullwinkel animates the competitors’ pasts and futures as they summon the emotion, imagination, and force of will required to win.
Frenetic, surprising, and strikingly original, Headshot is a portrait of the desire, envy, perfectionism, madness, and sheer physical pleasure that motivates young women to fight—even, and perhaps especially, when no one else is watching.
Headshot is completely unlike anything else I've read. It takes us through a girls' boxing competition round by round, putting us in the minds and bodies of the young girls punching each other over their two-minute rounds until somebody wins. As they fight we get intimate access to the thoughts, emotions, and physicality of eight uniquely complex young women.
Bullwinkel really excels at making her characters come alive. Each of the girls stands out as her own person, with her own voice and her own desire to carve a place in the world. And as we see them fight we go on a journey with each of them, learning what brought them to the point where they stand in a boxing ring in a tin gym in Nevada in front of less than two dozen people to touch each other over and over again, and learning where they'll go with their lives after the weekend is over. Each of them goes on a journey during their fights, too, and we get to experience it with them just as their opponent does.
In many ways this does what I wish Chetna Maroo's Western Lane had done, which was to give me more time with the characters and more time seeing what the sport actually means to them. In Western Lane the sport takes a back seat to the emotional journey that Gopi goes on, but here the two things are intrinsically linked.
My only criticism is that after we've spent so much time with these girls, after all the focus on the fact that they define themselves and are not defined by the men who train them, the men who judge them despite being less qualified than them, the men who don't particularly want to be there, we're shown the tournament final through the eyes of a male sports reporter. After the raw beauty and power of the preceding six fights I was ready for a big, cathartic final, and we aren't given it. Instead, like the girls who lost, it all ends with a whimper and then it's over. Maybe that's the point, or maybe there's a point being made about how no matter how much a woman excels her story will end up being shown through a male lens that diminishes her, but if that's the case it didn't really land and I feel like I'm reaching by trying to get that from the text.
Regardless of how the ending made me feel, this is a stunning debut and thoroughly deserves its place on the Booker longlist. One of my favourites of the year.
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