One or Another

by Rosalyn Drexler

Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Rosalyn Drexler, a painter, playwright, and novelist, has been on the scene in several arts for many years. She is well known in Soho art galleries, infamous off-Broadway, and highly regarded as a fiction writer.

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rosalyn Drexler: painter, novelist, luchador.

Books were so good in the 70s. I was recently struck by the total excellence (along with the total-70s-ness) of John Hawkes fragmented, polyamorous 1975 Death, Sleep & the Traveler. Rosalind Drexler's second novel, though five years earlier actually forms a perfect feminine counterpart: dubious eroticism, marital discord, love triangles, and dreamlike disintegration told in fractured bits of story from a single line to several pages -- nearly the same format, definitely a part of the 70s, and a certain symmetry of concepts. There's even a shared sort of sympathetic unrelatability in the characters. Drexler's story of collapsing marriage (and collapsing entire existence of its housewife narator), however, is the mania to Hawkes' strange sad calm: funnier, more tumultuous, more prone to unexpectedly slipping into hallucinatory set pieces wherein husband turns cannibal, Africa goes unsaved by impromptu doctors, or a highschool cafeteria descends into a symphony of drug use. Actually, the tendency of the book to lapse without warning into a scene in which major characters dies, only to go on later as if nothing had happened, even suggests the nightmarish narratorial instability of Kavan's Ice. But, again, funnier.

The actual story here is of the bad decisions of a women trapped in marriage (with an NRA-loving gym teacher, of all people, the bad decision that starts them all), as she attempts to smooth over his drunken actions, sleeps with his students, tries to hang onto sanity even as it slips from those around her. All against the external turmoil of Vietnam, NYC student protests, racial unrest, America in general social upheaval. (in this way, Drexler's New York vignettes are like a far more wildly entertaining counterpart to Rentata Adler's in Speedboat 6 years later).

Though still alive and active in the art world, so deeply ingrained into pop art as to have appeared in prints by Andy Warhol and written the novelization of Rocky, Drexler's fiction seems near-terminally forgotten. This novel somehow didn't even have a goodreads page until I made one just now, which is completely criminal. This is a total gem, possibly a new favorite, that I devoured in a day. I'll absolutely be reading more Drexler, and can only hope that a few of those that read this will join me.

[Ebenmaessiger · Rating 3 out of 5]

An effervescent, and ultimately unsuccessful exercise in melding the terse jocularity of modernist non-linearity with the particular sexual, racial, and social hangups of late 60s America. Centering it diffusely around a violent reactionary was the best part, although too little considered beyond the gun-loving reveal.