Henk's Reviews > Headshot

Longlisted for the Booker prize 2024, a surprisingly punchy read 🥊
Divided in short sections, in a structure governed by the tournament of a girls boxing competition in Reno, many themes are touched upon in the 1 on 1 confrontations between the characters
You can’t train for a sport unless you believe you have control over your own destiny. The point of training is to change the outcome of the future. You train to change something you otherwise would have lost.

Headshot consists of short sections, that have the electric feel of a match, even though flashbacks and omniscient narrator takes you out of the sport slipstream at times. We sometimes jumps decades into the future of the girls but also learn their current teenager interiority. Still in slickness of narration and how we sometimes zoom in to the deeper drivers of the girls competing, the book at times made me think of the film Challengers of Luca Guadagnino.

Rita Bullwinkel plays and illuminates themes in the matches she offers us from the quarterfinals onwards that happen in Reno Nevada, situated in a sad gym called Bob’s Boxing Palace. The dichotomy of underdogs and pedigree, well trained and talented, rich and poor, chaos and confusion versus good form, adaptability versus resoluteness are presented, without universal truths being offered.

It was refreshing to see many teenage girls perspective rendered with nuance in a book, most of the time they are relegated to stereotypes or ridiculed as vapid, and here we have 8 fully rendered characters with motivations, coping mechanisms and various social-economical backgrounds.

I found this an assured debut and, even though I find it hard to say what the goal of the novel as such was, I was along the ride and enjoyed the book. And I never had much interest in boxing before!
3.5 stars rounded up.

Quotes:
Everything the coaches have taught the girls is in the past.

Artemis Victor has no idea what it takes to own a house, but she knows what it takes to beat other people, which is what owning property seems like, beating other people at owning a piece of the earth and making that piece of earth yours, not to be shared with other people, because the owning of the property is a product of your victory over other humans, as in, you won more dollars than them so now this slice of land is yours for keeps.

Both Artemis and Andi have broken their fists loads of times, but Artemis’s fists have been broken a dozen more times than Andi’s, and, though Artemis doesn’t know it now, this additional dozen number of finger breakings has already pushed the fragility that is her human hand over the bridge and into the realm of permanently damaged. When Artemis is sixty she won’t be able to hold a cup of tea.

Andi hadn’t as much loved her father as needed him.

Whereas Kate Heffer looked at her life and what lay before her and she allowed time and events to circle her, things occurring for the sole purpose that she could walk through them, be a part of them, and then move on. For Kate, time was a thing that existed only to have her in it. Kate was a goal setter. She made detailed lists and kept highly organised folders.

That’s the thing with children. So often what they do, or what they think they should do, or what they think they are good at is just some product of something someone told them that they would be good at. If you’re tall people say, Surely you’re magnificent at basketball. If you’re a girl shaped like a block without hips, people say swimming, boxing, the discus, and then one thinks, Am I good at these things? Surely if people say it, it must be true.

It’s always better to destroy something if you can’t have it.

Andi’s in snooze city because sleeping is her all-time best coping mechanism. She sleeps like some people drink liquor.

All the coaches Rachel has ever been trained by are men with something to prove, or something that’s been lost. The coach Rachel Doricko has here in Reno has three kids he’s lost complete custody of. Debt collectors plague his phone. He came to the gym Rachel trains at because he wanted a place to be in power. Rachel tolerates this desire of his like one tolerates a tax. Everything has a price, thinks Rachel. Everything I want I have to give something for, thinks Rachel. This coach has taught me things about form and stance but I have paid for it, thinks Rachel.

The desire to please people is the desire to not be singular.

I love fighting Izzy, thinks Iggy, mid-throw. I love the way she looks when I beat her. I love the way I feel when I beat her. It’s the most important thing in the world to Iggy. Beating someone at something that matters more to them than anything is like squashing a fly. You can see the guts of a fly after it’s been smashed

It’s not that all of the girls in the Daughters of America tournament are punching their way through a dead person.

The people in mass with her are what make her the least sure of God’s existence. They are, most of them, cruel and small.

It is a gift to be alive, and to be fighting each other.

There are people who, just by looking at disasters, implicate themselves in the violence at hand.

Fighting is the opposite of being in hiding