Kick The Latch byKathryn Scanlan
Review by Jess Moody
The crowds are excitable, already muttering comparisons to Lydia Davis and other greats of the sparse and stirring prose. Expectations of a slim and slick performance, a rush of beaten lives and wind-whipping wit. It won’t be long. Barely 150 pages to cover, and that at a gallop: here are jumps of time, leaps of white page, the unapologetic episodic slicing of a life. To pick up this book is to kick the latch and be rushed away: to feel the rhythm of a life told in moments, chasing an uncertain kind of win.
‘Galloping, a horse spends a lot of his time suspended in the air — flying, really — on one foot. When a foot lands, there’s a thousand pounds of pressure held up by that one thin leg, that little hoof the size of a handheld ashtray’.
Kathryn Scanlan’s short novel is told by Sonia, a US horse trainer growing up and into the migratory career and shifting community of the race track (‘Bad feelings, hard feelings, friction — nobody loves everybody’). This narrator has little time for self-pity or wider social commentary, only a honed and singular focus on experience over interiority. The characters she meets are the punctuation of her years: some are dangerous, some are lonely, some are the stuff of legend. The encounters are shared in a steady series of short vignettes, like bar-room tales settled down into a sharp-edged prose poetry.
There’s a refusal here of any kind of hero’s journey. For all the planning and the patience that goes into a race, Sonia makes clear that life’s too muddled for anything like fair chances or any just rewards at the end of that track. Riders and horses fall, or are pushed to fall, and some breaks heal, and some don’t. The world of Kick The Latch is one of poverty, gender-based violence, cruel capitalism; and also friendship, and professional pride, and compassion. It’s all utterly immersive in its physicality, each sentence as firm and hard-working as the narrator (‘They say your hearing’s the last to go. I thought they would bury me alive’). After Sonia's decades of one foot in front of another, the reader is left bereft at the finish line with only thing clear. It’s a beautiful run.