The Knockout Queen

The Knockout Queen by Rufi Thorpe

Friendships can be every bit as intense, queer, grotesque, riddled with the aftershocks of trauma, mysterious, and passionate as romantic/sexual relationships, but rarely is this reality explored with as much dynamism and acute attention as in Rufi Thorpe’s The Knockout Queen. When protagonist Michael Hasketh, a gay teenage boy who moves in with his aunt and cousin after his mother is incarcerated for stabbing his father in self defense, meets his next door neighbor Bunny Lampert, he is immediately taken with her. Bunny is un-self-conscious, goofy and brash. She inhabits a queer body, bigger and taller than anyone else she knows and seems to not only accept but love Michael immediately. The two also have distinct but overlapping experiences of trauma: parents who are alcoholics, witnessing intimate partner abuse and coercion between their parents, loss of parents to death or prison. And, in a way that strikes Michael as almost impossible, their friendship is a blossoming, effortless, loving, and joyful experience.

Until all of the forces of violence, addiction, and control—within relationships, households, schools, and states—that have been circling around the two friends ensnare them. Violence blooms suddenly, personally, in the midst of their everyday lives in a way that Michael and Bunny seem to have been expecting all along and are simultaneously shocked and undone by. Their bodies, with their relative power and weakness, re-emerge as humblingly central, wreaking havoc where friendship seemed to promise a bubble of safety and security. Thorpe is a magician of braiding intense plot points into the humdrum of high school, weaving in the twinned drama and mundanity of pursuing romantic/sexual relationships as a teenager, and exploring the truly crushing feeling of realizing that everything—everything—is touched by power, violence, and capitalism.

This novel is sweet and devastating and so easy to gulp down, but could easily bear re-reading for further meditation on the many big and hungry questions it asks. Michael, as a White cis male teenager indelibly affected by trauma, often thinks about “why things are the way they are.” These ruminations, which cover everything from racism to genocide, are thorny and genuine; even while Michael might draw questionable or undeveloped conclusions at points, it was refreshing to read an author conscious that her White main character is as much a racialized subject as non-White people, and attempt to engage with what Whiteness can look like from the inside. Finding a book simultaneously so readable and so chewy, rich with tough and challenging and lovely and funny subject matter, was a nuanced delight, inviting real engagement and real pleasure at once.