Review by New York Times Review
IT PROBABLY STARTED with Homer. The "Iliad" includes some snappy sports reporting, and writers ever since have been probing athletes for signifiers, for metaphor amped by grit under pressure. Now the erudite essayist Kerry Howley makes her full-length debut in this sweaty but honorable tradition. She endows it with sly humor, trenchant vision and a curious twist on our conceptions of genre. The narrator of "Thrown" is an excitable and hyper-educated philosophy student. One day in Des Moines, this prickly scholar grows restless at an academic conference. The topic is her specialty, phenomenology, which, among other things, holds the idea that no two people experience reality in exactly the same way. Wandering out, she stumbles on something different - a mixed martial arts tournament. "This interested me," she writes, "only in that it appeared to be the honest kind of butchery in which the theory-mangling, logic-maiming academics I had just abandoned would never partake." New to combat sports, our philosopher perches in the crowd to watch men in an octagonal cage try to dismember each other. Her arcane but, she insists, "astute" remarks on the action make the fan next to her change his seat. Still, she is mesmerized. One fighter in particular, Sean Huffman, loses with dramatic and bloody resilience. This spectacle triggers sensations so overwhelming to the scholar that she associates them with ecstatic reactions to violent rituals as described by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. "Thrown" offers many possible uses for the title verb, but this one is crucial. The experience has thrown her as hard as any fighter slammed to the canvas. She could be describing her own condition when, later, she defines Heidegger's concept of "thrownness (the 'poignant sense of having been hurled into the world without preparation or consent'...)." Somehow, a fighter grinning through pain has transformed her. "From that moment onward," she writes, "the only phenomenological project that could possibly hold interest to me was as follows: Capture and describe that particular state of being to which one Sean Huffman had taken me." To this end the scholar spends the next few years following and studying two M.M.A. fighters on the far fringes of success. The first, that same Sean Huffman, is a veteran in his early 30s with a gift for absorbing punishment. She stalks him until he accepts her as fan and biographer, an entourage of one: "In general, members of the fighter class do not mind my presence in even the most intimate surroundings. This is not to say that they long for my companionship. It is to say that they forget, with startling regularity, that I am there at all. And when something requires that they take notice, such as an irrepressible urge I might have to press a philosophical point, they react to the point itself and not to me." This reads as if she is crouching among ferns to observe gorillas, and by now we sense that our narrator conveniently misinterprets the reactions she elicits from others. Her obsessive absurdity makes her the butt of much of the book's abundant humor. "I remember well that first real conversation with Sean," she writes, "wherein we lunched on satisfactory dive-bar burgers and I told him I thought his performance an extraordinary physical analogue to phenomenological inquiry. He cocked his head, arched an eyebrow and said, in a way that seemed quietly pleased with my observation, 'You're insane.'" Fearing some injury might end Huffman's career before her research is complete, she searches for a backup source of potentially ecstatic experiences. She picks a talented young prospect named Erik Koch, and joins his entourage. If the scholar is comically obtuse about herself, she is a shrewd observer of others. Shuttling from one fighter to the other, she sketches revealing portraits of extremely different men and the spartan world they share. We come to respect Huffman's quiet decency. If we initially dislike Koch's pride, we are led to sympathy for his fraught complexity. The discipline of training and the collegial air of the gym, the delicate hierarchy of peer relationships, the nerd-boy dissolution of the athletes' downtime, and the calculated fury of the fights - Howley depicts it all with piercing skill, and weaves in a sturdy context of the sport of mixed martial arts, its forms and its history. sean Huffman and Erik Koch are real M.M.A. fighters. The matches described actually took place. Much of the information our scholar imparts is documented and can be confirmed. She offers a ruthlessly intimate but graceful example of the familiar genre of athlete profiles. But a twist appears on Page 65, with formal confirmation that the engaging narrator we know as "Kit" is fictional. The enthralled scholar is not the author but a substitute, an avatar, created by Howley. Whatever our previous suspicions about Kit, this news spawns questions. What's real here? How many of these events, conversations and relationships actually happened? Doubt shadows what came before and what comes after this information. We, in our turn, have been thrown. This is uncharted territory. The rationale offered in the text rings a tad specious. We could drop the book at this point and march off in a righteous huff. But it's an entertaining ride, and odds are we want to climb back aboard, so we devise our own shaky rationales. Howley and Kit share similarities, after all. Both were graduate students at a university in Iowa, although in different fields. Kit's phenomenology research involves intensive interviews, observation and the personal reflections of the researcher, which are also writers' tools. The tale certainly gains zest from Kit's voice, which swoops from arrogant to vulnerable to exalted, and from the cool Latinate structures of academic discourse to the terse heat of kicks landed, blood spilled and hope smashed. That virtuoso range is Howley's, but it is Kit whose overt foolishness is funny and ultimately effective. "All narrators, I say, are fiction," she claims. "The reliable ones have the decency to admit it." Well, maybe. And we might capitulate entirely if we consider "Thrown" the equivalent of a historical novel in which a fictional tale is embedded with real-life characters and events. One way or another, from Page 65 on, we are knowing players. And Howley's game accelerates into challenging dimensions. "Thrown's" entwined stories hang on Kit's phantasmic search for transcendent experience. She defines the fighters as artists performing for her purposes, not their own. She is not a neutral or passive observer. She adopts strict standards for their level of commitment. If the fighters fail her, she grieves, rages, scorns or grows cold. In all her highbrow singularity, Kit is the archetypal sports fan. She could well be the audience for all art. She is a vampire voyeur, the parasitic watcher, feeding on the bone-crunching efforts of the doers. She claims that the relationship is symbiotic, that the fighters need her as much as she needs them. And she's right. "Thrown" is compulsively readable, informative, hilarious and partly true. It is also a ferocious dissection of the essence of the spectator. The experience has thrown her as hard as any fighter slammed to the canvas. KATHERINE DUNN'S boxing essays are collected in "One Ring Circus: Dispatches From the World of Boxing." Her third novel, "Geek Love," was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 2, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
Joyce Carol Oates wrote about boxing (On Boxing, 2009), joining Hemingway and others who also were entranced by the bloody art of hand-to-hand combat. Howley isn't just enamored, however. One night, she stumbled upon a mixed-martial-arts match and discovered that her thoughts could whip and whistle their way across the mind without the friction I'd come to experience as thought itself which she deems ecstatic experience. Suffice it to say, she likes to watch. Hence, she attaches herself as a spacetaker, accompanying two very different fighters Sean (older, with a child) and Erik (younger, more dedicated) and following their careers for three years. It's unclear who this book's audience is, those who hearken to such questions as, Where, I ask you, does the maenadic instinct still persist?, or those who pack the octagons mainly for the blood and the beer. Howley writes loftily of the unlofty almost hitting the far ends of both extremes and one gets the feeling that she enjoys the sound of her own voice more than she cares to acquire or impart information. Readers will find this either enrapturing or self-indulgent (or both).--Kinney, Eloise Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This sui generis debut threatens to remap the entire genre of nonfiction. Howley, a philosophy student disillusioned by "academic apple-polishing," sets out on a quest to find the closest contemporary equivalent to Schopenhauer's concept of an ecstatic experience. She finds it, unexpectedly, in the world of mixed-martial-arts (MMA) fighting. Howley becomes a "species of fighterly accoutrement known as a 'spacetaker,'?" ingratiating herself into the lives of two cage fighters: Sean Huffman, a smash-nosed, cauliflower-eared veteran with a legacy of losing but never getting knocked out, and Erik Koch, a young, lithe, apprentice-level beginner "destined for the big shows." Howley's brilliant prose is as dexterous and doughty as the fighters she trails, torquing into philosophy, parody, and sweat-soaked poetry. At times, the narrative is difficult to follow, while the contrast between her highbrow analysis and the aggressive MMA subculture can be disorienting. Her year-long immersion in the sport, however, proves as captivating as any blood-spattered spectacle. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A philosophical examination of the maligned subculture of mixed martial arts "cage" fighting. As an unhappy graduate student, Howley wandered from a Des Moines academic conference into a cage match and became entranced, meeting one of two fighters she would follow as a "spacetaker." As she notes of MMA's roots in Brazil, "[f]ighting had to be born in the one place where ecstasy remained the organizing principle." As the narrative progresses, the author becomes strangely possessive of both fighters, documenting their lives in minute detail. Her underdog, Sean, is a journeyman with a deep tolerance for injury and a stolid, sentimental attitude about MMA: "I just like to feel things." Howley prefers the glitzy dreams of Erik, an insecure, self-indulgent fighter being groomed for nationwide success: "[I]n coming to Milwaukee, [Erik] signaled some readiness to belong in the world of the Big Shows." The author spent two years pursuing both fighters, describing their tumultuous yet stagnant lives in alternating chapters, and fretting over her tenuous role: "It is not unheard of for a fighter to drop a spacetaker just as brutally as Nietzsche turned on Schopenhauer." The book's strongest aspect is Howley's keen observation of every part of the fighters' hardscrabble milieufrom their complex interpersonal relationships to the sleazy finances that keep the scene goingyet she ultimately views them as vessels for her own ideas. An ambitious writer, Howley's prose can be perceptive and precisely detailed but also pretentious. Though she strives to present herself as uncondescending in this working-class milieu (unlike her caricatured fellow academics), her constant first-person reveries feel self-congratulatory: "I had by this time filled three notebooks with my observations, and had begun to consider the tradition in which my work of phenomenology would fall. Too bold for conventional academic minds and the nonsmoking, healthy-minded, hidebound thinkers therein." An original fusion of topic and stance that will appeal to fans of NPR-style social investigations. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
