Whereas studying Lucas Schaefer’s debut novel The Slip, I puzzled: Might it’s attainable that at this late date we discover ourselves within the midst of a Golden Age for boxing literature?
Earlier than you get too skeptical, take into account that The Slip simply received The Kirkus Prize in fiction, and I anticipate extra literary plaudits are on their method. And simply final yr, Rita Bullwinkel’s slim novel Headshot, set totally inside a lady’s newbie boxing event, was longlisted for the Booker Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer.
Nice boxing literature isn’t relegated to fiction and yearly there are quite a few nonfiction titles — histories, biographies, memoirs – that advantage consideration and this yr isn’t any completely different. Donald McRae’s The Final Bell and Anna Whitman’s Smooth Tissue Injury spring to thoughts. Then there are the confessional poems of Raisa Tolchinsky’s Glass Jaw, and the exuberant poetic experimentation of Eloisa Amezcua’s Combating Is Like a Spouse. And there’s Michael Winkler’s genre-exploding novel Grimmish, which needs to be learn to be believed.
Boxing as a publicly accessible and culturally related sport may be in a precarious place in the mean time, however boxing as a topic for literature is prospering. And in Lucas Schaefer’s The Slip, boxing is the social glue that binds its disparate characters collectively.
Extra particularly, it’s the boxing gymnasium that connects these characters. The novel begins with Bob Alexander, a 68-year-old “semi-affable curmudgeon” and member of the gymnasium’s “First Thingers,” an off-the-cuff group that often attends the gymnasium’s first-class of the day and consists of cash managers, realtors, and a district courtroom decide. The solid spirals out from the boxing gymnasium to incorporate a younger feminine cop, a telephone intercourse operator, a former boxer turned Director of Hospitality at an eldercare middle, and greater than a dozen others.
The novel is expansive, “maximalist” in scope. In that regard, it has much less in frequent with Headshot’s minimalist prose than say, Joyce Carol Oates’ undervalued A Ebook of American Martyrs, which issues an abortion supplier, the fundamentalist who murders him, and their respective daughters, considered one of which turns into a professional boxer.
Not solely does Schaefer’s novel transfer out and in between dozens of characters, it weaves between many years, from 1998 to 2014. On the coronary heart of the story is an unsolved thriller, described on the opening web page by a newspaper clipping with the headline: “Ten Years Later, Nonetheless No Signal of Lacking Teen.” The teenager in query is Nathaniel Rothstein, nephew of First Thinger Bob Alexander, who had been staying with Bob at his dwelling in Austin, Texas. Earlier than he out of the blue went lacking, Nathaniel’s summer time had been crammed with volunteering on the eldercare middle and taking his first classes on the boxing gymnasium.
Though the disappearance accounts for the guts of the plot, it’s the boxing gymnasium – Terry Tucker’s Boxing Fitness center – that’s the coronary heart of the novel. A few of Schaefer’s most eloquent, textured prose will be present in his descriptions of the gymnasium and the on a regular basis transcendence taking place there.
Folks got here and went, the gymnasium remained. It didn’t keep the identical, precisely. Yr after yr it grew to become ever extra itself. Inside, the partitions had been coated in tattered combat posters over which Terry was without end stapling recent ones, fights on the Alamodome, fights at Austin Coliseum, so many fights it appeared one might drain the partitions of cement and insulation and the constructing would stand on the energy of these posters alone … Within the gravel lot, patrons pulled exercise luggage from trunks or backseats, then began towards the storage doorways.
In interviews, Schaefer has defined the inspiration behind Terry Tucker’s Boxing Fitness center. Newly-arrived in Austin some twenty years again, Schaefer started attending night courses at Lord’s Fitness center and the place clearly left fairly an impression. Operated by Richard Lord, Austin’s temple of fistiana has produced champions like Jesus “El Matador” Chavez and Anissa “The Murderer” Zamarron. Lord’s Fitness center was additionally the topic of Frederick Wiseman’s 2010 documentary “Boxing Fitness center,” an interesting companion piece now to The Slip.
Like so many gyms, duct tape is ubiquitous in Terry Tucker’s Boxing Fitness center, and we encounter David’s favourite heavy bag “mummified from head to toe” with the stuff. “Alone within the thicket of heavy luggage, David swung his arms in a half-hearted shoulder stretch, regarded his world-weary competitor.” It’s attention-grabbing that Schaefer makes use of the time period “world-weary” to explain the heavy bag. There’s a German time period, Weltschmerz, which is commonly translated as “world-weariness.” It’s used to precise the melancholy that arises from one’s sense that the world simply isn’t fairly how we imagined it might be.
Taking one other step, I feel Weltzschmerz prods us to contemplate that once we say “the world,” we regularly merely imply ourselves. As a result of what’s the world besides what we see of it, and the way we see it? Our weariness stems from our sense that we aren’t how we imagined we’d be, that our lives aren’t as thrilling or adventurous or fulfilling as we’d daydreamed all these past-lives in the past, as bright-eyed youngsters not but benumbed by the infinite errands of maturity.
Within the gymnasium, Schaefer’s characters hearth punches within the ring or on the heavy bag and bodily exertion mixes with, even permits, daydreaming. In a single scene, David, the Director of Hospitality, remembers again to his youthful days of potential within the gymnasium as he and his cohort
turned their fists sideways and located rhythm with the velocity luggage, as they realized to make the heavy luggage swing, they felt inside themselves, regardless of themselves, the tug of risk, and each smack of glove to bag, or fist to face, started to sound somewhat like What if?
Schaefer places us subsequent to David, many years later, nonetheless on the now-mummified heavy bag.
On uncommon days like at present, when he stuffed his resentments and his jealousies and his regrets into his gloves and raised his fists to his face, he forgot his iffy knees and added girth. He forgot his forty-seven-year-old self altogether … On this second, David is not the Director of Hospitality at Shoal Creek Rehabilitation. He’s David the longer term lawyer, the one-day businessman, the sometime therapist. David the maybe-not-a-tomato-can, who takes it 9 rounds in Alvarado and wakes the following morning bruised however prepared for extra.
The central storyline of The Slip is a thriller plot, a disappearance. That plotline delivers, and I’m not seeking to spoil it’s conclusion for you. What The Slip does, much more successfully than revealing its clues and twists relating to the lacking teen, is remind us that though we prefer to assume such mysteries are positioned inside different individuals, we are sometimes extra of a thriller to ourselves.
Characters change and rework all all through the novel. Some need to change into one thing new. Some are merely seeking to escape what they’ve been. Terry Tucker’s Boxing Fitness center is the house the place these individuals need to change. Possibly it’s an newbie seeking to flip professional. Possibly it’s a lady seeking to acquire confidence and assertiveness. Possibly it’s a middle-aged workplace employee seeking to lose fifteen kilos. In considered one of my favourite strains from the novel, Schaefer writes “They launch themselves from themselves.”
Placing the e book down, one thriller revealed and tallying my very own ‘What ifs,’ I’m left questioning: Can the Nice American novel be a boxing novel? Does The Slip belong alongside Huck Finn, Moby Dick, and The Grapes of Wrath? That’s not for me to resolve, actually not at present. What has posterity ever achieved for me, as considered one of my faculty professors appreciated to say. However heck, why not? Is there a greater metaphor for the USA within the twenty first century than a sport during which two individuals beat the crap out of each other for diminishing returns, whereas almost definitely being swindled by anyone on the enterprise finish of the deal?
What’s vital at present is that with The Slip, Lucas Schaefer swings large and his purpose is true. Let the longer term resolve the place he ranks. Proper now, simply take pleasure in a rattling high-quality e book. –Andrew Rihn
