The Fighter by Michael Farris Smith

Published by Little, Brown & Co./Lee Boudreaux Books on March 20, 2018

Life is full of improbable coincidences. So is The Fighter, a novel that depends on two or three huge coincidences of time and place and circumstance to bring the story together. Some readers might chalk those circumstances up to fate, particularly in light of the novel’s religious imagery and express references to angels, saviors, and prayer. I’m not much of a believer in fate, and I have criticized other novels for an overreliance on coincidence, but I’m giving The Fighter a pass. Why? Because I enjoyed the story, and in the end, that’s all that matters.

Jack Boucher is a cage fighter and a gambler. He owes money to Big Momma Sweet. That isn’t good. She puts men in the ground who don’t pay their debts. Jack also needs money to stop a foreclosure and to get a former foster mother out of a nursing home. She suffers from dementia but she’s the only person in his life he cares about, the only family he has. Jack might also be suffering from dementia, or some form brain damage that has robbed him of his memories, a likely consequence of being kicked in the head too many times.

Jack’s struggle to get out of debt, to get his life back on track, to do something for his foster mother before he dies, is sad because it seems so futile. In the story’s opening chapters, it seems clear that Jack, while well-intentioned, has little control over his life. Even if he can break out of the daze caused by his pain pills, it isn’t clear how he will overcome the cumulative impact of his bad choices before he loses his foster mother’s home to foreclosure. It isn’t even clear that he will outlive his foster mother, who may be entering her last days.

A former stripper named Annette enters the story while she’s traveling with a carnival, working as the tattooed girl. Annette’s life intersects with Jack’s in ways she doesn’t immediately understand. I won’t say much about Annette because revealing her story would spoil the coincidental surprises. I can say that, as a character, she has the right combination of damage and heart and toughness to make her appealing (although no fictional stripper has ever been created who wasn’t appealing). The same combination of damage and heart and toughness animates Jack, but he’s also appealing because he takes comfort in being who he is. He hasn’t lived a life most people would want, but he has lived the life he wanted.

The novel reveals secrets that Jack never suspected his foster mother was carrying. It builds tension as it moves toward a climax involving the possibility of one last fight, a fight that Jack might not survive. The ending could have gone in either direction, a fact that maintains suspense as the story reaches its climax. As was true of Michael Farris Smith’s Desperation Road, the humanity of the novel’s desperate and damaged characters shines through, conveyed by prose that manages to be both intense and understated.

RECOMMENDED