Sing Her Down by Ivy Pochoda

Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux/MCD on May 23, 2023

Sing Her Down isn’t quite Thelma and Louise, but it echoes the theme of two outlaw women celebrating their freedom from men. The story differs in that the women are not friends. They start the novel in prison, both having chosen an outlaw path before they meet. Like the women in the iconic movie, however, they embark on a crime spree that is more impulsive than planned. They commit crimes they can’t outrun.

Florence Baum is known in prison as Florida. She comes from California money. She was on a lark with her boyfriend when, seeking vengeance against people who ripped them off, he threw a Molotov cocktail that started a fire and killed two people. She drove the getaway car — her Jaguar — and was convicted as an accomplice to murder.

Diana Diosmary Sandoval is known as Dios. She views female empowerment as having the strength to dominate or kill the people who bother you. An inmate named Kace who narrates an occasional chapter calls Dios’ philosophy “fucked up feminist nonsense.” Kace has conversations with dead people so her perspective might not be entirely reliable.

The Arizona prison where they’re serving time decides to grant early releases to suitable inmates to protect them from COVID-19. Florida gets one and promptly violates parole by catching a bus to California. Dios gets an improbable release and joins Florida on the bus. Dios apparently knew where Florida would be staying immediately after her release and followed her. How Dios got out of prison is a mystery, given her history of violent conduct as an inmate.

Florida can’t get away from Dios. They leave the bus at separate times but Dios finds Florida again. For much of the novel, why Dios is pursuing Florida — why Dios is encouraging Florida to commit violent acts — is another mystery. People are sometimes driven to behave in ways that are not easily understood.

Florida is an archetype. She represents those who instigate trouble and refuse to take responsibility for its consequences. Florida blames a boyfriend for beating the father of her friend Ronna. She blames a boyfriend for the murders that sent her to prison. Florida is the kind of person who (both literally and metaphorically) lights the match and blames someone else for starting the fire. America is full of Floridas.

Dios recognizes Florida’s true nature — “always the accomplice and never the perp” —and challenges her to own her violence. Either Dios or Florida killed an inmate named Tina, but they can’t agree about who committed the crime. The reader learns what might be the truth when Tina chats with Kace from beyond the grave.

When Dios exited the bus to resume her search for Florida, she left a body behind. Detective Lobos enters the plot in search of the bus passenger’s murderer. Lobos’ partner can’t believe a woman would cut a larger man’s throat. Lobos believes he undervalues the ability of women to be violent. Lobos muses about all the terms applied to violent women (femme fatales, black widows) that “soften their crimes — to make a sport or light of what they did, to make men able to consider that women can kill.”

Lobos faults herself for not being more violent. She searches for her ex-husband’s face in the faces of the homeless. Even as a cop, she became a domestic violence victim as her husband’s mental health deteriorated. She reviled herself for her weakness. She wants one more chance to stand up to him. She understands how rage can build, how women can kill. She sees the murder on the bus as a statement, “a demonstration of power by someone who wants to be seen.” Perhaps she sees herself that way.

While much of the novel focuses on Florida, Lobos will join the reader in understanding that Dios is more intriguing. While Dios seems to be feral, she doesn’t reveal the fullness of her personality until late in the novel. Sing Her Down is an interesting read because neither Florida nor Dios are exactly the person they initially appear to be.

The plot is atmospheric in both its classic presentation of prison cafeteria fights and its transition to LA noir. Los Angeles in lockdown, the National Guard enforcing a nightly curfew, advances the theme of “a sick city getting sicker.” The unhoused have abandoned their shelters and camps, “creating their own ruins.” Lobos and Florida don’t realize it, but they are connected by the city’s landscape, by the motion they perceive in its murals and its rippling tent cities.

The story ends with a message about the difference between strength and weakness. Violence is not strength. Walking away is not always weakness. Sometimes walking away requires the strength to put the past in the past, to walk in the direction of the future.

The chapters that feature Kace narrating her conversations with dead people are apparently intended to add a cohesive structure to the novel. The novel begins with Kace telling the reader about certain events that will occur in the story, events that might be reflected in a mural. Kace added little of value to the story. Is she really attuned to dead people or is she just crazy? Perhaps the reader is meant to decide that question, but I decided that Kace was annoying. Kace does provide important information that she gleans from Tina’s ghost, but that information could have been conveyed without filtering it through a crazed medium. That’s a relatively small complaint, but the story would have been just as effective without giving Kace a narrative voice.

Kace’s reservations about “feminist nonsense” aside, Ivy Pochoda has something meaningful to say about the choices women make in a world that is too often controlled by violent men. The ending differs from Thelma and Louise, but it’s almost as surprising and similar in its sad inevitability.

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Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway

Published by Knopf on May 16, 2023

A hard-boiled crime solver is a standard ingredient in noir fiction. That role in Titanium Noir is played by Cal Sounder. He works in a private capacity to help the police or shady characters investigate crimes. Some of the shady characters are Titans. Not titans of industry, necessarily, although they generally need substantial wealth to become Titans. They are characters who resemble the Titans of Greek mythology.

Titans extend their lifespans with an expensive drug called T7. The drug rejuvenates by reverting cells to their pre-puberty state, then fast forwards the body to adulthood while adding muscle mass and bone density. Each dose adds to a Titan’s size but the treatment creates a risk of memory loss. By the fourth dose, Titans labor to breathe.

Cal visits a crime scene where Roddy Tebbit appears to have shot himself in the head. Roddy is a one-dose Titan, seven-foot-eight and 91 years old despite resembling a hale man of 50. Giles Gatton, the police chief, invites Cal to investigate because Titan deaths tend to be political and the cops want to avoid publicity. On the other hand, Titans often hire Cal because they don’t think the police take their deaths seriously.

Cal doesn’t believe the death is a suicide. When he asks how Roddy, a scientist who doesn’t come from money, could have become a Titan, the answers seem false. Roddy’s past is elusive. He was involved with a woman who works in the kind of club where women entertain without clothing. After Cal wins a cage fight for a chance to interview the woman, she’s killed in an assassination that nearly takes out Cal.

Faced with more questions than answers, Cal suspects that Roddy left behind a secret. Those suspicions are confirmed when two competing Titans — a four-dose giant named Stefan Tonfamecasca and a big guy known as Doublewide — insist that Roddy find the secret and bring it to them. The secret turns out to be stored in a strange place. Cal isn’t sure that either of the Titans should have it — at least not before he reviews the information that Roddy took such trouble to protect.

Nick Harkaway relies on the sarcastic prose and dark atmosphere of noir to tell the story. Substitute underworld figures who are shagging each other’s wives for Titans who extend their lives with T7 and you’d come up with a similar plot. Cal is sort of dating a woman named Athena, whose one-dose mother has a backstory that becomes critical to the plot. Like stories from Greek mythology, family drama informs the story.

Harkaway exploits the classic noir theme of the wealthy versus the rest of us, the privileged class versus the servant class, to make the story relatable to those of us who aren’t privileged. Big guys bullying smaller guys is another theme, with the smaller guy (Cal) managing to use wits to defeat brute force. All of this is entertaining even if the noir sometimes seems forced. Marrying the future to the 1940s (Cal even calls himself a gumshoe) is a contrivance that always seems on the verge of collapsing into silliness. I give Harkaway credit for pulling it off, all the way to an ironic and surprising finish.

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Sidle Creek by Jolene McIlwain

Published by Melville House on May 16, 2023

The stories collected in Sidle Creek are joined by their setting — the fictional Sidle Creek in Appalachia. It is a place where townies keep their business to themselves, where women are routinely abused and men try to avoid deep thought about troubled lives.

The most powerful story is about a stripper who is raped, a dog that is shot, an unmarked grave in the woods, and a man who lacked the courage to stop any of it. Videos eventually surface showing several people of both genders being abused by hunters at a campsite. The story unfolds from multiple perspectives, each contribution building the reader’s understanding of what happened to two girls and how a town where secrets are kept reacted to rumored truths.

In my favorite story, the disappearance of a waitress causes paranoia among the restaurant’s male staff and customers (primarily miners and iron workers) as they wonder whether they are suspected of foul play. Customers are fond of red boots the waitresses wear and are willing to tolerate the restaurant’s gay owner because he hires pretty waitresses. The owner is haunted by the fear that he failed to keep an employee safe. The solution to the disappearance reveals that bad acts can be more sad than nefarious.

In the most poignant story, a man begins to “count random things to pilot his days” after he loses his wife. Living alone on wooded land, he has fallen in love with a doe that occasionally visits his property, an animal he feels an obsessive need to shield from death.

Another strong story revolves around a semi-literate man who breeds pit bulls for fighting. The man has an obsessive desire to be regarded as respectable, a condition he associates with wealth. He decides that having his boys fight each other in bare knuckled brawls is a step up from dog fighting. The story gives new meaning to the concept of unfit parenting.

Several stories highlight the theme of meanness that is ingrained in the characters. A man recalls his childhood, when his angry father dragged a steer behind his pickup truck to punish the steer for wandering away. A priest threatens boys with the paddle when they make “pizzle” the world of the day. A young man on a motorcycle watches a woman with a knife try to steal a baby from a pregnant woman.

Other stories focus on the sadness of desperate lives. An Amish carpenter’s wife tells him that the coffin he built for their son is too small, as if “she thought her love for him might expand his small body.” Sixth grade girls try to puzzle out the mysteries of pregnancy by observing a woman who had four miscarriages in the last seven years, but they instead learn to cope with fear of the unknown. A young woman finishes having sex with a man she can picture making a life with, but then knows she has to hop in her car “and drive far as I can get if I ever want to be anything that ain’t a few steps away from crazy.”

Some stories defy categorization. City council members want to learn the stories of a reclusive woman by condemning her house. A man learns from his Vietnamese wife how to read unfortunate future events from markings on eggs.

Several stories are snapshots of a time and place. Vignettes don’t appeal to me. I like stories to be full meals, or at least a main course, not a meager slice.

I appreciate the cumulative sense of atmosphere that the Winesburg, Ohio approach to storytelling creates. I also appreciate Jolene McIlwain’s ability to portray characters in a sympathetic light despite their limitations and flaws. She doesn’t stereotype or judge. Her prose is precise and fluid but never showy. The collected stories are uneven — the four I’ve highlighted struck me as occupying a higher level than the rest — but taken as a whole, they showcase McIlwain’s undeniable talent.

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Big Two-Hearted River by Ernest Hemingway

First published in 1925; published as a Centennial Edition by Mariner Books on May 9, 2023

I probably read this story in college. I know I read In Our Time, the collection that featured this and one other Nick Adams story. I remember the other Adams story but not this one. That doesn't surprise me, as I don’t recall much about my college years. I attribute that to my declining memory rather than collegiate substance abuse, but the two might be related.

The story is well regarded by Hemingway fans. It is probably beloved by the editors of Field & Stream. Sports Illustrated praised it as the greatest story about the outdoors in literary history. I have a guarded appreciation of Hemingway, but I’m more of a Faulkner guy. This centennial edition includes some beautifully detailed pen-and-ink sketches/engravings of fishing and camping scenes by Chris Wormell, as well as a “revelatory forward” by John MacLean, whose dad wrote A River Runs Through It.

The story is simple. Nick backpacks his way into the woods, makes camp, catches soot-covered grasshoppers to use as bait, and fishes for trout. Sometimes he wins, sometimes the trout wins. That’s the story.

Along the way, Nick reports on his state of mind. Hiking induces weariness that helps him sleep despite his troubled thoughts. We don’t know why he’s troubled but in the context of other Nick Adams stories, he’s probably fretting about a girl. Nick becomes happy, or at least content, as the tranquility of solitude eases his mind. When a large fish gets away, he centers himself in nature, sitting on a log with the sun at his back, and waits until the feeling of disappointment leaves. “It was all right now.”

The revelatory forward explains that Hemingway wrote the story at the age of 25 when he was a struggling writer in Paris following his ambulance driving years in Italy. MacLean notes that critics at the time (but not the “perceptive” ones who were mostly Hemingway’s friends) complained that nothing happens. Far be it from me to echo that same unperceptive complaint. Critics apparently argue about the meaning of the story’s metaphors (grasshoppers are soot-covered because of a fire that represents, well, something). My heretical thought is that Hemingway described what he saw and wasn't being metaphonrical at all. Who knows? MacLean suggests that the story is about a journey of the spirit. I’ll buy that.

I can’t deny Hemingway’s impact on American literature, even if I don’t fully appreciate it. This book might be a good gift for true Hemingway admirers and for outdoorsy types who like to wade into frigid streams to fish for trout when they could get a tasty grouper in a seafood restaurant. Yeah, I know, it isn’t the same. It’s a big two-hearted world with plenty of room for readers who like Hemingway and readers who wonder what all the fuss is about.

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A Line in the Sand by Kevin Powers

Published by Little, Brown and Company on May 16, 2023

A Line in the Sand is a thriller/mystery with war as a backstory, but it is also a story of loss and healing. The plot builds steam until it explodes in a series of action scenes, each more tense than the last. Yet the minor characters, more than the plot, make the story stand out.

Arman Bajalan was an interpreter in Iraq. His family was killed. He earned a visa to relocate to the US, but only after he witnessed a war crime committed by contractors, a nice name for mercenaries. He told a lieutenant who promised him protection. Now Bajalan works as a custodian in a motel, living a life of “ritual with no purpose he could recall.”

Bajalan discovers a man’s body on the beach where he regularly swims before starting his shift at the motel. A tattoo identifies the man’s affiliation with the Australian military. The people who killed the man likely believed he was looking for Bajalan. They wanted to find Bajalan first.

Detective Catherine Wheel and her partner Lamar Adams catch the case of the dead Australian. Since Bajalan is a witness, Wheel spends time learning his story. She soon suspects that he might be in danger. A series of killings over the course of the novel confirms those suspicions.

The contractors belonged to a company called Decision Tree. Trevor Graves, its CEO, is a corrupt power broker who is about to sign a contract with the government that is worth billions to his company. Congress is slow walking an investigation that might jeopardize that contract.

Sally Ewell, a reporter for a Virginia newspaper, is covering the congressional hearing. An anonymous source gives her a thumb drive with a note that invites her to a meeting at a train station. Sally brings her former lover, Carter West III (Trey to his buddies), who is also involved in the Decision Tree hearing as a congressional aide. Wheel, Lamar, and Bajalan are following a lead at the station. They all hook up and, in the course of events, realize the information on the thumb drive might relate to the danger that Bajalan faces. Trey contends that the thumb drive implicates national security.

Characters embark on separate journeys that eventually lead to a resolution. Wheel follows her instincts until her desire to confront Graves meets with serious pushback.

The plot is surprisingly tight, given the number of branches and subplots that Kevin Powers built into the story. Occasional shootouts and knifings add urgency to Wheel’s investigation. Good guys are sometimes difficult to separate from bad guys, but lives of good and bad are equally likely to end in violence. The key plot point, a conspiracy to cover up war crimes, is far from original, but Powers tells a story that never feels like a cliché.

Characterization is well above par for a thriller. Wheel doesn’t posture herself as the only police officer in the world who cares about victims, a tired approach to characterization that ruins too many police thrillers. Wheel’s concern for Bajalan and for people in general comes across as genuine. She digs herself a hole by digging into Graves (no pun intended) and, when she believes her career is down the toilet, she’s faced with the kind of moral issue that is common in thrillers: She can abandon the law she’s always upheld by imposing her own version of justice or she can let the guilty go unpunished. It is to Powers’ credit that he made such a stale idea seem convincing. I was particularly impressed by Wheel’s understanding that vigilantism comes with a price — not just to the vigilante, but to a society that allows individuals to pick and choose the laws they follow.

Supporting characters, including Sally’s father and the motel owner who employs Bajalan, play heroic roles. They are such fundamentally decent people that Powers forces the reader to worry about their fates. One of the most emotionally effective scenes involves two other characters who are collateral to the plot, a teenage hooker and a state trooper who helps her.

Death and the stupidity of war weigh heavily on the minds of characters who lost friends and family because Dick Cheney and his puppet president decided that Saddam had to go, a decision that not coincidentally enriched Cheney’s Halliburton. The politics of war and defense contracting are underplayed in the novel — Powers delivers a thriller, not a lecture — but that background strengthens the plot’s plausibility and enhances the sense of pain that pervades characters whose lives are forever diminished by wars that result from business decisions rather than moral choices.

Powell recognizes that pain is beyond our control. In the end, the novel suggests that we can respond to pain with hatred of those who cause it, a response that withers the soul, or we can choose not to hate. Again, that insight isn’t original, but the need to make that choice comes across as a genuine emotional reaction to painful circumstances. Even if the novel does nothing new, its effective repackaging of familiar elements earns A Line in the Sand a solid recommendation.

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