A New York Times book review recently caught my attention. It was titled “A Brilliantly Offbeat Novel of Art and Women’s Wrestling in 1970s New York,” and it was about Rosalyn Drexler’s 1972 novel To Smithereens. I don’t recall pro wrestling, or books about pro wrestling, being covered too often in the New York Times, so of course I read the review, and immediately decided that I needed to read Drexler’s novel, and I can happily say it’s one of the best novels I’ve read in quite some time.
Drexler’s To Smithereens, or the edition of To Smithereens I read, was reissued by Hagfish, an independent publisher, literary agency, and editorial studio based in Brooklyn, in May 2025, but it was initially published by NAL in 1972, in hardcover and paperback, before going out of print for decades.
To Smithereens served as the inspiration for a film, Below the Belt, that was released in 1980, and Rosalyn Drexler received a writing credit for the film, and while I haven’t watched it yet, it sounds like the book and film are quite a bit different from one another.
Rosayln Drexler, at the age of 98, is a writer of note, having written nine novels, as well as multiple plays and screenplays, and she is also a renowned artist of the Pop Art movement. Drexler’s 1962 painting, “Lost Match,” serves as the cover art for her 2025 reissue of To Smithereens, and Drexler herself was the subject of a series of Andy Warhol silkscreen paintings, titled “Album of a Mat Queen.”
All of this is to say I was more than a little shocked that I just recently learned about Drexler and To Smithereens, but I’m thrilled that I was smartened up.
To Smithereens tells the story of Rosa Rubinsky, a young, unemployed, free spirit in gritty, grimy, early 1970s New York. The novel begins with Rosa sitting in a dark movie theatre, when she feels a stranger’s hand on her thigh. Rosa retaliates by squeezing the stranger’s hand as hard as she can, feeling the bones in his hand crunching together like a “log jam,” and thus begins Rosa’s relationship with Paul.
Paul is an art critic with a fetish for large, strong women who can overpower him, or “Glamazons,” as he calls them. He almost immediately reminded me of the comic book writer/artist R. Crumb, who is eventually referenced in the book as also having a fetish for large, powerful women.
To Smithereens is written from the points of view of Rosa and Paul, sometimes in alternating chapters, sometimes switching back and forth midchapter. This change in point of view threw me off a little, at first, until I came to expect it, but even then, sometimes the midchapter shifts would take me a few sentences to readjust. I don’t want to say it’s a flaw of the writing, but it’s something other readers might want to know about beforehand.
After Rosa and Paul’s initial meeting, it isn’t long before they make their way back to Paul’s apartment, where Paul convinces Rosa to wrestle him, among other things. Rosa sticks around, staying in Paul’s apartment, and Paul eventually tells Rosa that he’s been “training” her to become a wrestler.
Paul, a fan of women’s wrestling for more lurid reasons than just the sport of it, puts Rosa in contact with an actual trainer, and Rosa begins to train at a New York wrestling school, where she meets a cast of colorful, wrestling characters.
Some of Drexler’s best writing takes place describing the events surrounding Rosa’s training, in that it’s truly a sensory experience, detailing the sights, sounds, and smells of the human body, and this carries over into her writing about sex, as well.
To Smithereens is an extremely graphic and explicit novel, certain sections might even delve into the pornographic, but if you’re not squeamish about the human anatomy, body hair, and secretions, pimples and genitals and all, I can’t recommend it enough.
From the perspective of someone who hasn’t trained to wrestle, this feels like one of the more realistic depictions of what it takes to become a pro wrestler, in a fictional context, that I’ve ever read, in that it isn’t until more than halfway through the book that Rosa, now wrestling as Rosa Rio, has her first professional match, and this is likely because Drexler herself trained as a pro wrestler years before her writing and art careers, which served as the inspiration for To Smithereens. Drexler’s actual ring name was even “Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire.”
Drexler has stated that she ultimately hated her experience as a pro wrestler, and despised the racism that she observed while touring the Southern states, but she should “at least get a book out of it,” and hence she wrote To Smithereens.
Reviewing Drexler’s lengthy curriculum vitae, spanning more than half a century of writing and art, pro wrestling and her novel To Smithereens may serve as relatively minor footnotes in her career, but I’m grateful that is what brought her to my attention at this time, because Drexler, aka Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire, has lived a long and prolific life worthy of celebration.
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