“Pablo has confessed his love for me. I was stunned.”
We are, too, when we learn, a few lines further down the first page of Rosalyn Drexler’s third novel The Cosmopolitan Girl, that Pablo is a dog. The narrator, Helen, lives in the Hotel Buckminster in Manhattan. The hotel has a strict no-pets policy, but Helen has trained Pablo to walk on his hind legs and dresses him up in a man’s suit, wig, and hat. Pablo is “an intelligent dog, well coordinated and faithful” — which goes without saying, Helen reminds us.
He can also carry on a conversation and enjoys having Helen read to him from the newspaper. They share their most intimate thoughts and dreams. “I dreamt I was lying in the courtyard dead,” Pablo confides after a troubling night sleep. Helen promises to ask her mother what the dream means.
Helen’s mother is a psychic who changes her lovers more often than her sheets. Helen’s father is a fabulously wealthy herbalist. Neither parent is particularly concerned that their daughter is in love with a dog. It’s good to know she’s got a steady relationship.
It’s not without its difficulties, though. Helen notices that the roll of stamps is growing smaller and smaller and discovers that Pablo has been sending obscene letters to sex magazines. Also, her mother’s latest lover, Albert, is taking an interest in Helen. He tries to seduce her one night, but she finds the fact that he’s disguised himself as Gertrude Stein disconcerting. “I did not want to discover that yes, Gertrude did have a penis.” Well, who would?
Helen often gets her advice about romance from Cosmospolitan magazine. Cosmo tells her that “Anything goes” is the motto of her time: “Whether your ‘thing’ turns out to be of redeeming social importance is not crucial; it’s the passion with which you defend you view that’s important.” And so, she decides to sleep with Pablo.
The sex is not bad, but not great. Pablo’s nails leave deep scratches on Helen’s back and he seems unconcerned whether she enjoys it. Things grow even more complicated when Helen finds that an old man in the hotel is stalking her. When she visits his room to warn him off, the man introduces Helen to “your twin sister” — a life-size rag doll he’s dressed and made up to look exactly like her.
It should be apparent by this point that Rosalyn Drexler was not looking to Zola for inspiration. Any pretence of realism is abandoned in the first paragraph of The Cosmopolitan Girl. Nor is this an example of magical realism in the fashion of Garcia Marquez and his Latin American colleagues. The clue to her approach can be found in two of the writers quoted on the back of the book’s dust jacket: Stanley Elkin and Donald Barthelme.
Elkin, Barthelme, and Kurt Vonnegut were the most critically and popularly successful American fabulists of the 1970s. For Barthelme in particularly, the aim of a piece of writing was more to achieve some formalistic coherence than to be realistic. No one thinks that the children in Barthelme’s The Dead Father are really dragging the giant corpse of their father across the landscape, but from a symbolic standpoint it’s an amazingly effective parable for the emotional burden that parents can leave behind.
By this standard, how does The Cosmopolitan Girl measure up? Well, one thing that Elkin, Barthelme, and Vonnegut all had going for them was a brilliant gift for comedy. I suspect that many people who read Barthelme’s stories in The New Yorker enjoyed his extravagantly absurdist humor without noticing the serious messages underneath the jokes.
And Drexler certainly holds her own in this regard. She takes full advantage of the playfulness that characterizes so much of American experimentalist fiction of this period. There are newspaper articles, letters, advertisements, dialogues from radio shows, to do lists, and a dozen other types of material included alongside passages of conventional narrative.
The Cosmopolitan Girl has 145 chapters in its 192 pages, but you can’t really say they’re squeezed into the book because some of them are just a sentence or two long. Take this example, when Helen is trying to write an article about incest for Cosmo:
103
Article going well. Already have four typewritten pages.104
Article going well. Already have three typewritten pages.105
Article may not be written. Should be able to begin on the fifteenth page, as one begins on the top floor of the Guggenheim to see the show. It’s too exhausting to begin on page one. It’s never any good. Has anything ever been written backward?106
.reverof em evarc mih ekam dluohs amleS hserf fo etsat teews eht, ffo repparw ym sleep luaP nehw, nehT. wollamarc a ekil nat ni depparw nruter ll’I.
What, then, about Drexler’s underlying message? I’m tempted to reread The Dead Father now because I suspect there is more of a connection between it and The Cosmopolitan Girl than Barthelme’s blurb on the back. The Cosmopolitan Girl came out in 1974, The Dead Father a year later. Both deal with the complexities of the relationship between parents and children, particularly after the parents are gone.
And Drexler is also examining the nature of marriage and romantic relationships. It may be absurd that Helen finds happiness, at least for a while, with Pablo as a partner, but it’s really no more absurd that the notion that the stereotypical heterosexual American couple like Ward and June Cleaver were the ideal to which everyone should aspire. The Cosmopolitan Girl is not just a product of American experimentalism in fiction but of the wave of feminism and sexual liberation that was shaking up the country. (It’s telling that Gloria Steinem is one of the back-cover blurbers. It’s sad, however, that her quote appears second down the page after Norman Mailer’s).
The Cosmopolitan Girl is no more than a night or two’s read, and well worth looking for as both a very funny book and an illuminating artifact of its time.