James v. Headshot
The 2025 Tournament of Books, presented by Field Notes, is an annual battle royale among 16 of the best novels of the previous year.
MARCH 19 • QUARTERFINALS
James
v. Headshot
Judged by Stephen Kearse
Stephen Kearse is the author of the novels Liquid Snakes and In the Heat of the Light. He writes music and book criticism for the Nation, Pitchfork, NPR, the Washington Post, and other outlets. His short stories have been published in Joyland and The Deadlands. Originally from Atlanta, he now lives in metro Washington, DC, with his family. Known connections to this year’s contenders: None. / noreasontopretend.com
Headshot and James are both works of portraiture. The former, set at a girls’ boxing tournament in Reno, follows eight participants as they duke their way to the finals. Only one goes the distance, but Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot treats all the girls as protagonists, weaving their disparate dreams, skills, and circumstances into a tapestry of shared angst and yearning. The novel presents girls’ boxing less as a sport and more as a collective pugilist spirit coursing through each bout. The tournament is a communion as much as a contest—a kinetic class photo.
Percival Everett’s James, set in antebellum America, offers a more classical portrait, and also has sneakier aims. James, the main character, is a fugitive from slavery and from the literary canon. Everett bases him on Jim from Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and spends the novel reimagining the character’s arc and Twain’s 19th-century America. Instead of serving as an accessory to the hijinks of the bumbling Huck, Jim acts as the picaresque adventure’s aperture. The inversion fundamentally transforms the story into a darker and more anxious tale yet maintains Twain’s swashbuckling mood.
I enjoyed how openly subversive both books are: Everett and Bullwinkel both take familiar genres and stories and make them strange and offbeat. Headshot seeks to avoid standard sport narratives of scrappy ascent, triumph, and self-realization. The narration is digressive and loose with time, often exiting the ring to explore characters’ backgrounds. One fighter, Rachel Doricko, views the competition as “meaningless,” the omniscient narrator reveals.
Win or lose this Daughters of America Cup, the biggest most important, most competitive youth women’s boxing championship, time will march on and Rachel will walk through it, and while there might be some meaning somewhere, it’s not in the win, it’s in the fact that Rachel is trying.
Time frequently does march on, far into the girls’ futures, where they variously become wedding planners, accountants, and university employees, among other vocations. Doricko, who makes it to the final fight, becomes a grocery store manager, a fate the narrator attributes to her never being “able to muster the gumption for dramatic chance taking on things outside of boxing.” These detours and leaps forward are meant to deflate the presumed significance of youth sports, which statistically produce more regular folk than Lebrons and Serenas and Tigers. Bullwinkel, who’s said she’s a former athlete herself, clearly wants to honor the way these kids commit their bodies and identities to a single pursuit—and also acknowledge that the pageantry and intensity of youth sports are extremely ridiculous.
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But so little of the narrative takes place in real time that the contrast Headshot tries to strike between teen ambition and adult reality falters. The girls don’t talk to each other because “language has no place inside the gym. Inside the gym the language used is the language of animals—the language of smell and feeling and sound.” But the elegance and tactility of Bullwinkel’s prose don’t make up for the inertia of the fights. There’s little sport to the matches—as in skill and style being applied tactically to produce an outcome. Shit talking, cheating, fouls, and bullying virtually never happen despite the apparent ferality of the girls. Headshot instead includes pages and pages of backstory and epilogue, an approach that discounts the moment-to-moment drama of boxing, which is one of the most thrilling bloodsports. Teen sports are certainly inconsequential, but by definition, shouldn’t even vainglory feel glorious?
James is dramatic to the core, every little line of dialogue packed with emotion or intrigue, or building toward a larger payoff. Part of the book’s momentum is built in. Fugitive stories are inherently tense and engrossing because life on the lam is perilous and active: a character’s future is a giant question mark. An enslaved person navigating antebellum America only supercharges that dynamic. Additionally, James largely sticks to Twain’s plot, which bounces from place to place along the winding Mississippi River. This all makes it a very plotty novel—a rarity for historical fiction. I was pleasantly surprised by how much of a page-turner this was.
But what made the book the superior book for me was Everett’s consistent ability to dramatize thought and solitude even when the plot cooled. “I was somewhere else. I was not on one side of that damn river or the other. I was not on the Mississippi. I was not in Missouri,” James says in one of many moments of rich, stolen peace. His illegal ability to read and write, which he tries to hide from Huck, charges all of their interactions. There’s a distance to their relationship despite their intimacy, and this moment, which occurs when Huck is asleep and James is simply touching books, is one of many where that disconnect erupts to the surface. James, to put it differently, is a novel in which the present is imminently meaningful. Even its lulls and digressions are electric.
The book also has a more pronounced and rewarding sense of play compared to Headshot. The dialogue is frequently hilarious, often darkly so. At one point, James and Norman, a Black man who passes for white, are pretending to be a slave and owner. They plan to sell James, have him escape, then split the money, and Norman struggles to maintain the dangerous ruse as they pass through a town. “Listen, you’ve got to relax,” James tells Norman. “To all of them you’re white. Hell, to me you’re white.” Norman’s response: “There’s no need to be insulting.” Elsewhere, in dream sequences, the bookish James argues with Voltaire and John Locke, roasting the liberty-touting Enlightenment figures for their hypocrisy when it came to slavery.
Moments like this show James isn’t about “modernizing” Twain’s oft-banned book or “reclaiming” Jim. It’s about the endlessness of imagination, the ways in which even a Black fugitive tethered to the hell of chattel slavery can dream and steal and riff his way into freedom. Individually and collectively, the fighting girls of Headshot never felt as realized, their portraits blurry, their lives constrained.
Advancing:
James
Match Commentary
with Meave Gallagher and Alana Mohamed
Meave Gallagher: Percival Everett is a goddamn steamroller. Also a perpetual motion machine? He just keeps writing books and people keep going nuts for them, and there he is again on a bunch of best-of and awards lists. And now, instead of just being inspired to humor in bleakness by Mark Twain, he’s written his own Mark Twain novel? It’s giving “with our powers combined,” and a modest novel like Headshot didn’t stand a chance. Or did it? Judge Kearse doesn’t think so.
Alana Mohamed: I didn’t always agree with Judge Kearse’s assessments of Headshot, but I think I would be hard-pressed not to put Everett’s James through. On a storytelling level, more happens and the stakes are higher. On an artistic level, it’s a risk that pays off in huge returns. Politically, it’s commenting on both the past and the present. Headshot is a compact book, but James’s project is expansive.
Meave: Judge Kearse puts Headshot in a broader context—youth sports rather than girls’ sports—and seems to appreciate its “acknowledge[ment] that the pageantry and intensity of youth sports are extremely ridiculous.” Judge Bonner praised Headshot for its tight focus on each competitor, which makes an interesting contrast with Judge Kearse’s opinion that so much of the focus on each athlete isn’t on their boxing. And something that I didn’t realize bothered me until reading this judgment is the absence of “the moment-to-moment drama of boxing.”
Alana: This is the part of Judge Kearse’s judgment that I disagreed with the most—I thought a lot happened in the matches and that there was a great focus on the mind-body connection athletes have. One of the most interesting things about the book to me was its discussion of form and the strategy behind each match. I’m no child athlete, though, so maybe what struck me as quite a bit of action doesn’t read the same for the more active among us. I would give you that it’s an uneven book—there are some standout chapters where I felt the moment-to-moment action more than others.
Meave: Headshot has some of that, but I agree with the judge—spinning off into the competitors’ backstories and futures undercuts (sorry) the immediacy and physicality of the matches. I suppose you could argue that it isn’t really a book about boxing so much as the tiny world of girls’ boxing the characters inhabit, and who they are in it. But where James really is a book about an enslaved man’s escape down the Mississippi River, Headshot jukes the reader a little (so sorry), if their expectations are to read about a boxing tournament.
Alana: James is action-packed—I think it would be hard not to have an interpretation of Huck Finn that wasn’t. I was interested in Judge Kearse’s admiration of “Everett’s consistent ability to dramatize thought and solitude even when the plot cooled.” So many things he praises James for I feel could apply equally to Headshot—the sense of play and this ability to dramatize thought particularly. But when he talks about lines building to “a larger payoff” or a “more rewarding” sense of play specifically, I can’t argue with him there.
Meave: Another apology: As of this writing, I haven’t read James. I want to! More than I want to read the other two books I haven’t gotten to (I’m not saying which). The judgment makes it sound like a lot of fun, though I disagree that having a plot with a lot of momentum is “a rarity for historical fiction.” My dad loves the Flashman series, and they’re quite plotty, as is Horatio Hornblower. And there are so many detective/mystery novels set in the “real” past, which are naturally plotty. The Three Musketeers is all plot and action and plots about plots, no? Or do I even know what “plotty” means?
Alana: Yeah, I thought that was an interesting assertion. I wondered which books he was thinking of. And good question re: plotty. I will say a ton does happen—sidequests and misadventures. It’s stuffed to the brim with action and I’d say that I’m probably used to more of a streamlined historical fiction novel.
Meave: It sounds like the dark-black humor of Trees makes a full return in James, which is maybe my favorite thing about Everett: the way he maintains his light touch through moments of dark humor, serious reflection, danger, and sincere emotion. It’s a Twain-ish quality, I think, the way the prose feels feather-light but never inconsequential. I don’t think Bullwinkel needs to have a similar light touch (oh no) in Headshot, but in comparison, her prose is heavier without having the same impact (I can’t stop). And like Judge Lukas’s appreciation of the propulsive prose of Margo’s Got Money Troubles, Judge Kearse loved the way James kept things moving—like a skiff on the surface of a great river, say?
Alana: Meave, you’re on a roll with these jokes.
Meave: They are idioms that become inexcusable puns when used in this context. My mother would be so proud.
Alana: When I read Everett, I am sometimes not sure if he’s punching up or down, and that held with James as well. But, truly, I don’t know if there’s any more to say. James was the clear winner—though I would be interested to hear from any contrarians out there. Until next time!
Meave: Now that Headshot’s been TKOed, James travels on to meet the winner of tomorrow’s head-to-head, where Martyr! will take on Beautyland under the eyes of Judge Kelly McEvers.
Kevin Guilfoile: I’m back again with a Zombie update. Tallying up the punches, Headshot does not have votes to stay in Zombie contention. If the Zombie Round were held today, All Fours and The Wedding People would still be our literary grotesqueries.
Today’s mascot
Say hello to today’s mascots Charlie Boy and Harhaark, nominated by Lesley, who tells us:
This is Charlie Boy (who is actually a girl, we learned) and Harhaark, two crows who join various other birds and squirrels for breakfast in our driveway every morning. Their favorite pastimes in relation to us seem to be screaming loudly to say hello and thank you for the food, and leaving little gifts.
They would really appreciate it if Beautyland took home the Rooster this year, and I would think seriously about honoring their wishes because everyone knows you don’t want to piss off a crow. They’ll tell all their little crow friends—and their babies—and apparently crows can hold grudges for up to 17 years!
If you’re interested in nominating a pet as a mascot for this year’s Tournament of Books, contact us for more details. (Please note, this is a paid program.)