Zany ... Brilliantly offbeat ... Paul is a hilarious sendup of a self-serious art writer ... 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.
Somewhat surreally, though never unrealistically—which is the way everything unfurls in this brilliant, haywire novel ... The first-person narration bounces back and forth between the lovers, helping the story zip along ... [A] rollicking feminist classic ... Drexler’s prose is the real deal, and Rosa is a blast. To Smithereens oozes sleazy, sexy style.
A wild ride through the underground lives of female wrestlers in early 1970s New York ... While at times the book shows its age—’70s-era freak show ableism of the Tom Robbins variety rides a gleeful sidecar to the main plot—the buoyant quality of Rosa’s nature, her absolute certainty of her right to her own perspective, and her open embrace of a world that is sometimes actively trying to harm her go a long way toward recentering the reader’s attention to the novel’s real goal: a radical assertion of the power inherent in Rosa, and the rest of us, to defend the identity we’ve chosen to live. The result is a book that is both epic in its energy and intimate in its attention; a much-needed reminder of the enduring, and transformative, power of the weird.
