{"id":10899,"date":"2025-07-29T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-07-29T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10899"},"modified":"2025-07-28T22:18:49","modified_gmt":"2025-07-29T02:18:49","slug":"headshot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/29\/headshot\/","title":{"rendered":"Headshot."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I\u2019ll start off the review with the conclusion: Rita Bullwinkel\u2019s Headshot<\/a><\/em>, one of the three novels shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize this year by the nominating committee that the board passed over in favor of Percival Everett\u2019s James<\/a><\/em>, is just not very good. It\u2019s probably the best of those three, but that is damning with faint praise. I\u2019ve often suspected that the Pulitzer process was skewed by non-literary considerations, but never more so this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Headshot<\/em> follows a series of eight relatively anonymous and uninteresting teenaged women competing in a boxing tournament held in an empty (maybe abandoned) warehouse in Reno, with modest prize money that hardly justifies the investment in time and pain required of its contestants. Bullwinkel uses the tournament as a gimmick to give personality sketches and life stories, backwards and forwards, for the various contestants, showing a broad range of archetypes but a surprising lack of insight into what makes any of these young women tick beyond some very general tropes (e.g., sibling rivalry). The plot is extremely beside the point; I don\u2019t even remember who won the tournament.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, I barely remember anything about these characters, and I\u2019m flabbergasted by all of the reviews<\/a> specifically praising<\/em> the characters as the novel\u2019s strength. They\u2019re not all the same, far from it, but they are all fairly boring. Most of them box because they have some kind of hole inside they\u2019re trying to fill \u2013 broken families, bullying, dead-end lives \u2013 but the sheer number of characters means none of them gets the kind of page time they\u2019d need for any depth, never mind actual development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And some of those characters\u2019 names are amateurish. Artemis Victor is one of the best of the eight boxers \u2013 she may have won the fictional tournament, I don\u2019t know \u2013 but I\u2019ll call Fowl on that one. Others just have weird character traits that don\u2019t add to their definition, like the one woman who has memorized pi to 50 digits and uses it as a sort of mantra\/coping strategy, like meditating, but appears to have no other interest in math or just school in general.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a deep sadness throughout the scenes in the ring and around it, even though Bullwinkel\u2019s descriptions of their later lives at least hint at richer futures to come \u2013 families, marriages, careers, lives longer than many people who get hit in the head this often end up with. (There\u2019s no mention of concussions or CTE.) Those are the stories that mean something here, but the structure leaves them as afterthoughts because the focus is far more on what\u2019s happening in the ring and in the girls\u2019 heads as they prepare to fight or trade punches. That just leaves those flash-forwards feeling like throwaways, sops to lighten the mood of what is overall a rather depressing novel, because it\u2019s easy to say \u201cand then she had a good life\u201d rather than exploring just what that meant and implying that this tournament, which loomed so large in the girls\u2019 minds as it happened, turned out to be irrelevant in the grand scheme.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t know what the committee was thinking here with the three choices, all written by women, none of which was even good enough for me to recommend. Everett\u2019s James<\/em> is one of the best novels written this century. Kelly Link\u2019s The Book of Love<\/a><\/em> was also eligible, and is better than any of the three shortlisted novels by a country mile. Tommy Orange\u2019s Wandering Stars<\/a><\/em> was better. I\u2019m sure there were other works of literary fiction more deserving than these three novels. The Board made the right call.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next up: I\u2019m slowly making my way through Robert Jackson Bennett\u2019s The Tainted Cup<\/a><\/em>, nominated for this year\u2019s Hugo Award for Best Novel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ll start off the review with the conclusion: Rita Bullwinkel\u2019s Headshot, one of the three novels shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize this year by the nominating committee that the board passed over in favor of Percival Everett\u2019s James, is just not very good. It\u2019s probably the best of those three, but that is damning with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[36,684,102],"class_list":["post-10899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-american-literature","tag-contemporary-novels","tag-disappointments","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10899"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10899\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10900,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10899\/revisions\/10900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}