Boxer Handsome by Anna Whitwham, review Hyper Macho is an American genre. All honour codes and frontier justice, it attempts a poetry of male violence that is terse and tough, looking for that which is brutally beautiful in among the cocked Colt 45s and the splatter of blood. We don't really do it over here. They have the Wild West. We have West Ham. When we do macho we don't bother with allegorical pretensions, we just wade in. Tattooed prizefighters, terrace thuggery, scraps in pub car parks: ours isn't Hyper Macho, it's Heritage Macho, misty-eyed and bevvied-up. Which isn't to say, of course, that we aren't just as idiotically sentimental about violence. And so it is with Anna Whitwham's debut novel, inspired by the author's grandfather, a featherweight who fought at Hoxton's Crown and Manor gym. Set in a part of contemporary Hackney untouched by the neighbourhood's recent influx of coffee shops, Boxer Handsome follows 20-year-old Bobby, a third generation boxer, as he prepares for a competition bout against his lifelong sparring partner, Connor, a local boy from a family of Irish travellers. The rivalry is intensified by their complex affections for two women: Theresa, a streetwise local, and Chloe, a recently bereaved nursery assistant. And it's given an intergenerational aspect by the long-term animus between Bobby's old man Joe, a washed up, self-pitying street drinker and Denny, Connor's father figure and the unloveliest of the novel's many unlovely characters. Rich in detail and elegantly written, Boxer Handsome is evidence that Whitwham has considerable talent, not least in her use of clipped repetitive sentences that create a kind of incantatory menace. But it falls down on the matter of violence, as so many macho books do. The central concern that animates the novel is whether boxing channels violence, releasing it safely into the world, or legitimises it, creating a platform from which it spreads into the community. Two-thirds of the way through the book Whitwham has the whole sorry spectacle on the ropes: all that maudlin East End nostalgia with its absurd hard man hero-worshipping. It's just a shame that she fails to deliver the knockout punch. Boxer Handsome Anna Whitwham Chatto, 288pp, Telegraph offer price: £11.99 plus £1.35 p&p (RRP £12.99).