The Fighter by Craig Davidson
Reviewed by Mark Dundas Wood
7.20.07
Paul Harris, one of the two protagonists in Craig Davidson’s first novel, The Fighter, confronts such issues. (Oh, boy, does he confront them). Working for his father, a well-heeled viticulturist outside of Toronto, Paul meanders through his young life until, one night at a club, he dubs one of the locals a “troglodyte” and is subsequently beaten bloody by the guy: “[Paul had] never been punched—maliciously, viciously punched—in his quarter-century plus of life on this planet and all he could do was stare, with a stupid bovine look on his face, at the man who popped his cherry.”
Humiliated, Paul views himself as a “flabby boneless creature, shapeless, as soft and raw as the spot under a picked scab.” He begins a campaign to claim his masculine birthright. It’s a gradual process that, interestingly, starts with a renunciation of privilege: Paul takes to assisting the Caribbean fieldworkers in his father’s vineyards—silently picking frozen grapes while his broken body heals. His parents are bewildered: When the only real power in life is money power, why would a kid choose to turn himself into a smelly, shivering serf?
Paul soon expands his campaign. He finds a new home in a shabby gym where he begins working out and taking injections of testosterone ethanate. Before long he’s himself a troglodyte among troglodytes, so tanked on steroids that he begins molting: “His shower soap was furred with so much shed hair it looked like some headless amputee rodent.” When Paul does embark on one of those paintball outings with the guys, he can’t manage to stick with the Sherwin-Williams. He thwacks his opponent with his weapon and then begins pummeling the guy. Subsequently, he goes on a frenzied joyride, nearly wiping out a recumbent bicyclist with his Nissan Micra.
That particular sequence seems as surreal as the violent dream scenes Davidson scatters throughout the novel. Fantasy blurs with reality just as—at a certain point—Paul’s need to inflict pain becomes indistinguishable from his need to absorb it. Obviously, we’re in Fight Club territory here. And, inevitably, Paul finds just the underground venue to help him realize his full potential for violence.
Meanwhile, in intervening chapters, Davidson has been chronicling the days of his other protagonist, a younger fighter named Rob Tully. If Paul is the untested though savage mongoose—bloated on controlled substances—Rob is the naturally powerful but seemingly docile young cobra. Fighting is in the Tully bloodline: Rob was raised (and trained for the ring) by an ambitious father, Reuben, and a damaged but exceedingly good-hearted uncle, Tommy (who once boxed, unsuccessfully, at Madison Square Garden). Rob is mostly indifferent to the boxing world. He’d just as soon be goofing around with his good pal Kate, talking about haiku. He has too much compassion, too much empathy for his opponents to be a committed fighter. Yet he wears his masculine power easily; he has nothing to prove until someone makes him prove it. Can there be any doubt that that someone will be Paul Harris?
The chapters with Rob have less force than those with Paul. There’s less sense of who he is, really. But that seems to be part of the author’s design. When the cobra coils and raises its head like a question mark, we pay attention. Will the creature strike or merely wind away into the night?
The quiet domestic sequences in this novel are rendered in a sharply observed but relatively unadorned manner. In the scenes in which violence figures, however, Davidson’s prose blossoms into something more fantastic. His sentences become rich and sometimes garish—with metaphor proliferating like kudzu in a state-of-the art greenhouse. There’s no holding back the narrative voice when it’s describing grotesquely distended body tissues and exotic hues of bruised, damaged flesh. A boxer’s eyes in one scene are “two plum-colored anthills separated by a split bridge of nose.”
Adrenaline seems to infuse the writing in these sections—and maybe a whiff of nitrous oxide, too. Davidson gives the reader a rush—and often a giggle—with each baroquely overstated turn of phrase that he employs as he ratchets up the grisly mood. The Fighter feels, at moments, like a lurid comic book. Which is not to say that the author doesn’t have something fairly serious on his mind.
It’s easy to mock the earnestness of someone who—in order to “prove himself” or “feel more alive”—turns himself into a raging mass of living scar tissue. But how many young people who believe, as Paul puts it, that they have “had it pretty cushy so far” will remedy the situation by turning themselves into something elemental and dangerous? We know that military recruiters exploit such youthful notions. So too, of course, do far less respectable organizations and individuals. The jihad-minded, for instance.
“I haven’t done anything, ever. Good or bad,” Paul tells his parents midway through the novel—oddly echoing John Marcher, the despairing protagonist of Henry James’s A Beast in the Jungle. Paul then adds, more ominously, “Even vicious murderers go to their graves knowing they’ve changed the world somehow. Murdering takes initiative; it takes drive. You got to get up off your duff to murder someone.”
James’s Marcher, finally, savors emotional pain because it has “something of the taste of life.” Paul Harris dishes out and endures physical pain for a similar reason. Both characters may be misguided, but their desire for event is something that anyone—not just those who wring their hands about their atrophied masculinity—can relate to. That’s one reason why The Fighter is such an absorbing, if unsettling, read.