Spoilers!
To be a woman navigating the world is necessarily to be filled with a restrained rage, and whether one acquiesces to it is the thin demarcation between civilization and violence. As it is with a man, of course. That’s the takeaway I had from Ivy Pochoda’s hard-boiled, Cormac McCarthy-like women’s revenge story from 2023, Sing Her Down. Like the best art, as Pochoda describes in the opening pages, she’s trying to capture what isn’t there in women instead of what is. In other words, what leads a woman to step over the aforementioned demarcation line, to acquiesce? Pochoda’s answer is to dismiss the premise wholesale; there is no “stepping over,” there just is. Our brains, like the detective in her story, Lobos, like to map solutions onto unmappable puzzles, such as violence, and there’s nothing doing. Trying to ascertain the starting point is “darkness all the way down,” Lobos surmises. And certainly, women are just like men in this capacity, as Lobos constantly argues with her detective partner about.
What’s particularly brilliant about Pochoda’s hard-boiled story is setting it within two places: a women’s prison in the unrelenting Arizona heat, only adding to the madness inherent to daily prison life; and within Los Angeles two months into COVID-19. In that way, Pochoda’s book almost feels post-apocalyptic, as her two main characters, Florence (prison name: Florida) and Dios, are released into Los Angeles, owing to COVID-19. Thus, then, releasing the two into a whirlwind of violence as unrelenting as the Arizona heat they escaped from. Their dynamic is Dios is the agent of chaos, the devil quite literally whispering into Florida’s ear to embrace her predator side, and Florida willing to listen. Sure, she expresses consternation as Dios continues to track her down (like the prey she actually is), but Florida feels release any time she does embrace her violent nature (nurture?). Or to put a finer point on it, paraphrasing the Denis Johnson quote Pochoda opens the book with, Dios is the light and Florida is the candle. I see it as Florida, unbeknownst to even her own self-reflections at time, has the capacity for violence, i.e., is the vessel for Dios’ fiery passion, the light.
After being released from prison, Florida just wants to go back to California and get her fast car and ride away. But Dios follows her onto an illegal bus heading that way, and kills the corrections officer who sexually assaulted her in prison, who happens to also be on the bus. Florida flees the bus, but Dios catches up, and they hitch a ride with a man. The man brings them back to an enclave of sorts with two other men. The man tries to sexually assault Florida, and she beats him to death perhaps and evades Dios again.
Meanwhile, probably my favorite character from the book, is Lobos, the detective, who is trying to track down Florida and Dios, while also dealing with the shadow of her husband, who assaulted her. Like Florida and Dios, she’s trying to ascertain where her husband lost his way, what was the “stepping over” moment for him to become the man she loved to the man capable of wrapping his hands around her throat. Lobos comes to understand that he just is, and there is no starting point. He’s on the streets now, so, she’s constantly checking for him at homeless encampments. Her mind’s not in the game of tracking down Florida and Dios until it is and she does. But she wonders if she, too, could step over the line and attack her husband (or any man, for that matter). To defend herself the way she thinks a cop ought to have. She fantasizes about having that opportunity to fight back against him. At the end of the book, she steps back from the precipice when she’s alone in a room with him again, though, setting her own demarcation line between herself and Florida and Dios.
We also hear from Kace, the cellmate of Florida and Dios by extension, who some think of as crazy because she hears the voices of the dead. That is, the victims of the murderous women in the prison, including Florida’s victim, a fellow cellmate named Tina. Kace is one of the conduits Pochoda uses to wax philosophical about death and dying, violence and the precipice of violence, and if you crack open the past of the murderous women searching for when they contained light, it’s only darkness all the way down.
As was destined and inevitable from the beginning, Florida and Dios have a Western-style showdown on an intersection in Los Angeles, with Florida holding a nearly antique gun she barted for from a homeless man (she gave him gas cans). Before this, Dios strangled and drowned Florida’s mother after they trashed the mother’s house together. Florida’s pointing the gun at Dios, with her finger on the trigger. This is a great metaphor for the whole book, and Pochoda leans into it, noting how half an inch of a trigger pull separates one reality from another, life from death, inaction from consequence. Florida pulls the trigger, striking Dios in the upper thigh. At nearly the same moment, Lobos shoots Florida in the chest, killing her.
Pochoda’s book is interesting because it certainly feels influenced by McCarthy’s gritty, wasteland, minimalist style, hence why I mentioned that at the top, but it also sizzles with the best of hardboiled detective fiction and that intangible feeling of danger, particularly with Dios, but also, of course, Florida. I’m not sure I’ve read a comparable book to this one so far in 2024, and that’s a positive.
Milam's Musings 