-reviews

Kirkus Review

In her new novel, Alexander (Smoking Hopes, 1996, Naked Singularity, 2003) looks at strip clubs and the women who work in them. A pale waif with dark hair, Trixie is a stripper at the Girlie Playhouse. The narrator Pixie is also a dancer who works with Trixie and whose stripper-mother was killed. Set up as a Daisy Miller-like figure, Trixie meets equally tragic results. And thus the novel becomes Pixie’s retelling of how Trixie gets involved with Max, and of how she meets her untimely death, with false parallels drawn between Pixie’s mother’s life and murder. Alexander vividly depicts Pixie’s loneliness and sense of self-expression, all themes reminiscent of Mary Gaitskill (a comparison Alexander would likely reject). The book should be commended for exploring a world not often depicted in fiction and for not relegating the men who visit the Playhouse to stereotypes (since this reviewer is one of them). And while the mystery around Trixie’s death pulls the reader in, the novel is decentered from the heroine and focused on the narrator who steals the stage. An intriguing concept that hits the mark.

Smart and Sexy–Dorion Sagan, co-author of Death and Sex

The eponymous heroine is a vividly drawn character, rebellious and passionate, attracting the voyeurs of her establishment with an insouciance and beauty, an honesty and intimacy that upsets a strip club’s pro forma conventions. By focusing on Trixie’s innocent wildness, Alexander gives us a thought-provoking trip behind the scenes at a strip club, seen through the eyes of the women themselves.

Moving–Heather Trulieb, Dallas Book Review

Just as Nabokov’s Lolita is not really about a girl named Lolita, Victoria N. Alexander’s Trixie is not really about a stripper named Trixie. Both stories are about the narrator’s obsession, and so the reader is not shown the inside of the mind of the title character, who remains elusive to lover and reader alike. All physical descriptions of Trixie and her dialogue are carefully filtered through the eyes of someone whose judgment and honesty may be suspect.  Pixie, the narrator of Trixie, is like Lolita’s Humbert Humbert unreasonably attracted to someone who does not seem to be the person the narrator says she is.  The narrative is layered with irony, introspection, and self-doubt that alerts the reader to the narrator’s frustrated desire to make the love object into something that she isn’t. Poignant and haunting, Alexander’s third novel successfully relates the strangeness of love that is too often tragically self-reflexive. There is, however, one very powerful triumph in the story: Even though love may be a failure for Pixie, her self expression is a success. We do understand Pixie,  as we do Humbert, even if we don’t understand the attraction. A very strange, funny, and moving story.

Not A Women’s Romance –Russ Gordon, Downtown Journal

The narrator, “Pixie,” is the daughter of a famous cabaret stripper, who was murdered in the 1960s. In flashbacks, she describes that tragedy, which has filled her with loss and longing. Pixie admits that she has a thing for “girls with meretricious charms.” After college, she becomes a stripper herself and meets Trixie who reminds her of her mother. Trixie, she tells us, is also killed. The story unfolds as a kind of whodunnit and why.

Max, a car dealership owner, is a regular at the Girlie Playhouse, who thought he was happily married until he met Trixie. Meanwhile, spurred by changes in the law and licensing for his bar, the owner begins to turn his homey, old-fashioned cabaret into a table dance club, hiring several new, not-so-nice dancers. Also meanwhile, the bouncer, Calvin, shows interest in Pixie, but she rejects him and immediately regrets it. Pixie, like her mother and like Trixie, does not want to stop dancing. None of the women is hard up for cash or of limited means. At this point one begins to wonder, If the objective of this eroticism is not to attract a male or to make money, then what is its purpose?

Then Max wins seven million dollars in the lottery, and he takes Trixie and six friends away for the weekend, and gives them each a red sports car. The press has a field day. They are especially fond of making fun of Trixie. Things degenerate considerably. Calvin quits. The club is a travesty and now features headliners with names punning on “breasts,” the worst is M’am Mary, painful to watch, but funny! Max seems to be falling out of love with Trixie and demands that she stop dancing. She wants to save the club’s tarnished name and redeem herself.

With poetry and paradox, Trixie isn’t a women’s romance but it will appeal to a more empowered feminine audience, crossing over to lesbian fiction (as did Smoking Hopes), and even speaking to men, who will be surprised to find they actually relate, as I did.

A fine pick and will entertain as it enlightens – Midwest Book Review

If you think they’re just a piece of meat for you to ogle, you’re doing it wrong. “Trixie” follows one stripper as she faces her life and author Victoria N. Alexander hopes to teach readers a little something about life and where it’s going, and why some women go down paths others may feel degrading. With plenty of food for thought, “Trixie” is a fine pick and will entertain as it enlightens and is highly recommended.