The Brooklyn Rail

The women’s eighteen-and-under boxing tournament at the center of Rita Bullwinkel’s debut novel Headshot is not to be taken seriously. At least, not if you take the narrator’s word for it. There’s the location: Reno, Nevada, which is like if Las Vegas “had shrunk its own glowing strip architecture and handed it down.” There’s the gym hosting the event: Bob’s Boxing Palace, a tired warehouse chosen because the titular Bob knows the head of the Women’s Youth Boxing Association. There’s the prize money: 100 dollars, or the same amount as the entry fee. There are the judges: all men, presumably Friends of Bob, that learned the rules from a one-pager and YouTube videos. There’s the name of the tournament: the Daughters of America Cup, which obscures both the sport and the competitors.

And then, there are the girls. Bullwinkel writes from the point of view of an anonymous, omniscient narrator who seems at first to regard them with the same disinterest and light disdain as the narrator views the tournament itself. Women’s boxing, we’re told, will never be “something respected enough to put every ounce of your energy into.” These girls are misfits and discards whose families largely ignore or are baffled by their pursuit of the sport. One girl hopes to frighten the competition by wearing a weird hat. Another drove across the country alone, her mother too absorbed in her new husband and child to notice her daughter’s absence. Due in part to the novel’s brevity and the number of competitors, some characters (like the youngest in a dynasty of girl boxers) read more like archetypes, while others (the girl who pretends to pray in-between bouts) are richly realized.

In contrast to the deafening cheers and lightning-fast punches that define pay-per-view boxing, the arena of Bullwinkel’s Headshot is hushed. The physical blows are secondary to the messy, vicious, desperate thoughts running through each girl’s mind. The novel follows the

structure of the tournament’s bracket, with each chapter introducing us to new competitors. The narrator dips into every girl’s inner-monologue in distinct, often brief paragraphs that reveal their backstories and motivations. Initially, this incremental storytelling approach—which includes multiple perspectives and timelines, often within a single page—feels chaotic, perhaps intentionally so.

As the tournament progresses, Bullwinkel’s narrative tone shifts dramatically from being dismissive of the girls to wonderstruck. With each round, they are leaving the world of Bob’s Boxing Palace behind and entering another world entirely of their own making. All of the adult bystanders, Bullwinkel writes, “are dull around the edges in a way that glares compared with the searing radiance of these girl fighters… Even the dullest of the judges can feel that the girls are not quite human.” The girls focus only on one another: on every vulnerability, every adjustment, every tactic that the others expose in the ring. Each victor leaves her match feeling the “hot burn of the next-bout girls’ eyes.” They are connected by a powerful desire to be the best at this one thing—even if no one else back home cares.

Bullwinkel makes surprising and shrewd connections between the world of this one tournament and the other hidden worlds that girls build in plain sight. She frequently references the ubiquitous “hand-clapping games” of American girlhood. The choreography and chants of these games vary slightly depending on when and where you grew up, but are largely the same—as though generations of girls are passing them down through “a thousand-mile-long tin can and string.” To the adult eye, the sight of little girls playing hand-clapping games is benign, even idyllic. But for the girls, these games are life and death. They learn them as quickly as possible, lest they show up to the playground with a chink in their armor. Players push one another to get better, faster, to endure, to kill or be killed, often while staring directly into one another’s eyes. “There are so few activities that allow the intimacy of staring,” one of the tournament’s competitors thinks. Hand-clapping games are one. Boxing is another.

It makes sense that as girls age, there are fewer peers left in the game. Bullwinkel nods at the broader societal forces that encourage most girls to dull the sharp edges with which they once played. When one competitor is drummed out of the tournament in the first round, her mother consoles her by saying “only vulgar girls become the best in the world at boxing.” This girl will go on to be a wedding planner who habitually reminds her brides that this is the best day of their lives. The girls that remain in the tournament are the ones that, for one reason or another, haven’t learned to be ashamed of their vulgarity.

For those of us whose hands still remember the choreography of the games we once played, Headshot is a fearless and faithful rendering of what it’s like to inhabit the secret world of girls—the disorientation, the violence, the delusions of grandeur, the simultaneous intimacy with and alienation from one another—through the eyes of eight competitors at the very edge of girlhood, playing the last hand-clapping game of their lives.