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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Craig Davidson

  
 
Blake Head
22:28 / 19.11.07
In the summer I picked up a copy of Rust and Bone by Craig Davidson at the annual book fair:



Not being entirely convinced by the idea of a collection of stories based around boxing and other uber-masculine pursuits, I was persuaded by the origin and earnestness of the praise adorning the cover: if Brett Easton Ellis, Clive Barker and Peter Straub are convinced by something then I reckoned it must be worth a look. I’m glad I was, and I guess I’m hoping that if you’ve missed out on hearing about him a thread on the author might convince some people on the board to give Rust and Bone a shot as well.

The characters populating his stories are strong women and particularly strong men working in jobs that are at once traditional and somewhat marginalised and offbeat: an underground boxer, a fighter trainer, a cop, a ball player, a repo man; some others a little more esoteric: a diver, a porno actor, a couple who train pitbulls. These aren’t civilized roles, but they’re familiar and most exist in an established (masculine) tradition. One of the most striking qualities about these stories is that they avoid exploiting the potential for these characters to appear as gimmicky or self-consciously outlandish, they’re people first and their descriptive titles second, no matter how briefly they’re presented, and in defending that Davidson evades the problems that (in my opinion) Palahniuk gets into in some of his later work where characters and incidents become unrealistically lurid, repetitive and based on novelty value. I think Ellis has it about right when he talks about Davidson’s work as “big, riveting stories”. It’s an unfussy description of the type of narrow focus character level yarns that he’s spinning that still notes the scale of the questions the author’s trying to raise.

He’s a difficult author to quote directly because taken out of context his utilitarian choice of words might seem unimpressive or even full of a false affectation. He captures genuine speech patterns but consequently his characters for the most part sound like regular people, when they’re funny (and they can be darkly funny) they’re not really quotable as such because without the context it means little. But his sentences snap! together and there is little wasted movement in his choice of words. His writing seems to propel the reader towards an inexorable impact with the devastating insights his characters experience by the conclusion of each story, but (at their best) also sharing with them in that dazed moment before the story ends a moment of grace, an instant where there’s nothing left to fear, and just sometimes some small thing to hope for. I’m really finding it quite difficult to sum up the thrill of reading something so deceptively simple and readable that draws you in to its characters’ dramas and then hits you with an image of them at their most extreme moment of exposure. Just as in his stories where a fight is won or lost not in the heart or the mind that enters the ring but the whole body that is trained beforehand, Davidson’s prose in places seems absolutely instinctive and effortless – it was incredibly exciting to experience a new writer steaming ahead with such controlled confidence, a real sense of “this is it, this is the thing, this is what writing is about” that can be lacking in more delicate and celebrated authors.

I’ve already mentioned Ellis, Barker and Straub. Turns out Palahniuk and Irvine Welsh are fans too. What struck me about that, beyond the fact that they’re all authors I more or less enjoy, is that in that group you’ve got three of the English speaking world’s most visible male gay authors who write transgressive fiction which employs violence and horror and often physical disfiguration. I wondered in an offhand if way if Davidson was also gay (he’s not), and there are enough disturbingly bloody moments to confirm his belonging to the latter club; there is something, I think, in the way that violence and sex are linked in the book that Davidson himself is susceptible to viewing masculine identity and sexuality in the same non-normative way that (many) gay writers are able to, something that’s maybe not fully formed yet in his writing, a mix of fascination and fear with figures of indeterminate gender and orientation. Maybe we could get to that in a bit.

I think it’s possible to read Fight Club as a book where violence has a redemptive quality, a space where masculine identity can be recovered, and the strength and anger and bonding under the threat of harm that at least appears to be denied to contemporary, decadent, emasculated men can be regained. That’s an incomplete reading, but I think it is present in the novel. Violence in Davidson’s work is quite different – it’s a fact of life for the characters he writes about, and is accordingly demystified. Some of his fighters fight out of anger or as some kind of extreme therapy, but they’re contrasted with others who exist in that world but seek to minimise their exposure to harm, they have something to fight for, the don’t participate in violence for its own sake. At the same time there’s a reverence for people and animals who appear to be capable of giving themselves over to violence completely, or for exposing themselves to danger for the sake of others, for the pureness that brings, stripping life down till there’s no fear of damage or pain or self-doubt, the dangerous freedom that brings that most people could never accept. As Davidson puts it: “Beauty exists in that fearlessness”. And I think there is a great deal of appreciation on the author’s part for that sort of single-mindedness, about the sort of people that are driven to seek out contact on that visceral level, as well as a corresponding tension in the lives of those who are threatened by it’s appearance.

Focusing on boxing as he does (he’s got a general image as “that guy who writes about boxing” and I think he ended fighting two bouts to promote his novel, you can read further at his site or on his blog writing about Davidson’s work it’s easy to employ a sympathetic idiom to describe his talents. Other criticism that I’ve read goes on about his power, his raw strength, the concussive effect of his words. It’s not necessarily inaccurate, and I’m sure I’m just as guilty of indulging in it here, but at times it’s misleading. The coarse subject matter and traditionally masculine values of strength and endurance in each story typically move towards a resolution where their opposites are proven: these are stories obsessed with vulnerability and the fragility of the strongest. Violence, rather than a site where masculine sensibilities are re-affirmed, is just as often something used to question the blind assumption of those values.

If I can just gush about the perfection of the cover image for a sec – a fighter binding his hands before a fight - for me it captures not just the superficial qualities the book is concerned with: boxing, violence, aggression, tension and physicality, but what I’ve come to think of the main feature of these stories: the thin and inadequate layer that lies between our immensely fragile bodies and an abrasive world, not as a passive form of protection but as something taut and integral to our continued and yet violent itself resistance to that environment. It’s that thinness that haunts these stories, the minimal distance between our satisfied, civilized lives and eruptions of randomness or fate that leave the characters desolated and trapped. The main character in the last story of the collection describes the life-destabilising wound she inflicted in the line of service:

“Eleven years old. The bullet passed within four centimetres of his heart.” She held her index finger and thumb an approximate distance apart. “Fractions, you know? Four… centimetres. Increments.”

… but it’s also a description of the wound that she herself takes, the one that leaves her fighting to live with herself and her failures and to keep going in the role and relationships that she’s been in up till that point. Davidson’s writing focuses primarily on physical violence and physical injuries but I don’t think he’s writing exclusively about not being prepared physically to throwdown, or men’s needs to join a boxing club or anything, but about how transformation can happen suddenly in anybody’s life and how vulnerable we are and how difficult it is to live sometimes trapped by that possibility or the consequences or fear of repetition when it happens.

So has anyone picked this up? Any Canadian ‘’lithers that are big Davidson fans, and if so why have you been keeping him to yourselves? If people want to we could talk about the fairly hefty topics of violence and masculine identity in literature, the idea of a growing genre or brand of literature dealing with those issues (which I think Davidson is quite clearly being promoted in the light of), or the sub-genre of boxing writing that’s out there, how it can used as a place where male violence and power fantasies can be made to seem authentic and valid. If anyone wants to address the problem of using barbaric “sports” like boxing and dog fighting in literature in a non-condemnatory fashion then we could talk about that too. I know it’s a bit of a heavy-handed post to get us started with but there’s loads here and I’d just like to give us something to wrestle with.

Davidson’s first novel came out a little while ago, but it’s not as impressive in my opinion, so I’ll leave off talking about it until we see if there’s any interest in the topic generally. He also (bonus!) has a secret career as a gory horror scribe under the pseudonym Patrick Lestewka, featuring psychopathic killers, vampires, werewolves, cybernetically enhanced gladiators and no doubt all manner of other beasties, and similarly intense and violent, so they’re up for grabs in discussion as well. I’ve just read through Rust and Bone again, so I’ll try and post something else about how well it stands up to a closer reading after that initial burst of adrenaline wears off, but it’s been the only book I’ve bothered to read twice this year, and even if his other stuff isn’t up to the standards of this collection, and even if there’s the chance that he’ll struggle to find a home for his next book and won’t achieve the same status as his champions, there’s something to be said for the quality that you find addressed in the book repeatedly but also describing it: the ability to recognise ones deficiencies and essential frailty and still come out from the corner and put it all on the line without hesitating. Even if the rest of Davidson’s future record doesn’t recapture the immediacy and power of this effort I think he’s worth looking up just for this one clean punch, the sweet sound of its connection.
 
 
Blake Head
21:23 / 27.11.07
I saw Craig Davidson at the Book Festival this year, promoting his new novel The Fighter. Also on the bill was Nathan Englander, and if nothing else it was a study in contrasts. Englander’s short story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges was an interesting look at (primarily) the lives of Orthodox Jews in varying situations: deliberately literary, controlled, assured prose, a little chilly, somewhat self-consciously profound. He discussed his work (paraphrasing from memory but without exaggerating) confidently in terms of the “quantum possibilities” of fiction, of how a novel “becomes organic”. Like his prose it was a polished, professional performance, but the overall effect was of how vague some of it sounded, how indirect. Davidson was, perhaps unexpectedly, more hesitant. He talked a little about the doubts he had regarding The Fighter, and about how after this book he plans to maybe move on from boxing as a subject, or at least that he doesn’t see his future literary career as defined by it. And there was just something refreshing about that: a writer being willing to honestly address the public reception of his work, his own attitudes to how well he’d achieved his aims, a complete absence of posturing about the special qualities of literature and writers. It doesn’t sound like much but I was pretty impressed.

Rereading Rust and Bone, there’s nothing that leaps out to completely ruin my earlier opinion of the book. If the writing is very direct at times, if sometimes the more memorable passages have an intrusive quality, if sometimes the inner thoughts of the narrators share similarities between stories, it does little to harm the overall effect: whatever the book occasionally lacks in finesse is more than made up for in the exuberance of the authorial voice. That might not be the same reaction for people who don’t respond to the material in general, but it worked for me. My overall impression wasn’t that the work was perfect or complete, but that the author had found his voice and then with these stories just nailed it; a few stories in and there was that great sense of “I wonder what other stuff this guy has done” and “I want to know what he’s going to do next, and how he’ll develop as a writer in the future”.

There are passages (in the stories, and also in some of his horror work) which, as mentioned above, betray the occasional prejudices one might expect from a work so steeped in masculine values and culture, doubt exists about women, about men who are weak, about sex or gender that’s not standard. But it’s difficult to see whether that’s unexamined prejudice on the part of the author, or, more likely I suspect, simply part of the environment and characters being written about. What I will say is that these issues are ones rarely addressed directly in his work so far, the bigoted characters that exist are neither lauded or condemned, and their issues are never made central, so far as I can see, they’re just there. Given what I was talking about above, about the idea that a non-standard perspective on masculinity might lead inevitably to the associated issues of sexuality and gender in general becoming seen as problematic, I’d really like to see how or if Davidson develops this side of his fiction in the future.

Anyway, on to The Fighter. As I started to say above, having been so impressed by Rust and Bone and having such high expectations for his next book, The Fighter disappointed in comparison. It starts strongly, with the same sort of precise, declarative prose that worked (for me) in the short stories on the theme of how little the basic essence of one’s character changes relative to the whole, and yet how considerable and striking that can be in effect. The novel’s young main characters are described through the differences of their backgrounds and their experience of fighting. One is a “born boxer” scraping by, the other a pampered and spineless rich kid who starts the novel proper getting beaten up in a bar fight. Having read over Rust and Bone a little more critically, they’re probably closer in quality than I gave them credit for, The Fighter is certainly competent, highly readable, exciting, it has the same visceral description; but I think it remains true that Davidson’s pacing in the longer format lets his work down, that sense of progression the short stories achieve is lacking, individual passages attain a high level of quality but they don’t relate to the whole structure in the same way. The Fighter feels like it was written by someone who’s clearly a gifted writer struggling to adapt to the longer format. It’s a book that has powerful moments but lacks the stamina to keep that level of delivery up the whole distance.

If I was being really critical I’d say that the novel format allowed him to explore the same themes in a longer but not sufficiently deeper fashion than one might have hoped for. The story of the gifted boxer borrows thematically from one of Davidson’s shorter stories where a father pushes his son into a role that he’s good at but ultimately doesn’t belong in. The character that appears picked to represent modern, decadent masculinity “everything gone soft and milky and diseased” and his subsequent descent into self-destruction and the violent world of underground boxing, just isn’t an interesting enough concept to sustain interest through the novel, and it’s one of the main reasons in my opinion why the narrative occasionally flags. It’s sub-Palahniuk, because it takes that idea that Palahniuk satirises and pretty much plays it straight, and it’s especially grating because the previous stories were in general much more imaginative than that: their strengths rested on a reversal of the expectations of the reader. There’s more there than just that, actually, in the full sketch of the character, but unless you’re already feeling generous towards the work I think that’s the strongest impression most people would take from it. Which is a shame. It’s without a doubt worth reading, even if it doesn’t quite fulfil the promise of Rust and Bone, and like I said I still want to find out what he’s going to do next.
 
 
Blake Head
23:59 / 27.11.07
Reading these two books by Davidson seemed to come in the midst of a run of books with links to boxing, so I thought I’d try and do a little run down of them here.

Rope Burns by F.X. Toole is probably more representative of what themes boxing fiction is usually concerned with than some of the novels below. It starts with a quotation from Joyce Carol Oates:

Boxing is for men, and is about men, and is men. A celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for being lost.

Some of the things he writes about Davidson shares, maybe the genre shares as a whole, like the fact of physical limitation (someone who bleeds easy say) coming up against the desire to overcome that limitation. Some things not so much, there’s a lot of emphasis placed on the magic of men in combat, the glamour of ringcraft, the tactics in professional boxing or the strategy of working a corner. Also, there’s a lot more attention to race played in Toole’s writing, perhaps inevitably given that he’s focusing primarily on professional boxing rather than underground fighting; probably the biggest effect that has is that it situates boxing as something that people who are prejudiced against because of their colour can use to escape their lack of privilege, whereas generally there are a lot of white boys fighting in Davidson’s stories because they choose to for other reasons. I’m skimming over this stuff quite fast and loose here because well, I’ve already gone on at length, but overall it’s good stuff; there’s more of a focus on what one might expect the traditional themes of the genre to be: honour in the ring, the community between men that violence creates, the sadness that permeates those who don’t make it or have made it and lost it, how boxing reveals a fighter’s heart. I think Davidson’s a bit harder-edged than that, he’s a little more interested in the forces that shape figures who might enter these violent worlds, what it does to people who use violence, but there’s the same appreciation for people who are prepared to push themselves to extremes I think.

Are You Boys Cyclists? by John McKenzie is set in Edinburgh in the seventies. It’s quite an odd, but engaging book, with a seemingly aimless start and an authorial voice obsessively cutting into the narrative to discuss what it’s like to be a fringe author, but whose main character, somewhere along the way, starts going to a boxing club and whose experiences there increasingly give his life structure. Most relevant here is that, amidst a lot of deliberate teasing from the author/narrator about how much violence they’re going to show, about the expectations the reader will have about descriptions of violence in this sort of novel, there’s some excellent writing about pre-fight anxiety that resonated. [Disclaimer: I’ve never boxed, my incredibly poor eyesight precluded any potential pugilistic career, and I was built for running anyway. So when I say it resonated, I mean that it captured the tension I remember from before a race, the sort of creep of doubt and adrenaline before any performance, the feeling of being about to be examined, the inner sense of “how did I get here, to do something that will hurt and test me, by choice?”, how unlikely and artificial and how out of place it all felt. Not dwelt on fear exactly, more the idea of how pointless it felt, at the same time as realising that one was trapped by the situation. Presumably with the addition in boxing of the likelihood of being repeatedly punched in the face.] The aftermath of the main character’s fights are interesting as well, if we want to consider writing about boxing as something which makes feeling pain and causing violence authentic masculine gestures, things which validate men because it’s some innate trait that’s been regained. Are You Boys Cyclists? is almost the opposite: sparring in a boxing ring, getting ready for a staged fight, getting hurt, these are absurd, out of place things, but there’s an existential quality to the relief afterwards as well, the violence inflicted and taken, the rules and traditions of the ring, are part of a larger absurdity and lack of direction to experience that ultimately seems to be comforting.

Richard House’s Bruiser is another Serpent’s Tail effort (Dennis Cooper recommended no less!) focusing on the relationship between two men, the younger of whom Adrian is training as a boxer. Boxing affects the novel only incidentally, the bruises on Adrian’s flesh, the marks of the gloves on his skin, there’s no real interest in boxing as a sport or combat. But it is used in that indirect way to cover some of the same issues Davidson deals with, albeit from a completely different direction. Adrian’s character, strong, physically exuberant and initially forward and confident, becomes defensive and unwilling in the face of transition from the more forceful exchange of his life as a hustler to someone in a relationship. There’s a resistance to intimacy that’s never quite eroded, a need to assert power even when vulnerable. Bruises from what he describes as “hardening” and love bites contest his body early on in the novel, and the struggle they represent is more complicated than I’ve got space to do more than outline here, they’re both marks of violence but of different kinds, they’re both markers of different kinds of fragility. Even just as a snapshot of a single character we’re dealing with the same issues about male power, the desire to inflict violence and exert control, the desire to experience and yet overcome weakness, the impossibility of both those ends ever being fully achieved.

So… Craig Davidson… boxing fiction… anyone?
 
 
rakehell
12:22 / 08.04.08
Craig Davidson has a piece about his experiences with steroids up on the Esquire website
 
 
buttergun
12:45 / 08.04.08
Have any of you read Thom Jones? He's older than Palahniuk or this guy, but I'd say he's a fair bit better, too...also a writer of short stories, most of them centering around boxing (or Vietnam, or a psychosis-prone Advertising executive). "Pugilist At Rest" I'd say is his best collection.
 
 
Blake Head
15:44 / 08.04.08
It’s an interesting enough article. There’s a little bit on his blog about the labelling of the pictures being messed up: basically the one where he looks a bit unhealthy and chubby is after taking the steroids, the one where he looks more athletic is without, if I’ve understood it right. It reminded me of reading the book Muscle by Jon Hotten which was a more comprehensive look at bodybuilding and (more sustained) steroid use/abuse. I thought it gave the reader a really interesting window on a world where men (and some women, it is true) set out not just to reach their bodies’ limits but purposefully to push past those limits into the impossible/monstrous, without being overly judgemental. Recommended read even if you’re not planning on hulking out anytime in the near future.

I’ve not read any Thom Jones, though the name’s familiar I think. Care to say what you prefer about his writing buttergun, or the sorts of themes in which he’s interested?
 
 
buttergun
16:36 / 08.04.08
He's got a hell of a narrative voice and a sharp sense of black humor. Palahniuk on the other hand tends to get a bit too "cutsey" for me at times. I know there's a better word for how I'm feeling...but I mean sort of the "I am Jack's bursting blood vessel" deals in Fight Club. I recommend Thom Jones so highly it's not even funny. He has three collections out there -- I was in touch in '99 or so with a friend of his, who claimed Jones was working on a novel about the character Ad Magic (the above-mentioned advertising whiz), but it seems Jones never finished it.
 
 
rakehell
09:04 / 09.04.08
I read "Rust and Bone" because of this thread and I'm glad I did, so thanks BH.

I think the stories where Davidson tries to be strange yet banal, ala Palahniuk, are the least effective. I don't have the book in front of me, but my favourite story in the collection was about the young boxer coming to Thailand to get some discipline. The story was effective partly because it wasn’t tied down with cute contrivances. Still, he is an effective writer and once he settles into his groove, I think he’ll be excellent.

Even though you say it’s disappointing compared to R&B, I’ll be checking out The Fighter – if only to come to that conclusion for myself.
 
  
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