When a book is described as “exciting,” it generally refers to an idea expressed in a brand new way or a breakneck search for a killer, but when I say “Headshot” is exciting I mean that the experience of reading it is exciting.
Rita Bullwinkel’s novel occasionally made me think of the Sarah DeLappe play, “The Wolves,” which Jungle Theater performed and which also is an intimate, surprising glimpse into the thoughts of teenage girls. But I’ve never read anything quite like “Headshot.”
It has eight characters, competitors in a single-elimination boxing tournament. Each chapter in “Headshot” encompasses one of the bouts at the tournament, which is in Reno, Nev., building to the championship.
Obviously, there’s built-in suspense around who’s going to win the title. But “Headshot” is less interested in the trophy than in what preoccupies the young women, all of whom have different approaches to the sport and what it means in their lives.
My favorite chapter is the first, “Artemis Victor vs. Andi Taylor.” Almost like a short play, its simple, declarative sentences flip back and forth between the brains of the two competitors, who sometimes think about boxing strategy but more often think about what brought them to this point.
Andi, for instance, is trying to atone for the death of a boy while she was on lifeguard duty: “Most people in her life don’t seem to believe she is capable of anything, let alone killing someone with purpose, and with the wandering-eyes murder of the little boy, she wonders if she is also capable of killing someone with her fists.”
The prose is not flashy but Bullwinkel, an editor at McSweeney’s magazine, comes up with one brilliant descriptive phrase after another: After she absorbs a punch, Taylor’s head “feels as if it is filled with undercooked pie.” In a later chapter, boxer Kate Heffer “can feel her rib bending inward like a cheap utensil, the teeth of a plastic fork pulled in opposite directions.”
Kate also is the subject of this rapidly accelerating stunner:
