‘Headshot’ is a bracing, inventive gutpunch of a novel

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:

“Here she is now, being beat badly, with a puffed-out bloody eye that makes her look like her body is a single-use, disposable paper plate, and that the paper plate of Kate’s body has been used for a barbecue where there is a lot of ketchup so that the ketchup has been dribbled all over the paper plate of Kate’s face to such an extent that the plate is soggy and almost unrecognizable and most certainly no longer of use.”

There’s violence in the book, of course, but it’s not about the bloodshed and, to be dazzled by it, you don’t need to care about boxing (I very much do not). Like “The Wolves,” the young women in “Headshot” are individuals — individuals who crave or avoid attention, who command their own power or who run away from it — but they also function as a group.

It’s a group whose members are so baffled by the world around them and its confounding expectations that, at least for this moment in their lives, what makes the most sense is to meet another girl as her equal and try to punch her in the face.

Headshot

By: Rita Bullwinkel.

Publisher: Viking, 203 pages, $28.