Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan – #ABookADayInMay – Day 23

At the end of Kick the Latch (2022) by Kathryn Scanlan, there is quite a curious note from the author. She writes:

Kick the Latch is based on interviews recorded in person and by phone in 2018, 2020, and 2021. With Sonia’s permission, I transcribed those recordings and used them to write this book, which is a work of fiction. My gratitude to Sonia – and to my mother, who introduced us – is profound.

I don’t remember reading any of the many reviews that circulated about this book a couple of years ago, but I’m sure they’d all have highlighted this curious mixture of fiction and non-fiction. If the main character is called Sonia, sharing her experiences in the first person, where does the real Sonia end and the fictional one begin?

The novel – if such it is – is told in many vignettes, or extremely short chapters. They are broadly in chronological order, from her early childhood through her career as a horse trainer, with a slightly unexpected addendum of life working in a prison at the end. But Kick the Latch is really a window on a world that most of us know nothing about: the visceral, often violent, all-encompassing world of horse trainers and jockeys. While the horse owners are at the peripheraries of the book, this not their stage. This is a clear-eyed, direct account of a world that Sonia loves, even while it treats her with apathetic brutality.

You get hit. I got kicked in the head. The horse was kicking at a fly and my head got in the way. Riders would go down. They’d get steel rods put up their spine. You were on top of the world or the bottom. You’d get hurt and be laid up with no money coming in, but there’d be other weeks where you made real good.

It’s a sport, you’re competitive – you want to be tops, you want to win, you want your name on the program, in the standings. A trainer’ll try to swipe an owner from another trainer. A jockey’ll say to another jockey – What the fuck are you doing, sniffing around my stable? Bad feelings, hard feelings, friction – nobody loves everybody. But if someone gets hurt, laid up, down on their luck, loses a loved one – even if their truck breaks down on the way to the next track – we’d work together to help. We’d have a big benefit.

Sonia’s voice is clear and unapologetic, and she skates along the surface of this dizzying world. Whether describing the dubious ways that jockeys keep their weight down, the muckier side of horse rearing, or her own rape and, later, domestic violence, she gives us the information in staccato summary. She seldom dwells on anything. It gives the book a break-neck pace.

Scanlan isn’t afraid to immerse us in the idiolect of horse training. We get some glossing, but I still felt rather at sea with paragraphs like this:

Dark Side had been ruled off for flipping in the gates. You can get a flipper reinstated, but it’s a lot of work. You have to get reapproved by the starter and you have to have eight clean breaks.

I’m none the wiser, to be honest, but I think it’s better to be thrown into this world than to have everything explained – or, goodness, footnotes.

And we are very much thrown into the world of the book. It is short, spiky, and totally consistent. Perhaps it is too visceral for my liking, and it certainly doesn’t have the elegance or intertextuality of other vignette-based books I’ve read like Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill or Blue Postcards by Douglas Bruton. But it is confidently, unflinchingly its own thing – and, on those terms, very much a success.