There’s more than one reason the novelist Ivy Pochoda has the opening line of the “Iliad” tattooed on her upper right arm.
For starters, the verse — which in English is commonly translated as “Sing, oh Goddess, of the wrath of Achilles” — presents literary inspiration as a decidedly female endeavor. For another thing, by going with the original Greek, a passion of hers since high school, Pochoda ensured that its first word would be “μῆνιν,” or “wrath.” And wrath, specifically as it relates to female rage and vengeance, is never far from Pochoda’s mind.
The topic has played a role in much of her fiction, and it ferociously animates her new novel, “Ecstasy” — the sixth written under her own name — in which she revamps “The Bacchae” into a contemporary feminist horror story. It is set on the Greek island of Naxos, where Dionysus, the bad boy god of Euripides’ play, is sometimes said to have been born.
Pochoda believes that the horror genre, given its truck with violence, gore and the supernatural, is an effective way to turn up the volume on issues of gender inequality, oppression and women’s cratering social status.
“The imbalance starts to eat away at your sense of self, personally and professionally,” she said. “There’s still this institutionalizing of certain roles for women. There’s a rage about that. Horror gets people to pay attention.” To that end, “Ecstasy” — published by Putnam on June 17, and centering on an American real estate princeling with designs on a myth-shrouded part of the island — explodes into hallucinatory violence, blinding bloodlust and outbreaks of primal madness.
In New York recently for several days from Los Angeles, where she lives, Pochoda sat cradling a cup of tea in a favorite restaurant not far from the brownstone bohemia of Cobble Hill, where she grew up as the squash champion daughter of left-wing intellectuals, the noted magazine editor Elizabeth Pochoda and the ’60s activist turned publisher Philip Pochoda.
Educated at St. Ann’s, the private school in Brooklyn Heights, she located her acclaimed early novel “Visitation Street” along Brooklyn’s still-gritty Red Hook waterfront. Since her move west in 2009 with her now ex-husband, a TV writer, she has built a following for fiction that roves some of Southern California’s more desolate strips of urban degeneration and off-grid desert badlands.
The more frustration she has felt at unbridled misogyny, the higher the body count in her Western noirs, which also take place in a landscape Pochoda has watched play host to mounting ecological dysfunction. “Wind, fire, rain, mudslides — it’s a cycle of disaster,” she said.
“Ecstasy” flies in a different direction. With her title cued both to religious frenzy and to rave culture’s drug of choice, Pochoda owes the novel’s setting partly to the basketball star Kobe Bryant, who in 2018 tapped her as his collaborator on “Epoca,” his middle-grade classical steampunk fantasy series, and sent her to Naxos to soak up the island’s atmosphere of sun-bleached history and ancient mysteries. “Without that trip,” she said, “‘Ecstasy’ also wouldn’t have been as good.”
When Bryant first went looking for a collaborator, he typed “published novelist + former professional athlete + degree in classical literature” into Google Search, and up popped Pochoda’s biographical data: captain of the women’s squash team and four-time all-American at Harvard, nine standout years on the pro circuit in Europe, and a B.A. in classics and English literature.
Their inaugural title, “Epoca: The Tree of Ecrof,” with Pochoda taking the pen name Ivy Claire, hit No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list in 2020. The second, “Epoca: The River of Sand,” was published in collaboration with Bryant’s widow, Vanessa Bryant, after her husband’s death in a helicopter crash that year.
The writer Meghan O’Rourke, who edits The Yale Review, has known Pochoda since they overlapped at St. Ann’s. “She has always been super-observant,” O’Rourke said of Pochoda. “I think of her as quietly smiling as she was about to say something devastatingly true about the world.”
Some early readers of “Ecstasy” have invoked “The White Lotus.” But that discounts the moral and psychological mindfulness that Pochoda shows her characters. These include Lena, the protagonist, a newly widowed San Francisco socialite suddenly aching for the freedom she lost in marrying into the “loneliness of luxury,” and her tightly controlling son, obsessed with expanding his family’s five-star hospitality holdings even if they compromise ancient holy sites. Added to the mix are his wife, a tensely beautiful high flyer in finance, and a shifting band of messily questing women whose souls are up for grabs in an escalating contest between a scarily supernal D.J. and a comeback-hungry club queen trailing a prison record behind her.
Pochoda lived in Amsterdam at the height of the dusk-to-dawn rave scene of the 1990s, and though she was playing pro squash and beginning to write fiction at the same time, she plunged into the club scene full throttle. “I liked to party a little too hard,” she said of the memories that pulse through “Ecstasy”’s bouts of bacchanalia. A chunk of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ anthem “Heads Will Roll” serves as one of the novel’s epigraphs.
Pochoda has been grouped with such writers as Jonathan Lethem, Richard Price, Walter Mosley, Michael Connelly and Dennis Lehane, who in 2013 published “Visitation Street” through his namesake imprint. Joan Didion is likewise evident, in Pochoda’s ability to turn sunlight dark or to capture the universe in a traffic jam.
At least once Pochoda has also modeled herself after Cormac McCarthy: Convinced that women “don’t have to be victims to be pushed to violence,” she said, but can be just as hard-wired as men, she bet a friend in a bar one night that she could write a novel equal in gruesome impact to McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian.” The result, “Sing Her Down,” won the 2023 Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
The author and editor Sarah Weinman, who writes the Book Review’s crime column, has watched Pochoda start to explore horror as a genre. “Ivy is one of these writers who can build a fan base no matter what the genre,” Weinman said, “but horror allows her to reframe particular tropes in order to plumb the depths of feminist rage and make invisible women visible.”
Writing fiction and playing squash are a lot alike, Pochoda said, “because they both teach self-reliance and self-motivation. They both practice deception.”
At Harvard, Pochoda knows, she had a reputation for eschewing the prep-school gentility and clubby socializing that had accrued to the game. By then she’d been playing since a family friend introduced her to the courts at Brooklyn’s old-line Heights Casino when she was 8, and she was soon training with the boys’ team.
It gave her an early taste of sexism. “I got teased and belittled a lot,” she said.
For over a decade Pochoda has taught writing workshops in Los Angeles’s Skid Row neighborhood, only blocks from the club in the city’s downtown where she plays squash. “People there are always telling me how scared they’d be to set foot where I teach,” Pochoda said. “This fear of people because they’re indigent or neurodiverse makes me so angry. I hate the constant mistreatment and disrespect.”
She despises misjudgment at any level, and as her next novel takes shape in her mind, she keeps returning to her belief that the wrathful women condemned by Greek tragedy demand a fairer shake. “Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon after he has sacrificed their daughter merely for the sake of a fair wind,” Pochoda said. “It’s an understandable act of revenge.”
She is taking the summer off from writing. Her 11-year-old daughter, Loretta, is a top-seeded player in the world junior squash league, and, generally inseparable, they will be traveling extensively for her tournaments. Pochoda’s mother died in early May, and Pochoda is still processing. Her mother always kept a figurine of a swan wrapped protectively around a cygnet on her mantel, Pochoda said. She has the same image traced in ink on the inside of her left forearm.
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