A couple weeks ago Esquire Magazine took a break from finding the 10 best long sleeve shirts and 30 best bourbons (for men) to wonder: Why Are Debut Novels Failing to Launch? Kate Dwyer’s piece first describes the old process of setting up a debut for success, namely Jack Kerouac’s agent placing excerpts of On the Road in various magazines in the years leading up to its publication. Nowadays, though, there are more books published and more ways to spread the news; unfortunately, that also means that audiences are more splintered, which makes it hard for any one new book to rise above the fray and “break out.” “Break out” is a somewhat nebulous term to anchor a whole article on; there is attention paid to debuts landing on the bestseller list – only five non-celebrity-authored debut books made the New York Times bestseller list in 2021 – but there’s also some smaller indeterminate number of sales that would allow a publisher and writer to put out another book, and there’s also a long-term “break out” wherein a book’s sales grow gradually into a hit, but probably never rises to the level of a bestseller over a given week. Regardless of how one might “break out,” the general consensus is that it’s not happening enough. (Here we might see a general split between commercial publishing and less profit focused publishing. The big houses see work as an investment; if they can’t rely on debut books to do well, then acquiring debut novels deepens the cost of investment to bring in new writers. The small presses who nominally care more about quality will put a book out if they think it’s good, not expecting any kind of “break out”; what happens in practice is that big publishers are happy to dump the cost of publishing new and interesting debuts to smaller presses and then pick up any relatively successful debut author’s next book.) The various publicists and publishing higher-ups interviewed in the piece all outline the new ways that debuts have to be hawked: spraying and praying on advance copies, getting authors to do their own publicity via the indignity of a front facing video, hope to get mentioned within the swirling morass of Booktok, get an influencer or celebrity book club to pick the book (more hoping and praying), have the author build a persona that makes people parasocially interested in them, have the author hire their own freelance publicist (so, essentially, have a bunch of money on hand already), keep marketing the book far beyond release date, and, perhaps most importantly, enter the world of literary signal boosting (aka “community”), where authors continually hype up each other’s books, with one backscratch traded for another in the hope that a rising tide will lift all boats.
Because the publishing industry, like the rest of capital, is locked into a model of unceasing growth and profit chasing, the idea that publishers would just put out better books, and less of them, is nowhere to be found in the piece. And that’s fine; not many people would answer your calls if part of your article’s claim was that most debut novels were bad, and get lost because they simply just aren’t that good to begin with. But when considering the difference between now and the release On the Road, one wonders: would a major publisher even put out something like On the Road now? That might be a Coffee House Press book these days, and then maybe 2024 Jack Kerouac’s second novel would sell to one of the Big 5. Publishers, as much as they claim to have no control over what sells and what doesn’t – thus leading them to go quantity over quality in the hopes that one or two will stick – still do have some influence on what people buy, and could put out a list of good books all the time rather than a wide array of books of varying quality that could, with the right bump, sell a lot. Literary fiction already isn’t a big seller; go make bank in the genre and celebrity memoir fields, and instead just put out ‘a couple good books a season’ – a debut here and there as new talents announce themselves. Make the literary market only quality books – imagine that! But we live in the world of rapacious capital, the world of astroturfed Booktok influencers, of bleary-eyed authors having to explain what their book is about – another elevator pitch! – to the unflinching gaze of the front facing camera, of art having to compete against commerce and the million other avenues of entertainment that are available to the modern consumer. It’s a wonder any books “break out” at all, let alone good ones.
Would Rita Bullwinkel’s 2024 debut novel Headshot count as a “break out”? It got raves in the Times and Washington Post1, though it never cracked the best seller list, probably because it is a strange book about young women boxing, hardly au courant with publishing trends, and the market is not usually friendly to artistic risk taking. (Maybe an award would do the trick, or an alphabetically high spot on a year-end list.) In any view besides the commercial – the one we ought to respect the least – it is a stunning success, a work that requires none of the hazardous praise of “potential” that comes along with most debuts, an interesting and thorny piece of art that takes the novel to new and exciting places. You’d hope that’s enough for at least a couple more books in the future, but I suppose I can add to the chorus of hosannas to Headshot just to try and make sure.
Headshot follows eight teenage boxers at the Daughters of America Cup tournament in Reno, Nevada, with each chapter focusing on a different bout. The tournament is not some kind of national draw, with a packed to capacity crowd; it’s held in a half empty gym off the strip, the only viewers of the fights being the judges, the coaches, the fighters’ families, and a couple poor scrubs assigned to cover the tournament for an industry magazine and a local rag. The trappings of fame and money aren’t what’s at stake in the tournament; what instead impels them is a kind of base level of competition, some mix of competition with others and with the self, proving something ineffable, being the best at a very specific skill. That skill, at is base, is inflicting damage on another person, and the winnowing down of the tournament reveals just who has the correct temperament to do that to any and all comers. The ring in a half empty gym is a lonely place, which allows Bullwinkel plenty of room to operate, an ethereal presence within the proceedings, delving deeply into her characters’ inner lives will also briskly narrating their engagements. Bullwinkel nimbly juxtaposes harsh physicality with a minute attention to the otherworldly; the result is a novel unlike any in recent memory.
“If the Daughters of America tournament bracket was flipped counterclockwise on its side, it would look like a family tree,”2 writes Bullwinkel, and she insists on a kind of brute physical transitive connectedness between all the participants, regardless of whether they fought or not – one hand touches another which touches another which touches another, as if one traded a bit of the self while trading blows. “It was, is always, a big deal to traverse so many states, to be assigned to meet another you, an equal, another girl who lives in another world who also spends time alone hitting things with her hands.” The tournament features a broadly familiar yet singular taxonomy of youth sports participants – members of dynastic families (Artemis Victor, the last of her very successful sisters to participate, primed for years to win this tournament); a pair of cousins, Iggy and Izzy Lang, who train together and are forced, by the bracket’s cruel logic, to face off in the first round; loners who find solace in the grind and solitude of training, an escape in the space of the gym; athletes with a studied air of unease playing the mental game as well as the physical (Rachel Doricko, who wears a ratty coonskin when not in the ring and spits out Dada-ist fragmentary phrases through her mouthguard during matches); strivers hoping, through sheer effort, to become “the best in the world at something,” born into a “perfect body for boxing” even though they’d rather be a dancer, “but with a body like that, nobody ever said: Dancing, maybe that is a thing you should try.”
Bullwinkel writes a lot of paragraphs that I’d characterize as “fifty-dollar bills,” in honor of the section in Joy Williams’ Breaking and Entering that made George Plimpton tell her she was “showing off.” They accrue in the novel like body shots, scoring points like clockwork. Take this ripper from the middle of Izzy and Iggy Lang’s fight:
The boxing world that Iggy has built for herself hangs in the room in Reno, above the bout, like a large circular discus. On top of Iggy’s world is Izzy, and on top of that, at the far reaches of the ceiling, are the worlds constructed by the other girl boxers. They pile up, one world after the other, like a stack of thin, scratched CDs. If you stand in the middle of the ring you can send your mind up through the hole of the worlds built by the other girl boxers. You can travel through the layers of different imagined futures, and the different ways each girl has of being. Artemis Victor’s and Andi Taylor’s worlds are the closest to the ceiling. They’re smashed up to the skylight, their fight so long ago, earlier this morning, that they are a little hard to see. Andi’s is splintering a bit, or scratched so bad that you can’t tell if you’re looking at a light refraction.
Bullwinkel then calmly descends back through all those layers, through the discuses of the fights that have happened and the fights still to come, as if revealing new planes of reality always floating just beyond our reach, moving away towards becoming a refraction of the big lights up top. Outside of the ring, Bullwinkel is just as perceptive, including a section on the city of Reno at night that feels a bit like “Time Passes” from Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, condensed over a “night” and a “deep night,” a gliding into the illusory word of frictionlessness:
On the night of July 14, while the girl boxers sleep, Reno’s clubs fill up with adults looking for a theme-park-style evening. There are quarters in the casinos’ machines. The outfits the adults choose to wear out are special. The twenty-four-hour lights of the casinos are like the lights of the reptile tanks at the zoo. They’re always on and always hot and blue so that the insides of the clubs look like something other than day or night. It’s as if, inside these Reno clubs, there is no sun and there is no moon. Inside the blue light the adults become their theme-park versions. Their skin looks better than it has ever been. Their bodies look slimmer than they are. Money runs through their fingers. They dance and drink and fuck with almost no effort.
Further into that same night, Rachel Doricko’s grandmother, her companion for the tournament, looks over Reno:
The white-orb dome of Caesars looks like a barren ceramic planet. Rachel Doricko’s grandmother wonders if people will ever live on other planets. It doesn’t seem so far-fetched. Building a city in the desert seems like an equally impossible challenge, and here she is, with her girl-boxer granddaughter, at a youth women’s boxing tournament, sleeping in what looks like uninhabitable land.
More fifty dollar bills than a bank. Bullwinkel’s sections on the fights themselves are just as full of glimmering turns of phrase. Boxing is a sport that lends itself well to literature, and has a long novelistic tradition; Bullwinkel somehow manages to step out of the shadow of precedent and avoid the hoary cliches of the genre. Every punch and every dodge has its own particular texture, each fighter their own rhythm, each bout its own cadence. “Andi had seen a tunnel of a vacancy between her right fist and Artemis’s left rib cage. It had looked illuminated, like it was just begging to be filled with Andi’s fist. Andi had put her hand in the hole to Artemis’s body, that tunnel of vacancy, and then was filling the hole again, and again, until the referee got between them.” In another fight, “Rachel Doricko wants the judges and the coaches and the other girls watching to look at her and see that she is advancing in the slow, steady, military line of a wildfire that is dooming Kate Heffer.” Another fight: “Artemis Victor thinks of herself not as a stone mortar but as a bucket of water. Anybody who has ever seen a flood knows the violence that water can do. But water can also be violent in a smaller, more insidious fashion. The smallest leak in a pipe can destroy a house from the inside out.” The final (spoiler alert!): “The rounds go back and forth like this, as if Rose Mueller and Rachel Doricko are having an argument. The details of their debate are elegant. Rose Mueller and Rachel Doricko keep swapping round victories as if they are collaborative painters taking turns on the same canvas. Rachel Doricko boxes with the quick strokes of an impressionist, whereas Rose Mueller boxes with the detail of a photorealist.” In the hands of another writer, these might seem like overly precious abstractions, but Bullwinkel grounds them in gritty particulars: bruised ribs, swelling eyes, the creases the equipment leaves in the skin, the wallop of each successive jab, hit after hit after hit after hit.
There’s a kind of cruel irony to a novel about transcendent performances in half-empty gyms not being as big as it should be, as if the novel couldn’t help but mirror its protagonists, shining out to a world hardly looking. But transcendence is transcendence, no matter what, and one of the best things about literature and its attendant possibility of posterity is that a tree falling in the forest with no one around can still be heard months, years, or even decades later, buzzy “break out” or no.
You can get Headshot at your local bookstore, local library, or online at Bookshop.org, where all purchases support independent bookstores around the country. If you liked this post, please share it with a friend!
Funnily enough, a persona based debut – Honor Levy’s My First Book – got probably just as much review attention (though shaded negatively) and likely sold just about as many copies as Headshot, despite being miles worse as a book. (I’ve tried; I can’t get through it.) All press is good press!
The bracket also, at one point, “looks like a children’s nursery mobile.”