‘Wonder Valley,’ written by Ivy Pochoda
“Wonder Valley” begins with a classic Los Angeles tableau: a chase on the 101, complete with a police helicopter, camera-toting news crews and spectators recording it all on their smartphones. But this chase is different: it’s not a car speeding down the freeway, it’s a man on foot, naked. Things get even weirderas Ivy Pochoda’s novel follows characters on the edge. It’s a dizzying, kaleidoscopic thriller that refuses to let readers look away from the dark side of Southern California.
The characters include Tony, a dissatisfied attorney, and his social-climbing wife; Blake, on the run from the law with his partner in crime, Sam, hiding out in the desert east of Joshua Tree; plus Patrick, a creepy hippie with a commune nearby who reels in Britt, a former USC student. And then there’s young Ren, recently released from juvenile detention in New York after killing a man when he was 12. He’s come to Los Angeles to find his mother, Laila, who left for the West Coast and wound up on skid row. As these lives intersect, the novel becomes impossible to put down.
Pochoda writes beautiful prose and is psychologically astute; it’s hard not to feel sympathy for the characters, even the ones capable of monstrous acts of violence. It’s a gorgeous portrayal of, as one character puts it, “the place to be when you don’t belong anywhere else, when you’ve done things that make the straight world an impossible place to live.” Ivy Pochoda at the L.A. Times Festival of Books: Panel, Crime Fiction under the Sun, with Tod Goldberg and Attica Locke at 1:30 p.m. April 21 in Seely G. Mudd Room 123.