Rosalyn Drexler

This sly dark comedy, Drexler's seventh novel, was first published in 1982. It takes place, and pokes sticks at, the New York City intellectual scene of the 1970s, pop psychology in particular, as well as all-pervasive American media/TV culture. Jesus Allendez is a young, very confused man from a broken home who has committed, and confessed to, a brutal rape and murder of an older woman, a neighbor who had interrupted Allendez's robbery of her apartment. (So, yes, echoes of Raskalnikov.) Dr. Mathilda Brody is an adolescent psychologist with professionally controversially theories of treatment who, takes on Allendez as a patient. In the novel's first reality-bending development, she is allowed to take Allendez out of jail and put him up in her own high rise apartment for round-the-clock treatment. Soon, she is also treating the grieving adult daughter of the murder victim.

The novel is presented through Dr. Brody's perspective, and we are pretty sure from the beginning that we are in the hands of a somewhat less than reliable narrator. Despite that factor, Drexler is able to skillfully tread the line between dark comedy and caricature, and the characters are shown to us as complex and more or less relatable humans, even our murderer. The novel, I guess, is an artifact of late 70s-early 80s satire, but certainly, for me at least, enjoyable and worth reading. It's also a quick read, which doesn't hurt.

I had never heard of Drexler, which I'm now pretty much ashamed to say. My edition of this novel was published in 2018, and the back cover text tells us, "Bad Guy is the first selection in a new series from Pushcart under the editing of celebrated novelist Jonathan Lethem." I don't know whether that series got carried on or not, but I mention it because Lethem, in his brief introduction, provides this fascinating info about Drexler:

"Drexler is a multiple-Obie-winning playwright, one of the pillars of New York's off-Broadway movement in the '60's and '70's and '80's; an Emmy-award winning comedy writer who helped create Lily Tomlin's television special, Lily; a prolific and distinctive cult-literary novelist, her work effusively praised by Donald Barthelme, Norman Mailer, Annie Dillard, and others; under-the-radar pulp novelist and self-appointed hack, whose move and TV tie-in books include the widely read novelizations of Rocky and Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway; and, perhaps the most unrepeatable act in U.S. arts history (though, I suppose Andy Kaufman came close), Drexler's stint as a "lady wrestler", touring the country as Rosalita, The Mexican Spitfire . . . . Whew. All this leaves out what many would claim as Drexler's central and most imperishable accomplishment: as the nearly-erased female member of the first and central group of innovators of Pop Art--a generation of artists coming on the heels of Abstract Expressionism that included Warhol, Lichtenstein, Samaras, Grooms, Oldenberg, et al. These are the artists in whose company, in the early '60's and ongoingly, Drexler showed, mingled daily lives, shared mutual influence, and among whose work her sculptures and paintings stand tall, looking better and better with each passing year, even if her name is somehow nearly always left out of the annals (hmmm, wonder why?)."

So, wow! Shame on me! But, anyway, now I know.… (mehr)

1971. I really didn't like this book. A thirty-year-old woman has affairs with her husband's teenage students, one white and one black, and a slight dalliance with a woman. Her husband is abusive to her, but it's all written is a dream-like, fuzzy, confusing language. No one is good or likable. One boy goes to the mental hospital. Eventually she kills herself which is the only thing that made sense in the book. It might have made an interesting story told in a clear and straight-forward way, but it was impressionistic and vague and unsatisfying.… (mehr)

Odd. Very odd. There's a definite purpose to the oddness, and every so often a glimmer of deeper meaning shines through, but still. This is a strange little book, and I will do my best to put my finger on just how so.

Now, I don't have that much experience with reading the Cosmopolitan, but it's pretty clear that the focus of this book is on the satirization on the pop pulp regularly churned through the publication. The money, the sex, the sorts of 'revolutions' that are in fact rather ridiculously useless when compared to the issues of deep oppression that are not only condoned, but in fact propagated by the atmosphere of fifteen seconds of fame. The more bigotedly outrageous and virulently hateful, the better. In fact, the only moments when the book touches upon reality is when one of its main characters, a Rush Limbaugh stand in who pushes the limits of the poisonous spewing vented forth on radio stations (Or not. It may actually be that bad.), has his moments in the spotlight. All of the other entries, whose total amounts to 145 and whose content spans from short clips of sentences to a couple of pages of so, is concerned with the sort of clichéd banalities one finds in horoscopes and the majority of serial magazines.

It is this use of banalities in context with the a wide range of pop culture events where the work shines. These linguistic methodologies, so easily twisted and able to convey the weirdest of situations in the most misguided of terms that normalizes the strange and sensationalizes the usual, make for a variegated display of the sort of poor quality that provides most of the volume for today's articles. What marks the difference between the writing of this book and that of real publications is the author's intentional pushing of weird situations on the reader, weaving back and forth between the 'normal' and the 'grotesque' in a show of just how contrived these standards are when faced with the language of popular magazines. When one is far more accustomed to viciously spat out rants of extremely prejudiced radio hosts than harmless absurdities, one must ask how much meaning there really is in all this vacuous blathering floating around in both the written word and the air waves, and just what sort of message is being conveyed to the passively receptive public.

When it comes to the US, we laugh at the oddities of Cosmopolitan tips and take hate mongering as a matter of course. Says some concerning thing about the state of the culture, don't you think?… (mehr)

I first found out about Rosalyn Drexler through the BURIED BOOK CLUB where I read about her career as wrestler, artist, experimental writer, and general eccentric. I was intrigued. I mean, how could I not be?

Unfortunately, the writing in this book did not excite me nearly as much as the idea of the author's colorful personality. It's an epistolary novel written by a woman who could possibly be Drexler herself (she mentions certain things that line up with the real-life Drexler) to her supposedly dead brother. This MS was in turn presented by some other narrator who only appears in the forward and the afterword, explaining that she met the author of the letters briefly before the author died of food poisoning.

All pretty exciting, on the surface, and with made up blurbs on the back like this one from Joyce Carol Oates "I've never read anything like this ... in fact I haven't read this."

The problem is that the letters themselves read like trivial musings, trite thoughts, and cheap jokes. And the voice is flippant throughout, which I couldn't understand. There is no attempt at developing any of the characters. Nowhere does she give me any reason to care who this person or her brother is. Even that is forgivable if the language was interesting, or the thoughts were enlightening. But no.

There's a running joke about a piece of shit who gets flushed down the toilet and then tries to pursue a life as an entertainer. HAHAHA, umm . . . no. I "get" it, but that is something I might have found funny 20 years ago, or maybe found it chuckle-able if it were only a one-liner. But this was a drawn-out joke over many pages!

Was it experimental? Only if you count the fact that it did not have any traditional plot (or any plot at all). But other than that and the framing device which itself isn't that original, I would not call it experimental.

I can't say this book was atrocious either. The problem is that it's completely mediocre, so mediocre that in the middle of exhuming it, I almost fell into the grave myself due to boredom.

PS - Lest I seem overly damning in my judgement, I wanted to add here that the author was 81 years old when this was published! I would be lucky if I could think in full sentences by that age. So no, no damning of the author, just of this book. I will probably check out her earlier books, eventually.… (mehr)