'Thrown', by Kerry Howley

In the sport once known as cage fighting and now called mixed martial arts, the rules are simple. Each bout features two fighters who beat each other up until one of them gives in. They cannot bite, head-butt or gouge eyes. Nor can they force joints out of sockets or insert fingers into orifices. Otherwise, almost anything goes. Which is probably why people unfamiliar with the sport have such a low opinion of it, why it is often described as "human cockfighting".

The American journalist and essayist Kerry Howley challenges not only the stigma surrounding the sport but also the conventions of literary non-fiction. Thrown, her debut book chronicling the three years she spent shadowing mixed martial artists, is an unusual hybrid. It is equal parts sports reportage, memoir and tragicomic philosophical treatise about the search for transcendence, however fleeting, narrated not from the perspective of Howley but a semi-fictionalised version of herself, Kit, who is a graduate student.

Bored at a conference on phenomenology - the philosophical study of consciousness - Kit wanders off and stumbles across a "Midwest Cage Championship" just down the corridor. Ringside, she watches "the honest kind of butchery in which the theory-mangling, logic-maiming academics I had just abandoned would never partake".

Kit follows the lives of two real-life fighters: Sean Huffman, a broken-nosed, cauliflower-eared veteran past his prime with a reputation for losing but never getting knocked out, and Erik Koch, a "feather-light hummingbird of a man", skilled in a wide array of techniques and on his way to the big time. Moments of high capering - Erik bragging about his voracious appetite, which enables him to conquer a burrito four times the size of an ordinary one - exist alongside more intimate moments - Sean's kidneys shutting down - to give an unsparing portrait of the life of a mixed martial artist.

Howley has spent time in the gyms where these men practise their craft and the dingy apartments where they idle away the hours playing computer games. She's there consistently enough, and over a long enough period of time, to understand and convey just how much of a fighter's life is pure, repetitious tedium and low-grade suffering.

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The book also makes a convincing case that mixed martial arts is not for "toothless cretins and backwater voyeurs", "sadistic thrill-seekers atrocity-hopping" their way from one fight to the next. It is a skilful sport, requiring mastery of boxing, kick-boxing, wrestling and jiu-jitsu. And there is a paradoxical gentleness to it all. In the first match Kit witnesses, she describes a tap-out, a fighter's signal that he has given up: "His fingertips touched the canvas with extreme delicacy, as if to tap a bell and summon a concierge." Erik and Sean, Kit observes, "were more careful and solicitous with one another's bodies than might be you or I, perhaps because they knew exactly how it was that bodies broke."

<>It is the cruellest of sports, which is partly why it is so seductive to read about. But it is not just the drama of split brows and busted lips that interests Howley; something greater is at stake. Kit compares her viewing experience to the descriptions handed down by various great philosophers "in which a disturbing ritual - often violent - rendered each of their senses many times more acute, as if the dull blunt body were momentarily transformed into a tuning fork, alive, as Schopenhauer put it, 'to sensations fine and fleeting'".

The play between memoir and fiction will be familiar to readers of contemporary North American literature by writers such as Teju Cole, Ben Lerner and Sheila Heti. While invention may compromise authority, it allows Howley a distinctive kind of address: sensual and ruminative, by turns bloodthirsty and poetic. And you read on with the excitement of knowing that most of it is true.

Thrown, by Kerry Howley, Hamish Hamilton, RRP£14.99/ Sarabande, RRP$15.95, 288 pages

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