TO SMITHEREENS, by Rosalyn Drexler
One of my favorite Instagram accounts belongs to the Meredith Rosen Gallery: Whoever runs it regularly posts videos of people being daring, random or exceptionally dumb. A woman in a bikini and a wool hat jumps into a lake that’s frozen over. A little kid beats the living daylights out of an inflatable Santa in someone’s front yard. The same caption accompanies all of these posts — “#artdealing” — as if the art world were so absurd as to be a metaphor for every madness, every vanity, every act of stupid bravery.
Something of this zany spirit of juxtaposition governs “To Smithereens,” Rosalyn Drexler’s brilliantly offbeat novel of two seemingly unrelated subcultures in 1970s New York City: the art world and women’s wrestling. First published in 1972, it begins with a strange man putting his hand on a young woman’s thigh in a movie theater. She crushes his fingers, whacks his wrist and then empties her drink on him.
He’s into it. They start dating, and he, Paul, a middling art writer, pushes her, Rosa, sans profession but full of beans, to get into professional wrestling. It’s his kink, but she’s willing to give it a try.
Narrated by Paul and Rosa in alternating chapters, “To Smithereens” is a novel about a man daring a woman to do things, and the woman doing them — to test her power, to defy the straitjacket of femininity and to grow ever larger and stronger. Paul tries to give Rosa an artistic education, but she sees art in a fundamentally different way. When he shows her a picture of Magritte’s “The Listening Room” — a painting of “a fat apple as big as the room it was in,” as Rosa puts it — she disagrees with his take that the apple is “aggressive,” or “crowding out the room.”
An apple is natural; it belongs wherever it is: on trees, on the ground, in bowls, in rooms. Magritte was on the side of the apple, I’m sure. His rooms are always being invaded, or made to hold the outdoors in. He must have read “Alice in Wonderland.” His objects have done what the label on the bottle or the message on the table told them to: DRINK ME … EAT ME! And like Alice, they threaten to come through the roof. I’m an apple, I’m Alice, I’m Rosa.
Paul is a hilarious sendup of a self-serious art writer who considers it his role to “help clarify.” As he attends a circuit of parties, exhibition openings and ’60s-style “happenings” (including one in which he receives a sexual favor in a mausoleum), he is mindful that he must make his mark by inventing some catchphrase that will cement his importance:
I had been straining to coin a new word for the new art, a word as strong as “Pop,” “Op” or “Minimal.” A few times I had entered the phrase “Stop Art,” to express my feeling that art was coming to an end (because it had no place to go), but it was not picked up. Nobody wanted to stop anything. Everybody wanted to start something. To be the first, not the last.
Drexler’s portrayal of the pro-wrestling scene is no less vivid. In language as deft and muscular as Rosa’s team, Drexler captures the scent of the blood and the resin, every wisecrack and sob story, every flake of talc and gob of spit, every pimple and blackhead on the lady wrestlers’ thighs. As Rosa tries to memorize a sequence of moves before her first fight, language hits the mat in deference to the found poetry of the ring: “MONKEY-FLIP KICKOUT KEISTER BUMPS BABY-FACE WAIST SCISSORS HEEL WHIP KICKOUT HOT FLYING MARE COOL FIGURE-4 MURDER.” The promoters call her Rosa Rio, the Mexican “Sizzlin’ Spitfire,” though she’s a Jewish American girl who’s never been south of the border.
Off she goes on tour with a colorful cast of women wrestlers and their assorted hangers-on: Jean Burly, “the greatest, most beautiful ath-a-lete in America, Canada and Mexico,” according to her manager, Bobby Fox; Tommy J. Jukes (“I’m purty but I’m dirty”); Mike the promoter and his right-hand man, Shorty, a person with dwarfism who comes in for page after page of ableist invective. (I know it’s 1972, but yikes.)
Drexler’s own biography lends the novel an irrefutable air of authenticity: Now approaching 100, she was a collage artist and fixture of the 1960s Pop Art scene who has not only managed to produce 10 plays and nine novels, but herself had a spell as a wrestler (her nom de guerre was Rosa Carlo, and Andy Warhol once made a silk-screen print of her in her leotard, crouched as if preparing to attack).
Like a collage, or a fight, “To Smithereens” is at its heart about relationships, and the conflict and contact that is their lifeblood, or their ruin. Toward the end of the novel, as Rosa and Paul try to make a go of cohabiting, Paul quotes Kafka’s diary: “The hardships of living together. Forced upon us by strangeness, pity, lust, cowardice, vanity and only deep down, perhaps, a thin little stream worthy of the name love, impossible to seek out, flashing once in the moment of a moment.” It’s an apt description of his life with Rosa, he thinks. “Two contenders. No one to rescue us from ourselves. Each other’s victims.”
TO SMITHEREENS | By Rosalyn Drexler | Hagfish | 212 pp. | Paperback, $18
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