In de ban van de ring: een filosofiestudente duikt onder in de wereld van Mixed Martial Arts

by Kerry Howley, Tom Mes (Translator)

Fenomenologiestudente Kit dompelt zich drie jaar lang onder in het leven van twee professionele Mixed Martial de één een jonge belofte, de ander een journeyman. Op zoek naar de essentiële eigenschappen van de extatische ervaring - als beschreven in het werk van Schopenhauer en Nietzsche -, die ze ondergaat als ze voor het eerst toeschouwer is bij een gevecht, observeert ze de vechters terwijl ze zichzelf uithongeren, botten breken en hun families teleurstellen. Alles om de schamele amateurgevechten te ontstijgen en de achthoekige kooien van Las Vegas' volgepakte arena's te mogen betreden.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sports, Philosophy, Literature, Biography, Martial Arts, Unfinished

288 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 22, 2014

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 1 out of 5]

Thrown? Should be called "Swoon". An annoying grad student who is really impressed with her own writing becomes a "spacetaker" for a couple MMA guys. Very meh. The prose is stilted and self-congratulatory. I found out about 2/3 of the way through the book that the narrator is a fictitious character, which explains the oddly implausible situations and interactions she describes. The narrator is apparently supposed to be annoying on purpose. She definitely accomplished this, so be sure to pick this book up if you enjoy being irritated.

Towards the end of the book, she doubles (quadruples) down on the pretension, making it almost unreadable. This is probably the first book I've read where I found myself pausing, looking away from my kindle, sighing, and rolling my eyes. 95% of the way through the book I had to fight not to quit reading it.

[Tom Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite a book.

Full disclosure: I know Kerry Howley. In real life I suppose you'd have to say she and her husband are friends of friends. Before they moved away, I enjoyed chatting with her at parties once or twice. These days we're separated by distance, but in closer, if weirder, social proximity thanks to various apps and the diminished neuroticism, on my part at least, that comes with getting older and slowing down.

So. I know her a little. I'd like to see her sell a bunch of books. Feel free to dismiss my opinion.

But you should really read Thrown. It's insightful and laugh-out-loud funny and impressively executed.

As you've no doubt already read in scores of year-end lists, Thrown is work of narrative nonfiction focusing on mixed martial arts, as told by Kit, a cerebral grad student whose transcendent experience at a fight ignites a compulsive program of philosophical inquiry. That compulsion leads her to follow two real-life fighters: the implacable journeyman Sean Huffman and the ascendant but high-strung Erik Koch.

Rich portraits of Erik and Sean and the people around them are the book's great achievement, but the invention of Kit is the first of Howley's many technical feats. It must be difficult to cross tribal lines to engage with a topic like MMA. Difficult not to be a tourist who's seen as slumming; intolerable to abandon the terminology and precision of thought that frame your new fascination. Some Goodreads reviewers seem frustrated by the pretention of the narrator's language, but surely this was the only choice: self-deprecation or alienation. Which is my own pretentious way of saying: Kit is supposed to annoy you, dummies.

That's not the only trick on hand. Watch how she foreshadows injuries, for instance -- made visible only in retrospect, then kept suspended for a breath-stoppingly long stretch, or, finally, presented plainly to the reader, the toolset having been fully displayed and now ready to be used without flourishes. All of this is executed by Howley as fluidly as the complex sequences of grappling holds she describes. There is a certain flavor of contemporary writerliness to such a level of technical execution, but I suppose those who can do it do so because it works. They don't fuck around in Iowa. I was left wondering what maneuvers had been used on me that were too fast or subtle to notice.

As for the book's intellectual project--well, I really couldn't say. I don't really enjoy watching MMA, but I'm now ready to believe my preference is a function of my ignorance. Pro wrestling is much more fun for me, thanks to its reliable schedule and infinite layers of narrative and corresponding spectator culpability (seriously, Charlie Kaufman has nothing on Vince McMahon). But during a big pay-per view, when the performers are giving their all, there can be moments when the division between real and fake disappears. There's real blood deployed for fake reasons--though the blood-producing injury is artifice and the business behind it substantial--and an emotional thrill that persists despite its complete indefensibility. So maybe I understand some of it, even if the real thing just looks brutal and boring to my untrained eyes.

I don't think you could write Kit without holding some of her obsession and desire for transcendence in your own head. But even as this book was being written, I watched little squares of internet document the beautiful nuclear family that Howley is building in a realer part of America than the one I inhabit. I think that Thrown ends in a way that reveals the bleakness of Kit's project. It's not a conclusion that the character can accept; now I can't help wondering how the author feels about it.

Anyway, go buy this damn thing.

[Ken · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was drawn to this book by more than one sterling review AND by the unique topic -- it's about cage fighters (the MMA). Although I am not a fan of the sport and have never even watched a match, start to finish, I have seen some of the action on TV during "remote scans" and said to myself, "Jesus, but this is violent. And real. Nothing like the Championship Wrestling crap we watched as kids -- the choreographed performances."

In this case, U. of Iowa MFA product Kerry Howley insinuates herself into the lives of two MMA fighters and follows them around for a couple of years. A present-day creative writing instructor at Univ. of Tennessee, Howley is quite literary in her approach and alludes to philosophy (chiefly Schopenhauer, but others, too) early and often. So yes, I'm embarrassed to say I was looking words up as I read a tale about cage fighters because it was getting a rather unexpected "literary treatment."

Part of the appeal here is that the fighters are for real. Thus, you don't have to picture them so much as look them up and say, "So this is the psycho she's traipsing around with..." and so forth. There's the veteran who loses more than he wins, but almost never gets knocked out, Sean Huffman:

http://www.tapology.com/fightcenter/f...

And then there's the young dude Howley is so enamored with, by contrast with Huffman much less "stable" but much more successful, Erik Koch:

http://www.ufc.com/fighter/Erik-Koch

You'll learn a lot about Brazilian jiu-jitsu, its superiority to all forms of fighting, and of Howley's obsession with same. Not one to turn away from violence and blood, she positively luxuriates in it -- her prose constantly leaning in for a closer look, before, during, and after fights. You'll learn a lot about training and diet (e.g. eating fruit is not as healthy as you think due to the sugar and due to the fact that it makes you retain water in a big way), especially how these guys starve and dehydrate themselves to "make weight." You'll also learn a trick about fooling the drug testers, if you hang in the ring long enough.

As the matches come and go, we get to know both fighters more intimately: Sean in his custody dramas with a woman who just wants money and uses the baby as bait; Sean with his constant battles with weight and motivation; Sean with his plow-horse mentality in the octagon cage, earning respect for taking punishment without capitulating, thus winning while losing.

Then there's young and grossly immature Erik. He talks obsessively about food and himself, as if anyone cares; suspects everyone of disrespecting him; watches old movies like Pumping Iron and Dodgeball again and again (and again). He also plays MMA videogames starring himself, allowing Howley some philosophical flights of fancy about boy playing himself vs. the virtual version of the real-world champion in his weight class, Jose Aldo of Brazil.

In the end, interestingly, Howley becomes almost as psycho as the fighters she so cooly follows as a "spacetaker" (MMA for "groupie," I think). Thus, the whole book becomes as much psychological study as physical play-by-play, all with Famous Philosophers for $500, Alex, as a Greek chorus.

If it's something new and unusual you crave -- and if you don't mind the sight of a lot of blood on your pages -- you can't do much better (or weirder) than Thrown.

[George Ilsley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not sure what to make of this one. The writing was very strong at times, but the "narrator" was so annoying the text was difficult to wade through. I ended up skimming a lot.

Other reviewers say the narrator is "fictional" but I missed that confession.

The text was burdened by a load of bullcrap about natural ecstasy without any mention of hormones or physiology; — as well, there is a well known spectator effect in sports, but these simple facts are buried under the weight of philosophical nonsense.

The narrator (and thus unfortunately the book) ultimately comes across as someone with a simple crush on a guy, and willing to do anything to keep hanging out. This, plus a lot of fake philosophy.

[Strange Weather · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am very, very tired of MFA writing, the likes of which have become the pre-packaged bestsellers of the literary world. The sort of writing where intellectual pride weeps through every sentence, denying you the ability to forget that This Writer Got an MFA to even get a sense of plot. As these things go, this was a particularly noxious specimen. The self-absorption and flaunting of philosophy made this unreadable, however much I wanted to read the stories of MMA fighters. Is this fad of writing over yet? Can we go back to a time before?

[Abe Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

Genius on a sentence level. The fight scenes are better choreographed than blockbuster movies. The two fighters could not be more different and yet they pair beautifully together.

[Sean Owen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kerry Howley's "Thrown" is a difficult book to assess. The reader gets near total access to the inner circles of two different MMA fighters on two totally different trajectories. However, the reader is taken into that inner circle by one of the most insufferable narrators ever to put words to a page. The narration is so over the top towards the end I couldn't decide whether Howley really is this obnoxious or if she was pulling some sort of Andy Kaufman type stunt.

The book opens with Howley leaving an academic conference under the ruse of going to smoke (how edgy and counter-cultural!) only to walk off and stumble on a low level mixed martial arts exhibition. She feels she's found something truly special and unique, but of course she needs to break out the thesaurus and the Nietzche to tell us this. She ends up weaseling her way into the inner circle of Sean a sort of nobody fighter past his prime that never truly was. She also works her way into the inner circle of another MMA fighter Eric Koch who is on a rapid track towards the apex of the sport.

These two drastically different subjects provide a great entryway for discussing the sport at it's highest and lowest levels. The access Howley gets is like nothing I've ever seen in the writing on the sport. Also, Howley manages to render action scenes without drowning in a sea of adjectives and while preserving the tension of the moment. All of these strengths however barely compensate for the "I'm so smart and edgy and hip look at me slumming with these fighters tone" that the rest of the book just drowns in. I suppose Howley is attempting to claim a bit of ground in the school of non-fiction that maintains that distance and objectivity towards the subject, but she has far oversteered and given us so much info about the least interesting person in the entire book (her).

What makes these sections even harder to stomach is just how off-base some of her assertions are. She attempts to counterpose these fighters against sterile respectable society by talking about such square things as yoga and gluten free diets. Howley seems here to have confused the beer swilling t-shirt wearing fans of the sport with the disciplined athletes in the ring. She spends a full 20 pages later in the book telling us of the monk like efforts Erik puts into preparation towards making weight for a match. Any fan of the sport should read the book, because the inside look is like nothing else. Just be prepared for some serious groaning and eye-rolling as you make your way through Howley's bloviating.

[Charles Dee Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

The narrator is in Des Moines, Iowa, attending a conference on phenomenology. She tires of listening to a “balding professor stunningly wrong about Husserlian intentionality,” and goes off on her own to explore the conference facility. She sees a sign announcing the “Midwest Cage Championship.” For the rest of the afternoon she watches her first Mixed Martial Arts competition, a sport with which she has no experience and for which she has no vocabulary. “Sometimes the men were standing exchanging shots as if in a streetfight, and sometimes they leaned against the cage clutching and clawing at one another, and sometimes they rolled about the middle of the canvas like hugging children tumbling down a hill.” The last fight on the program is between Kevin “The Fire” Burns and Sean Huffman. The chiseled Burns is a crowd favorite. Huffman she perceives is a misshapened man already in his early thirties, apparently there to be dismantled by Burns.

For three long and bloody rounds I watched Sean play slobberknocker to another man’s technical prowess. Jab after jab Sean ate, and with each precisely timed shot to his own mouth Sean’s smile grew, as if The Fire were carving that smile into him. ..I had the oddest feeling of clouds momentarily departing…I felt an immense affection for the spectacle before me, but it was as if the affection were not emanating from anywhere, because I had dissolved into a kind of mist and expanded into the entire space that held these hundred men.

The narrator becomes a part of Sean Huffman’s entourage, or, in the parlance she learns of the MMA world, a “spacetaker.” She attends his fights, watches him train, hangs out at his place, and becomes enmeshed in his messy, beaten-down life. She is accepted into this new world, but she remains, at least for most of the book, a PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Iowa. She is the observer participant who looks to learn something about the nature of ecstatic experience from the world of cage fighting.

The fighters call the narrator Kit, and they know she is writing a book. One of Sean’s friends asks her if it will be a “girl book,” and she replies, “I don’t think it will be a girl book.” It’s not. As a reporter Kit never condescends to Sean, his friends, or their world, but her notes record both their eating binges and dope smoking with comments like, “Cartesian dualism…Disproved.” When she sees Sean enter the octagon to take another beating from a younger, fitter man she writes “…some especially receptive nerve in the back of my neck began to twitch – then, I thought, in concise paraphrase of Nietzsche, ‘order vies with chaos at the point where orders of beauty collapse.” Prententious? Yes, somewhat, but that’s who Kit is.

In an expansion of her spacetaking activities, Kit takes on a second fighter. Erik Koch is a lithe welterweight with the potential to fight his way into The Big Shows, those Las Vegas events broadcast on Pay-Per-View that are the pinnacle of the MMA world. Moving between the world of Erik Koch, filled with both the excitement of potential fame and the febrile energy of his Narcissism, and that of Sean who becomes increasingly focused on earning money for child support and gaining visitation rights with a child Kit is not convinced is his own, gives the narrative its variety and depth.

But with all its local color and psychological insight and entertaining cast of supporting characters, Thrown never pretends to be a novel. It is a complex essay and a sophisticated piece of journalism held together by the character of Kit herself, who in the multi-layered world of the book is somehow separate from the author Kerry Howley. Howley addresses this issue in what is possibly the defining moment of the book.

In regards to the present narration, I feel compelled to defend myself against a certain sort of prejudice endemic to our times. “You,” my gentle detractors will say, “who purport to tell the stories of these real men, are but a work of fiction.” This I do not deny: I stand before you every bit as fictional as longitude and latitude, as the Roman calendar, as the sixty-second minute, and I encourage you to dispose of all these to the extent that they offend you…For be assured, in the world I describe, space was taken. The fighters were heard by human ears, each word faithfully recorded. Real fingers ran over the stitches on Sean’s brow. Real tears fell down the face that watched him fall.
Now those who ask that I be as real as Sean have a curious faith in the ability of those with birth certificates and tax IDs to free themselves from the fetters of deception. My (admittedly neurotic) progenitor, on the other hand, is so conscious of her own tendency toward self-confabulation that she hesitates to call anything she says of herself a fact…All narrators, I say, are fiction. All. The reliable ones have the decency to admit it.

Thrown belongs on the nonfiction shelf, but it also finds itself sharing space on the new shelf that includes the novels of Ben Lerner, Teju Cole, and all the others who have decided that where there are lines to be blurred, they will blur them.

[Abraham Thunderwolf · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been watching MMA for so long that I remember renting an early UFC on VHS at the same place I use to rent Super Street Fighter 2 on the Sega Genesis because it was neon green. I popped that tape in and the first thing that came to mind was that it looked like the fucking kumite from Bloodsport, it looked unreal. It was fascinating. And while I've never been a fanboy of mma, I've always dug it, like boxing, but somehow purer. Thrown is cool because it starts off with the least likely person to dig mma and ends in several heartbreaks. It's weird reading about New Breed Koch from the prespective of not his coach or another fan but from a "space taker." From someone so far away from the wrold of MMA it's almost comical. It's brutal reading about a fighter who I've never heard of and never seen, but who fights and fights and fights. This is a great book for people who might have pretensions of being smart who look down on mma because it looks like something from the decline of Rome. I can't really speak from a fighters pov but I've seen a few local fights in person, and more fights on tv with people (men and women) basically fighting in their skivies in some dive in fucking Idaho, and fights out in Rio, Tokyo, Las Vegas, those huge fights, and as an observer who thinks they are sorta smart it hits pretty hard. It's weird how it's very philosophical; getting cracked in the face is getting cracked in the face, but that's just my stance on it, but KH puts a great spin on it. She also puts up this great thing about the how octagon is the same one and it is only conjured up when it is right, and fuck yeah I can see that. There's a school of ancient philosophers that basically said that there's one ideal thing, let's say a bed, but every other bed is just a representation of that ideal bed made by the god(s), but sometimes it shines through a "mundane" bed. Anyway. I liked this book so much that I couldn't wait to come home and type about it despite being drunker than I've been since before NYE. You should totally check this book out if you hate mma and if you are a fan of mma. If you're somewhere in the middle go watch a bunch of fights. It's even better live. The last fight I was right by the border of Indiana. I went to support the MMA school my friend goes to stay in shape and watched the dudes from that school just decimate the opposition. It's inspiring to watch Pretty Tony, who you just meta a couple of weeks ago, a decade and then some younger than you, just destroy some other dude. Soundtrack: Pantera. Drink: Sugar free red bulls.

[Kay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like Tom, I know Kerry Howley (though less well), but I'm glad to say that this work is a fascinating and well-executed work of fiction.

Set mostly in Iowa, the narrator follows two different fighters around as a "spacetaker"— a member of each of their entourages, something between a friend and an observer. She experiences the magic of MMA fighting and sacrifices everything just to be immersed into the world of a subculture of masculinity. That last word, I suppose is what this book is actually about. The beginning of the book makes much about how the two fighters, Erik and Sean, talk about how they feel alive in the cage. It is this focus, on the fight, that allows the rest of their lives to fade away. The more the two fighters are willing to sacrifice in their lives, the better they perform. And the more they allow real life to get in the way, the more the dream of the ring dies. Because MMA isn't a celebrity kind of sport, no one can really "make it" by fighting (not like other professional athletes, anyway). Sure, they can win prize money and earn a modicum of fame among a certain subset of fans, but mostly the fighters are winding down time until they either physically can't fight anymore or they can't pay the emotional or economic price of devoting that much time to training any longer.

Kit, the narrator, is a very thin character. This is, of course, intentional. Kerry doesn't want Kit to get in the way of the story, so she doesn't make much of her. And we never really understand her true fascination with the fighters (sexual? emotional? intellectual?). There are also a few things that don't make a ton of sense to me -- even an intellectual might know who April O'Neill of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is, and it's odd that someone who says she understands philosophy better than the professors at Iowa would have only a passing familiarity with Ron Paul. There's also very much the flavor of Kit as an intellectual finding a fascination with a sub-culture in "real America." (I find this irritating when the New Yorker does it, and Kerry replicates it well). This is also, of course, intentional. But nevertheless, I understand the point of Kit's character, I think I'm just a bit tired of the trope.

All that isn't enough to derail me from enjoying the book immensely. She does an excellent job of painting the world without getting bogged down in the technical details. It's a great read. One I'd highly recommend.

[Stefanie · Rating 1 out of 5]

If this is experimental literary non-fiction (whatever that is), then I'm not a fan. The fictional narrator is relentlessly annoying. The writing doesn't flow, it's as though she threw some word tiles up in the air and then made sentences based on how they landed. I kept thinking of the Wolcott Gibbs quote, "Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind." I am a casual MMA fan and respect fighters in general but this depiction makes both of the subjects appear petty, delusional, irrational, perhaps mentally unstable, and altogether not too bright. I would have liked to have seen some redeeming qualities in them, a more balanced portrayal, but if this is in any way a realistic depiction of these men, then I can't understand why she didn't choose different subjects. Perhaps the fighters didn't really matter to the author anyway, since the book is mostly about the fictional narrator anyway - and she's a complete head case. I am baffled by all the positive reviews.

[Monty · Rating 1 out of 5]

To me, it read less like a book and more like someone telling you just how smart they are. Smug, condescending, with superfluous arrogant autobiographical tidbits, it had a couple moments but....

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an odd book. It's considered literary non-fiction even though the "author" is fictional. To me, this story is therefore fiction. The MMA fighters might be real, and their stories might be real, but I think that a fictional narrator makes it fiction.

The concept of the book is that the narrator (Kit) is going through a PhD program in philosophy and doing a study on some sort of ecstatic out-of-body selflessness blah-blah-whatever. The first tenth of this book was really off-putting. Kit, the fictional author, was desperate to come off as intelligent, using a ridiculous number of million-dollar-words, and obnoxiously quoting philosophers. I don't know if this was intended by Kerry Howley (the actual author) or not. Either way, there was a cliche anti-academic thread going on throughout the book. Kit was trying to persuade us that there was some sort of valuable experimentation taking place, but it was unclear what the difference was between Kit's pseudo-intellectual experience watching a fight and any other couch-potatoesque sports fan (count me in!) enjoying any sport vicariously. Maybe its all in the adrenaline rush. Anyway, I didn't like that part of the book.

The part of the book that I liked was the reporting on the lives of the fighters, their social and psychological challenges, their work ethic, and just the narrative in general. The action writing was awesome and the stories of the fighters were intriguing. She did a great job of making these guys into real people. I guess it helps that they actually are real people. However, she has a undeniable gift with words and a great sense of humor that generated great moments naturally from their lives. I loved the parts of the book where she hung out with the guys, and talked about how they watched Arnold Schwarzenegger. I loved the part about their relationships and their struggles in their personal lives (One of the fighters gets a young lady pregnant but its uncertain whether the baby is really his or not).

Kit follows two fighters, one that's on his way up, and another that's later in his career, hoping to stage a final comeback. The book stays fresh by bouncing between the two stories. By the end, I was really invested in the success of the fighters. I was rooting for both of them.

I wish I could give this book 3.5 stars. 3 seems low and 4 seems high. I am rounding down because I am a little perturbed that the author didn't just play it straight as herself. But I can't be too angry because she probably did it for artistic purposes, it probably allowed her a little more freedom to be a little wilder and more flowery with language, and perhaps distanced her a bit more from some of the nastier realities and truths she had to tell.

Anyway, if you want something unique, go for it.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

It figures that it would take a columnist from a libertarian magazine to get me to be fascinated by MMA. Or CM Punk. One of the two, but, either way, Thrown was not previously down my alley and ended up being one of the better "nonfiction" reads I've taken in of late.

To call it a book about mixed martial arts isn't really fair, because there's not a lot about MMA here. Granted, there's information about some of the wrinkles, and the book does assume some basic knowledge, but this is less about cage fighting and more about the cage fighters - one, following a post-read Google search, is at least somewhat known, and one that didn't really seem to pan out. We get a glimpse into their lives, into what it's like to train, what it's like to be around an MMA fighter, and so on. It's immersive journalism in a sense, but it's also a little more than that. It kind of takes down the spectacle of the whole MMA "thing" a bit, a peek behind the veil, and it's constructed in such a way that it feels like you're part of the observation process instead of reading about it.

If there is a flaw in the book, it's that the tone feels a lot more like a long-form magazine article that would end up in one of the more serious publications than a book. It's not the sort of traditional narrative you come to expect, perhaps it's very "new journalism" and I'm just an old man reader archetype, but it was jarring from time to time until I got used to it.

With that said, it should be added that there's a wrinkle to this book that does throw (heh) a bit of the narrative into question. I don't want to give it away, as the information (to a point) is still solid, just... tweaked. I don't know how to describe it a bit.

Overall, really, this was a fascinating read. It's a good example of a book I read nonfiction for on purpose - I didn't know how interested I'd be in this aspect of sports or entertainment until I read about it. I still don't think I'll be watching MMA - it's a bit brutal for my taste - but I've come out with an appreciation for what it's about and the people involved with it, even in the state it's presented in. Very interesting, very strange, very much worth the time to read.

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was stunned by this brilliantly written gem. Howley kills it with her complex musings on an utterly boring yet egregiously violent game, specifically focusing on two diametrically opposed fighters, one a young sociopathic upstart and the other a lazy, pot-addled sadsack approaching overweight middle age. I don't know why these manly Iowa men allowed this sycophantic spacetaker into their private lives to view their insane training regimens involving near starvation and 7-hour sparring 6 days a week. Her tone sometimes veered too far toward the scholarly side ("I had of course constructed a phenomenological theory about my odd reaction to the violent encounter" is one such sparkler), but overall, her hunt for the perfect ecstatic moment had me hooked from beginning to end.

Some choice quotes:

"Fighting summons a kind of void to which words are wholly inadequate."

"This moment lasts for days. We can only open our mouths in a united wordless moan. We are each of us simple tools of perception, free of the clouding intellect, allowed a thinking of the body only accessible when men like Erik can, for a single solitary second, lead us outside ourselves. He has torn a small hole in consciousness. It is already closing."

"Know that the reaching tendrils of the analytical mind, even as they wrap themselves round a million problematical abstractions, leave a universe of calamity untouched."

[Lindsay · Rating 3 out of 5]

I always round down, so this is really 3.5 or even 3.75 stars.

Just because I feel like I should say something based on friend's reviews: I know Kerry Howley('s... name.)

Okay, I only know OF Kerry Howley, although I'm sure we've probably been at the same Halloween party at some point in the past decade or something. You tend to root for someone in your social sphere, however tenuous your link. That said, I legitimately liked this book.

Set in Iowa, Howley speaks to my roots. I also happen to have a coworker who is obsessed with MMA and spends his weekends driving to fights all over the East Coast. Reading someone's take on these personal-ish topics (even with the addition of a seriously obnoxious narrator from academia, a character I'm still trying to form an opinion on) make for a surprisingly enjoyable book.

I never found any parts of it funny like Tom did, but Howley is incredibly talented at describing details of MMA that a regular sportswriter or a novelist would overlook. I appreciate the weird entanglement of fiction and nonfiction, which has led me to spend a not insignificant amount of time googling MMA fighters and Schopenhauer's essays. Explaining the internet history on the family computer to my spouse should be entertaining.

[Feargal · Rating 3 out of 5]

it's fine. but I think the whole conceit of a fictional narrator to a nonfiction book is bs

[Stephen Durrant · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was drawn in by the unusual situation: a graduate student in philosophy, the author Kerry Howley, walks out of a boring academic conference and wanders into a cage fight venue. She has some sort of Artaudesque/Nietszchesque feeling of violence-enduced ecstasy and, for the rest of the book, becomes a "spacetaker," as they are called, in the entourage of two separate cage fighters, Sean and Erik, the former more-or-less washed up and the second ascending to near stardom. Howley writes well, but I was slightly disappointed that she did not develop more fully the rationale for her attachment to cage fighting. She does make passing references to several philosophers whose thought is relevant and, more pointedly, indicates some of the inconsistencies of those, like war hero John McCain, who reject cage fighting as mindless violence unworthy of serious attention, but mostly she becomes absorbed in two lives . . . even though the details of those relationships are not fully revealed and elaborated. Oh well, this is an unusual book and does have its moments of high interest. Plus I always enjoy the unexpected, and a philosopher who feels attracted to cage fighting is not something one encounters every day.

[Joy · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5- I don't often think this, but this is a very bizarre book. Howley writes in a near stream-of-conscious extremely self-aware literary style. At first I felt this was a choice made to distance her from her 'subjects' the MMA fighters she follows around for several years, later I became not so sure. Instead of using her prose as a class barrier to look down upon these men she turns on herself, portraying herself as a user, a bottom feeder. She knowingly states she's cultivating a fictional version of herself, which left me wondering if the horrible traits displayed are real? Is she playing a 'space taker' for the book? This is violently meta. These structural elements reflect the themes throughout 'Thrown'; art, transcendence, performance. The writing only became truly free flowing and unencumbered from elaborate embellishments during the depictions of fights. The fight sections gave me a taste of that transcendence UFC brought her. Knowing that Howley has written 'Thrown' to be that way only adds yet another element of performance. A Russian doll with reality somewhere inside. The sort of book that made me laugh and immediately feel guilty for laughing, then wonder if Howley intended my guilt.

[Miescha · Rating 2 out of 5]

First off I want to say that I was really excited to read this book. I bought over 20 books to start off the new year and I picked this one to read first because I was that excited. So, I gave it a fair shot. That being said, there are SO many problems with this book. First of all, the writing is atrocious. It's terribly awkward and not in a "I'm respecting the character's voice"-way, it's just difficult to follow which doesn't make sense because whatever shortcomings the narrator may have, she is still a graduate student in philosophy who can write well enough to get into graduate school. The descriptions are repetitive and cliche. She must have described Sean's cauliflower ear a million times, or Erik's skeleton milky white vs. tan skin. She also whipped out the 'ol "puckish sprite" comparison in a fight scene. Is this what we can expect from Iowa's MFA now? They're usually the gold standard. There are also a ridiculous amount of outright grammatical errors in the text, fragments of sentences and sentences like the following: "You have to go the emergency room?" Quality work. Now THAT'S sarcasm! Which brings me to my next point. The book was marketed as "sarcastic" and "darkly comic" and while Kit's self-involvement definitely reaches levels of ludicrous, most of the time its just mean and gets old. Since Kit doesn't really define well what she's looking for beyond "that particular state of being to which one Sean Huffman had taken me.” and repeatedly blows off scholastic endeavors as a goal, her self-involved antics stop being funny and the story loses its suspense for the reader. I gave it 2 stars because we DO care about the fighters and she does know how to keep us hooked albeit in the shameless manner of a drug-store mystery novel with sentences like "But even Duke wouldn't know what exactly happened that evening; he would be cloaked in ignorance nearly as long as I would." However, the BIGGEST problem I have with this book is that it is marketed NON-FICTION and touted as "experimental" and genre-bending in some way because it's a non-fiction book with a fictional narrator. No, honey, that's just a marketing ploy and we're not buying it. They have a genre for that and its called historical fiction. To me this is just a badly written book by a writer whose been mildly successful in publishing essays and short stories for the New York Times and thus was able to use her influence and branding to get published something that wouldn't pass as a decent historical fiction novel but put in the non-fiction section, is pardoned its sins under the cloak of experimentation.

[Kari · Rating 5 out of 5]

A conversation about this book at my Thanksgiving dinner table devolved into a debate about the definition of "creative nonfiction," but I maintain that this is a fine example of the form.

For years I have been in search of narratives about mixed martial arts and so far have found only memoirs written by non-writers and erotic romances. I was thrilled to read this literary depiction of the sport.

The "creative" part of this nonfiction is that the narrator is "fictitious," but the fighters she follows are real. While watching her first mixed martial arts match, she observes, "This exhibition, whatever it may be, has ushered ecstatic experience back into the world." Not only is she having an ecstatic experience, but she believe the fighters and other spectators are too. She spends the rest of the book in search of that same feeling.

In doing so, she reveals to the reader a world where men starve themselves to make weight and take repeated blows to the head. But she "gets" mixed martial arts, which I think does a service to a sport often misunderstood as pointlessly brutal.

"I was through careful study, beginning to see that the most talented fighters are those who can transition seamlessly between fighting arts."

Observed during training, "Nothing looks violent or forced here: the men, careful to protect one another against fractures and laceration and ligamentary tears, play with a cerebral placidity."

It was with cerebral placidity that I read this book and I highly recommend it.

[Edith-nicolecameron · Rating 1 out of 5]

Maybe I would have liked this in my early twenties when I was a less discriminating reader, or maybe I would have liked it if I hadn't recently read five mind-blowingly fantastic books oozing with craftsmanship at its most mature and polished (Dept. of Speculation, Gilead, Home, Redeployment, Lowland). As it is, wrong book, super wrong time. The author is painfully annoying and egocentric. The fighters would be compelling if the reader didn't have to sift through a weird overlay of unsympathetic narratorial judgment throughout the book's entirety. Overuse of "thus" and "to which", "from whom", "on which", "under which", et cetera was v. distracting. It seemed like the writer put her heart and soul into something and then nobody ever told her she needed to get over herself, find a point, and clean up the text so that such point was clear. (It wasn't.) The writing was so awkward. Improper use of large words, strange metaphors, random alliteration - clearly the author LOVES language, but in a selfish rather than generous way. It felt like she was diligently but misguidedly using an online thesaurus. I wondered what kinds of books she reads. I also bet her essays are better and more refined. I'm going to check them out because there were bits of budding brilliance. But bits among 280 pages is not enough to make a book good.

[Evija · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although I can't put this book in the "total waste of time" category, I still can't give more than 2.5 stars to it. The thing that pissed me off the most was that the book could have been so much better but it didn't live up to it's potential.

I thought that the book would be a joruney to the world of fighters and would reveal at least some parts of the men behind a social role they take as the fighters - problems, they have to deal with, everyday choices, dilemmas, emotional struggles. It turned out the book was about some annoying chick whith a bunch of mental problems who follows fighters but never comes close enough to reveal the deeper levels of the personalities of those fighters. I kept waiting and expecting something more and it never came.

I don't know why the book was so shallow - was it because the narrator wasn't able to get deeper than the scratching of the very surface of the topic or was she too self-absorbed and selfish to let anyone get closer to the objects of her affection? Maybe she wanted those fighers all to herself? Whatever the reason I feel sorry for the guys because I really, truly believe that they deserved more and their story was worth to be told just the voice telling it was too anoying and too egocentric.

One Word - disappointing!

[James Carmichael · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm very torn about this book.

Five stars: its immersion into this world, and its intimacy and observation of these two fighters. It really will ruin other books on the topic: it's so accomplished in both its observation and expression, and is so clearly the result of immersion.

fewer stars: I really don't get, for me as a reader, much out of "Kit". I was not interested in a fictional entity parading through this reality; I did not find her "phenomenological investigation" interesting; worst of all, it felt like "Kit" became cover or shield for the author's observations, to allow her to say certain things or, much worse, NOT say them. As a matter of taste: Kit's voice was clearly and carefully constructed, but felt constructed beside all this reality. I can't know this, but based on my view that Howley is a very smart person and a very skillful writer, I THINK I'd just have preferred the earnestness of her own observations, unfiltered.

counterpoint: Howley, a smart skillful writer, gave me a problematic narrator to push back against for the duration of the book, thus engaging me.

It's certainly worth reading.

[Jeffrey Powanda · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not sure what drew me to this book.

It's a literary nonfiction book about two cage fighters in the Midwest. The author, an acclaimed essayist, spent three years following the fighters. But the narrator is semi-fictional. Huh? So I guess it's NOT nonfiction. Whatever. The two mixed martial arts fighters are pathetic, and even a semi-fictional narrator can't overcome that.

This book just wasn't for me. No fault of the writer, who does an admirable job. She writes eloquently, honestly, and humorously--although semi-fictionally--about the fighters' pathetic lives.

Maybe I just don't understand MMA fighting. And I don't want to understand it. This will probably be the last book I read about it.

[Jeremy Hornik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Delightful.

I love books where a bookish, nerdy writer gets WAYYY too involved in a violent pastime. Like "Among the Thugs", or Liebling's "The Sweet Science", or "The Joy of Sumo: A Fan's Notes" (although for whatever reason, "A Fan's Notes" by Frederick Exley leaves me cold.) The need to describe the action and the gulf between narrator and subject is a great catalyst for STYLE. The language in these books is always fun. And the violence itself, it's clear, is kind of a mood-altering drug.

The narrator may be the writer or may be a character who rode along with the writer, or perhaps a little of both. She is a weirdo intellectual too precious for this world, capable of great insight and great foolishness. The fighters themselves are types, definite types, but described with great brio and still capable of surprise in their actions. The action of the book is capricious in both pace and outcome, which is to say, it seems like life. I was more completely caught up in this odd little book than any book I've read for a while, and read it fast. I think I'll buy it.

[Courtenay · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm stunned that so many readers gave this book one-star reviews. It is utterly hilarious, absurd, and informative, with some of the more gorgeous turns of phrase I've seen. It reads like Jane Austen writing a novel about MMA. Because it is billed as nonfiction, it seems some people are incapable of understanding that the narrator is a fictional construct, despite the fact that Howley clearly explains that ALL narratives are fictional constructs. This particular narrator is versed in philosophy, and Howley uses this lens to utterly hilarious effect. The mashup of highbrow continental philosophy, laced with elitism and pretentiousness, and lowbrow MMA is a beautiful and absurd juxtaposition. The result is a page-turner of a book that's simultaneously an exploration of "truth," a hilarious parody of intellectualism, and an insight into the world of MMA. It's perfect.

[John Devlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

An eccentric narrator with a fetish for MMA fighters and philosophic erudition attaches herself to two fighters like a barnacle to a 4- masted sailing vessel.

Interesting in its depiction of the Spartan way and the epistemological rumination over the sacredness of the Octagon, Howley is droll. Droll in her remembrances of the hapless, beaten Sean with his troubled baby-mama life and droll in her depiction of Eric, the zen like savant of the new fighting creed.

Written as part anthropology, part character sketch, part memoir, Howley's book is recommended to those who want to understand MMA in a more idiosyncratic way.

[Nick · Rating 2 out of 5]

Inherently interesting characters and story, but Howley focuses primarily on who is - or is not - an authentic member of the cage fighting community in an effort, presumably, to justify her own fetishizing of fighters. Her understanding of cage fighting and of athletics remains shockingly poor. While her commentary can appear convincing due to her exceptional talent as a writer, it is entirely lacking in truthful insight to anyone that has even a cursory understanding of the sport. I wanted to like this book for so many reasons, but ultimately found it to be the tale of a talented author who's neurotic anxieties prevented her from objectively engaging her subject.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was just going to give this four stars and skip the review until I saw how many other reviewers gave Thrown middling to low ratings without grasping that Kit and Kerry Howley are not the same person; that maybe there are reasons why Kit's narration is grating and her actions are strange; and so forth.