![]() The scenes involving Xavier and his father are agonizing in their soul-shattering horror the portrait of the Black nursing-home worker who absorbs Sam’s abuse is breathtaking in its complexity and Xavier’s internal battle as his brain functions fail him brings home the quintessential noir emotion of powerlessness. The fight-game story is enough to drive most novels, but this one goes way beyond that. And, yet, he must climb into the cage one more time if he is to free himself from the debt he owes his cousin (the crooked manager). He’s alienated from his Black mother, Evelyn his white father, Sam, is drifting into final-stages dementia, spewing long-suppressed racist venom and Xavier himself is fighting chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), or pugilistic dementia. The locked cage in which MMA combatants do battle is hardly the only confining element in Xavier’s crushing life. ![]() The brutality of the fight game and its inevitable downward arc provide enough darkness, as in Vercher’s tragic tale (following Three-Fifths, 2019) about mixed-race MMA fighter Xavier Wallace. Heinz’s The Professional in 1958 through Willy Vlautin’s Don’t Skip Out on Me in 2018, don’t need much overt crime to make them noir, though there’s usually a crooked manager involved somehow. ![]()
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