 "Whatever Oates sets her mind to, shoe does well." | 2007-06-11 |
| - Reviewed By xterminalx |
Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing (Doubleday, 1987)
The blurbs on the back of this book gush. A lot of very talented, very famous writers were quite enamored with Joyce Carol Oates' meditation on boxing, and they should have been. This is not only Oates writing with her best critical eye, but it's also Oates at her most approachable; this is easily as readable as any of her fiction, and more so than a good portion of it. She responds to the art of pugilism both, and often simultaneously, with a critical and an emotional eye. It's quite a nice little book, and as someone who knows nothing about boxing myself, I can attest that Oates' writing is not just for the aficionado; if you're old enough to remember the names Marvin Hagler and Tommy Hearns, you'll find this interesting and often enlightening. Another solid entry in the Oates canon. **** |
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 "Touching insight into the world of boxing from a wonderful writer" | 2007-05-18 |
| - Reviewed By User: A30E1626TFM12J |
| Oates takes a step away from her normal family drama fare to step into the ring with a slim series of essays that reflects her long-time love for the sweet science. Passed down from her father, her obsession is sincere and her understanding and compassion for the fighters she writes about is palpable. Including an essay on the young Mike Tyson, who comes off not as the subhuman monster he's portrayed as these days, but instead as a thoughtful man who just happens to have the power to crush men's skulls, this book was engrossing, rich prose from beginning to end. Coincidentally, I just read a new thriller that focuses on a talented young boxer who gets in over his head like Tyson, called The Castro Gene by Todd Buchholz, famous mostly for his non-fiction. Like Oates, he stretches in a new direction and succeeds. |
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| "For making me think about it in a different way" | 2007-04-19 |
| - Reviewed By shalomfn |
I boxed a bit as a young person although nothing really serious. I did however know something about the 'game' as it was a real part of my childhood world. Our upstairs neighbor Ike Newman was a boxing manager. A friend of my father who he used to visit in his shack down by the Hudson River was a man who once had been a very good featherweight, Joe Bedell. I too in those years saw many fights especially on the Gillette Cavalcade of sports. The greatest of another era were there, the Sugar Ray- Lamotta fights, the sad spectacle of Joe Louis being stopped by a decent Rocky Marciano , the great pleasure of seeing lightweight Jewish Algerian boxer Alphone Halimi take the title in a dancing victory over a now nameless- for-me- opponent.
For me in those days 'boxing' was about 'toughness' and 'proving oneself a man'. There was also identity- politics and ethnic struggle with I naturally rooting for the Jewish fighters in those days. I also of course rooted for the underdog 'Negro' fighters when they were not fighting someone Jewish.
All this is perhaps irrelevant to a review or Oates thoughtful, insightful and as usual beautifully written essay on Boxing. She sees it not as a 'sport' but rather sees each boxing match as a ' story, a highly condensed dramatic story' She says 'when nothing much happens' failure is the story. She speaks about boxing as a masculine world involving highly complex and refined skill 'especially in the lighter divisions'. She distinguishes boxing from fighting. " Fighting seems to belong to something predating civilization , the instinct not merely to defend oneself - for when has the masculine ego ever been assuaged by so minimal a gesture? - but to attack another and to force him into absolute submission. Hence the electifying effect upon a typical fight crowd when fighting suddenly emerges out of boxing - the excitement when a boxer's face begins to bleed."
She speaks about boxers being angry and about anger being a fundamental emotion of boxing. She speaks of it too , and its 'obsessive appeal' as a kind of art form an'emotional experience impossible to convey in words' She also does not shy away from something many see its 'brutality' She discusses the humanitarian interest in doing away with the sport but defends it .
She raises many questions which I had not really thought about it.
I will only add that I have not really had any interest in boxing for many many years. One reason is that I am one of those weak- hearted people who just cannot bring himself to take pleasure from seeing someone beaten and bloody. My own mixed feelings about the sport I guess have shifted with the years. In youth I had more enthusiasm for it . In age while still understanding the excitement it can give I am more repelled by it.
This is a book well- worth reading for anyone who truly wishes to think again about the 'sport'. |
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| "A Boxing Book Unparalleled" | 2007-04-09 |
| - Reviewed By User: AL9HZLZT4X1KL |
Where the most eloquent writers display their best prose is through passion. And the seeds of passion thrive in sex, exploitation, and violence. The human condition, written about by every writer but only successfully by a minority, is dissected and shaved away and exposed layer by layer until one gets to the core of what the soul is, of what separates us from our basest instincts. To that end, boxing is the true display of the human condition and the greatest writers have recognized this and have poured forth their own souls to capture the brutality that occurs inside the squared circle.
Joyce Carol Oates at first seems like an odd choice as an expert on the sport. A frail academic known for her moving stories of family interaction, she wouldn't at first strike you as a devotee to a sport that most academics abhor. But she is a lifelong fan. Her father was a fan and it seems that it runs in the blood. She's been going to matches and watching them on film since she was a young girl, and due to her thoughtful approach and extraordinary access she manages to coax the true spirit of the athletes from a myriad of interviews.
Many spectacular authors have written about the sport. Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, and A.J. Liebling are a few that come to mind. None of those giants bring to the sport a cautious sensitivity that Oates does. Her prose are so rich that when reading this book, I had to frequently set it down and digest what I'd read. Like a rich chocolate, too much at one time would overload my senses, dulling me and causing me to miss nuance and ramble through the poetry. Her book is a treat, slowly and steadily read. It's a beautiful, sad, witty communique from someone who recognizes that we need the outlet, the raw power and relentless destruction that representatives of all of us can administer. Trained to the height of physical perfection, but unrestrained by conscience, boxers show us what we are all capable of doing, what we are all capable of enduring.
Her prose? Check this out:
"No sport is more physical, more direct, than boxing. No sport appears more powerfully homoerotic: the confrontation in the ring--the disrobing--the sweaty heated combat that is part dance, courtship, coupling--the frequent urgent pursuit by one boxer of the other in the fight's natural and violent movement toward the "knockout": surely boxing derives much of its appeal from this mimicry of a species of erotic love in which one man overcomes the other in an exhibition of superior strength and will. The heralded celibacy of the fighter-in-training is very much a part of boxing lore: instead of focusing his energies and fantasies upon a woman the boxer focuses them upon an opponent. Where Woman has been, Opponent must be."
This book, to me, is an inspirational, a prayer book, a series of thoughts meant to get me through life more positive and more in tune with my soul.
Livingstone Brambles, of whom I have acquaintance and of whom Oates writes glowingly, when told that she'd written about him in On Boxing said, "Man, she loves me."
Yes, she does, Champ. She loves all men who've donned gloves and tested their instincts in the ring, but more than most, she loves men like you who held nothing back, who gave their entire being over to training and instinct and sacrificed everything to survive and conquer. She loves you Livingstone, because you are who we all wish to be.
CV Rick |
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 "Oates on Boxing" | 2006-11-29 |
| - Reviewed By cwn_annwn |
Oates psychoanalyzes fighters and boxing. On some points she was probably right, on others she was way off.
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| "The Manassa Mauler vs. Plato" | 2004-08-14 |
| - Reviewed By robslocum |
I agree with the Swedish reviewer. This book is too cosmic for my tastes. In a funny way I think Oates is aware of the trap she has set for herself. At the outset she says, "if you have seen five hundred boxing matches you have seen five hundred boxing matches and their common denominator, which certainly exists, is not of primary interest to you. `If the Host is only a symbol,' the Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor once remarked, `I'd say the hell with it.'" (Pp. 4-5.)
Having said that a fight is a fight, that generalizations are secondary, that symbolism is worthless, she proceeds to play philosopher for half the book. There is no relief from the earnestness. However, when she gets around to Mike Tyson, the pre-road-rage Tyson, I found a lot more to grab onto. Her rather sweet portrayal of the young champ is satisfyingly concrete, and certainly a kind of bizarre period piece in light of subsequent events in Tyson's life.
Coincidentally I read the following passage in American Heritage Magazine while I was reading this book. It's from an interview with sportswriter W.C. Heinz, now 86. Without coming within ten feet of a word like "homoerotic," it illustrates one of Oates's points and finishes with a memorable, upbeat image:
"When two fighters fight a hell of a battle, there's later a liking between them. This was true of Joe Walcott and Rocky Marciano. Marciano took him out in the thirteenth round of their great first championship fight, but Joe also knocked down Rocky in the first round. Rocky had never been down before, and the next day I was interviewing him and I asked him, "What were you thinking when you went down?" He had a wonderful fighter's remark. He said: "I was thinking, `This guy can really punch. This will be one hell of a fight.'"
I enjoy this kind of writing better. To my way of thinking, the deep thoughts come off better when left unstated, or sprinkled in carefully within more definite imagery like this.
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