Writers like to sound clever from the start, so it’s rather endearing that US author Gabe Habash has chosen an epigraph from an unlikely source to introduce his debut novel: Arnold Schwarzenegger. The former governor turned Trump antagonist sums up the mood of Stephen Florida in five simple words: “The mind is the limit.”

It’s an appropriate line given the sheer intensity of the eponymous character’s own mind. An orphan who is in college on a wrestling scholarship, Stephen is focused solely on winning the Kenosha Wrestling Championship, an event that looms for him with the same inevitability that the Oscars must loom for Meryl Streep every February. He has the discipline of a Buddhist monk, carefully monitoring his food, his bowel movements and his personal hygiene. On the rare occasions when he finds himself in a romantic clinch, whether it’s with his girlfriend Mary Beth or 53-year-old cleaner Masha, he refuses to climax for fear of losing his competitive edge.

This self-control is replicated in the narrative tone, which veers between hypnotic and suffocating. There are some novels where, after a chapter or two, one feels exhausted at the prospect of what lies ahead, and 50 pages into Stephen Florida I felt as though I was being pinned to a wall – or rather a mat – by a teenage boy intent on telling me every detail of his exercise routine, about the importance of warm-ups, protein and sleep and the reason he keeps his hair in a military buzz cut. Eventually, though, I gave in, seduced by his unrelenting determination, despite the fact that he was holding me down and twisting my arm into places nature did not want it to go.

The novel takes a turn halfway through, when Stephen suffers an injury that threatens his ambitions. When he finds himself in hospital, it seems as if his entire world is about to end. It’s only when his friend Linus leaves a note for him – “it is only a knee tear. You will be back in no time and I know you will keep winning” – that we realise how relatively minor his injury is and that the darkness into which he has been thrust is not only unnecessary but disturbing.

I was seduced by Stephen's unrelenting determination, despite the fact that he was holding me down and twisting my arm

Although the novel is so single-minded in its descriptions of weight classes, tactics and sporting statistics, it is not purely about, or for, wrestlers. It’s about obsession and how the things that are missing from our lives can force us to focus on a single goal to the exclusion of all other interests or pleasures; where winning is all that matters, despite the inescapable knowledge that once you’ve proved you’re the best, what else is there to do? If, as Scott Fitzgerald said, there are no second acts in American lives, this is doubly true for sportspeople, for whom it is all over in an instant.

If obsession is one of the twin pillars holding up Stephen Florida, loneliness is the other. Although he has a sort-of friend in Linus and a sort-of girlfriend in Mary Beth, Stephen is an isolated creature. When another youth, one of only 16 black students on a campus of 1,100, offers the hand of friendship and a suggestion that they “hang out sometime”, he is coldly rebuffed – “and he understands, I think, and when he says, ‘See you around,’ I get that he doesn’t mean it. His tone shuts the door.” Loneliness has met loneliness, segregation has encountered segregation, and while the other young man longs to conquer his isolation, Stephen sees only power in it.

This is not a novel that everyone will love. Its brutal intensity makes it a difficult read at times, but there’s no denying how deeply Stephen’s voice sinks into the mind. He’s a frightening construct but it’s his peculiarity and distinctiveness that draw the reader to him, much as readers have been drawn to Ignatius J Reilly or even Holden Caulfield over the years.

John Irving, who frequently features wrestlers in his novels and has written about his own experiences of the sport in The Imaginary Girlfriend, has said: “Writing is hard and I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.” I suspect Habash would spin that quote the opposite way. His writing is powerful and magnetic, with a quality that suggests it has been worked over to strip it bare of ornamentation but still leave it with a rare beauty that the greatest sportspeople, in a ring, on a court or on a pitch, can achieve.

John Boyne’s most recent novel is The Heart’s Invisible Furies (Doubleday).

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