A teaser/review for "The Shadow Boxer, by Steven Heighton".

*Warning* Minor Plot details may follow. Nothing too drastic though...It's like a high school book report. I'm not gonna pull a Fight Club spoiler out of my ass on this one.

This book is fairly hard to describe. Simply put, it has a weird feeling about it. Perhaps because it's setting is so close to my own experiences. Ex: Great lakes of Canada, 1930's parents/grandparents, trying to find success in the 90's. It's only about 5-10 years off my own age so I feel oddly connected.

There are a few differences though. Sevigne the machine, our main character, doesn't come from a wealthy family. Money is hardly a central issue in this novel, as it is in almost every other. This book is much more of a love story. He grows up in a fairly loving family, his French mother moving to Canada after the war with his seafaring father. With a brother and a best friend Meesa, he experiences the same things most middle class kids do growing up in Canada.

So....Why the book if nothing seems to be wrong yet?

Well, his father is a severe alchoholic. It's obvious to Sev by the time he's about 10. His mother brings him and his brother, and leaves for Egypt with another man. They live there for a couple years, when Sev finally gets mature enough to return to his father (where his true love seems to lie in his parents). Sev is an outcast in high school. He's extremely intelligent, tall, and lanky. He gets picked on a fair amount, but never more than once by the same person because he defends himself both verbally and physically quite adamantly. This leads Sev to eventually joining the high school boxing team. He finds out that his father was an olympic class boxer when he was young as well, and was passed up for another fighter to travel over to Africa and partake in one of the many fights with fights Cassius Clay (before he was Muhammed Ali).

However, Sev's friends (artists, poets, potheads), find his animalistic extracurricular rather frightening and they don't understand. After a few fights, Sev heads off by himself to Montreal to become a writer. He jumps back and forth between Canada and Egypt, and after a few more travels finds himself back at home to witness his father's self-destruction. He then moves to Toronto, and focuses full time on a book. He meets many women, two of whom make a lasting impression on him, for better or for worse. Finally Sev has a breakthrough with his novel, gets people interested in it, and then finds himself lost in a world he doesn't really understand. In a drastic way to escape, he travels to the island his father frequently talked about and spends some solitaire time alone there. He faces hardships we seem to have forgotten in this day and age, and everything seems to be put in perspective.

Sev, all his life, has been dancing around the ring, boxing his shadow. He doesn't really know who his opponent is, and keeps getting floored against the ropes by people more experienced than him. He finds Mikaela. His love. She becomes the other boxer for him, not in the way that they fight, but in the way that at the end of it all, tired and beaten, they can rest each others heads on each other's shoulder and not care who's arm gets raised as the victor. Only that they have each other. The book doesn't end this way though :P

However, it's that sort of feeling and parallel that Heighton alludes to for the entirety of the novel, and it seems to make me feel a little uncomfortable that I don't think I've had the same feeling yet, or perhaps because I know I may never because of my chosen career and path in life. .

Either way, this book has opened up a couple new feelings to me, which I always like, and I feel like it's gonna take a couple edits or a couple more days to think about this book and my real reaction to it. It still feels a little fresh to me. Again though, if you ever do decide to read this or re-read it, look for the parallels to boxing in every chapter. They're definatly there.

I recommend to almost everybody. You have to be a fairly avid reader though. This book could be taken as "slow", or "boring" by those not keen enough to dig deep and find the lessons buried behind his experiences.

Next up for review:
-Wicked; Gregory Maguire
Read:
-Kiterunner; Khaled Hosseini
-The Memory Keeper's Daughter; Kim Edwards

Recommend a book to me! It may take a couple weeks but I'll probably put it in my pile and read it eventually!