The Shadow Boxer
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Steven Heighton is already recognized as one of the best writers to come to the fore in the nineties, a winner of numerous literary awards, whose work is widely translated. In The Shadow Boxer, he delivers a stunning portrait of the artist in the tradition of such great tales as Jude the Obscure, Candide and even Don Quixote, and gives literary life to the Northern Ontario landscape of "the Soo", and the demanding, muscular life of Lake Superior where giant ore-barges make their way over the grave of The Edmund Fitzgerald. Intricately patterned and multi-layered, this is the story of Sevigne Torrins, poet and boxer, who sets off into the world to make it, and whose romantic and professional misadventures take him as far as Egypt before he finds his way back to the Great Lakes. But the classic writerly dream that Sevigne pursues turns out in practice to have a different and darker reality than any he had foreseen.
A passionate love story, a gripping narrative, The Shadow Boxer is also about the power of dreams and regret. It heralds a major new Canadian novelist and a master storyteller.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The texture, grit and pure narrative grace of this remarkable first novel by young Canadian short story writer, essayist and poet Heighton (Flight Paths of the Emperor; The Ecstasy of Skeptics, etc.) transform a coming-of-age story into something uncommon yet deeply familiar. Heighton chronicles the arduous artistic journey of the precocious but troubled Sevigne Torrins, who starts off by ditching a promising pugilistic career to follow his literary muse. The early chapters focus on his difficult relationship with his father, a former sailor drinking himself to death on the shores of Lake Superior, followed by a road-travel sequence that takes him to Egypt, where his mother has lived for years with her second husband. Most of the book, however, revolves around two romantic relationships, the first with a sexy, rabidly ambitious fellow writer, Una Sutherland, and the second and more lasting with a woman nearly 10 years older than Sevigne, 34-year-old singer Mikaela Chandler, whose biological clock is ticking with a vengeance. Heighton writes evocatively about the undercurrents of lust, creativity and ennui that shape the two situations. But he saves his most powerful work for the finale, when Sevigne isolates himself at his family's cottage on a remote island near Toronto, where a series of catastrophes reduce his winter writing retreat to a hovel and he contracts an infection that forces him to perform a grisly self-amputation. This is a remarkably accomplished, potent first novel in which Heighton explores the forces that shape the lives of artists, writing in a disarmingly natural voice that shifts effortlessly in range, from near-Lawrentian lyricism to blunt, gripping simplicity. In his progress from enthusiastic innocent, albeit with a complicated history, to someone older, wiser yet still "always working so hard at being alive," Sevigne convinces as few protagonists do. Author tour.
