Good writing delivers a jab to the solar plexus

Cut Time

An Education at the Fights

Carlo Rotella

Houghton Mifflin: 222 pp., $24

*

“Cut Time” is redolent of an earlier, sweatier, smellier America. It is a book about prizefighting, boxing for money. Surprising to find it suddenly shot out of the great American book-making machine, for in this sophisticated time, it neither deplores the animalistic qualities of boxing nor explores its sociological roots.

In “Cut Time,” boxing just is -- an aspect of life, much like any other. Carlo Rotella means no irony by his subtitle, “An Education at the Fights.” He believes it is possible to get an education there, and a pretty good one too: “Boxing is not just fighting,” he writes. “It is also training and living right and preparing to go the distance in the broadest sense of the phrase, a relentless managing of self that anyone who gets truly old must learn.”

He compares the deliberate gait of old champions, slowly and carefully stepping once more into the ring on a celebrity Fight Night at a three-star hotel, to his octogenarian Sicilian grandmother’s purposeful, determined walk to church or to the cemetery where her husband is buried: “Like my grandmother making her way steadily up the hill with the energy she had saved for the occasion, they were showing themselves prepared to go the distance.”

The old men had gone through a lot of distance to get to this point. They had endured “cut time.” Rotella gives us a look at a “cut time”: A boxer named Art takes a hook from his opponent (Speight) on the right side of his face. “There was soft, much-torn old scar tissue around the outside corner of Art’s right eye, the kind that parts like wet paper when force is applied to it. Blood came up enthusiastically out of the mess, a rich, awful seductive red under the ring lights. Within seconds it was running down Art’s face, getting all over his chest and Speight’s gloves, then Art’s own gloves and both fighters’ trunks. Art’s white trunks began to turn pink.

“When blood from a serious cut finds its way into the lights, everything seems to change: it’s cut time. You can almost hear it, a droning almost-music that hangs in the smoke-filled air of fight night, strumming the optic nerves and vibrating in the teeth, encouraging fighters to do urgent, sometimes desperate things. Spectators, too, shamed and fascinated, plunge headlong into cut time. What was inside and hidden, implicit in the fight, has come outside and taken form.”

That is good writing. Rotella, a teacher of English at Boston College, takes us to the fights and shows us, to our embarrassed fascination, what boxing can look and feel like. To his credit, Rotella doesn’t interpret what he offers. He leaves that to the reader.