John R. MacArthur

Boxing not so clever

Lies and self-invention will never be the solution for Willy Vautin’s lonely drifter from Nevada

For Horace Hopper, the half-breed protagonist of Willy Vlautin’s bleak new novel, essential truths come slowly, and usually too late to do him any good. Abandoned by his Native American mother and Irish American father, he has exiled himself from the only people who love him, an elderly couple on a sheep ranch in deepest Nevada. His one idea for becoming ‘somebody’ is to transform himself into a world-champion lightweight boxer with a wholly fabricated Mexican identity. ‘Mexican boxers are the toughest… true warriors who never quit,’ he believes. Only well into the novel does it dawn on him that his self-inflicted loneliness is ‘a sort of disease’, not a manly test of character that will redeem his young life.

Horace’s surrogate father, Eldon Reese, is an atypical westerner, a liberal who knows better than to buy into Horace’s ‘winners’ version of the American dream. Despite his efforts to keep his ward on the ranch, he can’t make up for Horace’s low self-esteem. When Horace is exploited by greedy trainer-promoters happy to bleed their new fighter both physically and financially, the truth once again catches up with him, in a Tucson emergency room after a particularly brutal match. ‘I’m a liar,’ he confesses to a nurse. ‘I’m not Hector Hidalgo. I’m not Mexican. My real name is Horace Hopper.’

Vlautin is on to something about what’s wrong with America, and with many Americans, especially in the age of Trump. According to the publishers, the author is exploring the ‘fringes’ of US society, but this is a misleading cliché. While in no way privileged, Horace is more rooted than many young men from a similar background. Above and beyond his sense of aloneness, there is something self-defeating in Horace’s personality that exemplifies an unfortunate tendency among certain Americans, corporate managers and factory workers alike: even though they boast about rugged independence, they’re all too willing to take abuse.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in