The Contender by Robert Lipsyte

First published: 1967

Type of work: Social realism

Themes: Coming-of-age, friendship, and race and ethnicity

Time of work: The late 1960’s

Recommended Ages: 13-15

Locale: Harlem, New York City

Principal Characters:

• Alfred Brooks, a seventeen-year-old orphan and school dropout, who must decide the direction his life will take
• Aunt Pearl, Alfred’s guardian, who works as a maid and takes comfort in her religion
• Vito Donatelli, a boxing trainer, who knows the difference between a contender and a victim
• Major, a thief and a thug, who destroys rather than builds
• James, one of the ghetto’s potential victims, who is Alfred’s best friend

The Story

The plot of The Contender follows the events in an eight-month period in the directionless life of Alfred Brooks. Alfred, a seventeen-year-old orphan and recent school dropout, lives with his Aunt Pearl, an extremely moral and religious woman, in the Harlem ghetto. Their world is depicted in gritty detail as an environment characterized by hopelessness, squalor, and desperation. Heroin addicts and gangs victimize those who attempt to live honestly at menial jobs.

Alfred, who works as a stock boy in a neighborhood grocery store, inadvertently gives a gang the idea to break into and rob the grocery store. Major, the muscular and vicious gang leader, cannot persuade Alfred to participate in the robbery, but Alfred’s best friend, James, agrees. The police arrive in time to thwart the robbery. Most of the gang escapes, but James is arrested.

Major and the gang blame Alfred for the arrival of the police because he failed to warn them about the silent alarm system. They beat him viciously and in the following weeks continue to terrorize him. Eventually, Alfred’s fear of Major and his loneliness at the loss of James’s friendship cause him to seek shelter in Vito Donatelli’s gym and boxing school. He decides to use boxing as a means to escape Harlem despite Donatelli’s discouragement and warning that there is more to being a champion than just mastering boxing skills and techniques.

Driven by his dreams, Alfred spends his free time training. His failure to achieve immediate and noticeable success, however, makes him an easy victim of Major’s plans to corrupt him. Major intends to keep Alfred from his goals. At a party in the basement of a tenement house, Alfred discovers that James has been released from prison and is now a heroin addict. Alfred’s despair at his friend’s addiction and the prevailing sense of hopelessness in the ghetto combine to destroy his resolve to become a champion. He abandons his hopes and follows Major, but eventually he is drawn back to the gym. With renewed determination, Alfred returns to his training. Months later, Alfred begins to enjoy limited boxing success within the gym and then begins to box publicly as an amateur.

Despite his success as an amateur boxer, Alfred is advised by Donatelli to give up his dreams of being a champion boxer. Donatelli knows that Alfred does not enjoy fighting and is uncomfortable with the possibility of severely injuring an opponent. Alfred agrees. He knows he is not a boxer, but he decides that he will not leave boxing behind until he fights his remaining scheduled bout. Donatelli agrees until he learns that Alfred’s opponent is an older, stronger, and more experienced boxer who prides himself on knocking out his opponent in the first minute of the first round. Nevertheless, Alfred insists on going ahead with the bout. He fights and loses, but he is not knocked out.

Context

The Contender, Robert Lipsyte’s acclaimed novel for adolescents, is a milestone in the development of the genre. In addition to telling an important story, The Contender is distinguished by breaking the conventions of innocence and restricted subject matter that once characterized the genre. Traditionally, novels for adolescents told innocent stories set in idyllic suburban communities populated by idealized and homogenized white children and adults. In stark contrast to that tradition, The Contender is set in the ghetto, which is described in grim detail as a desolate environment where drugs, sex, violence, and poverty are acknowledged facts of life. In addition, not only are the characters black and poor, but they also represent all the virtues, follies, and failures of humanity. Accordingly, the style of The Contender is also significantly different from the traditional style of novels for adolescents: The style is informal and colloquial, the dialogue clearly demonstrating an attempt to reflect the dialect of the streets, and although there is no profanity, conversations are characterized by the use of slang.

The Contender is an example of a new freedom in novels for adolescents—a freedom to explore the full range of adolescence in a style that attempts to reflect contemporary reality. This new freedom is demonstrated further in Robert Lipsyte’s novels about Bobby Marks: One Fat Summer (1977), Summer Rules (1981), and The Summerboy (1982). Although not set in the ghetto, these novels explore Bobby Marks’s efforts to deal with a weight problem in a society that is, at times, both hostile and cruel to those who do not conform to the norm. In these novels, as in The Contender, some uncomfortable aspects of the adolescent experience are dealt with in a style distinguished by both its candor and its sympathy.