I approached Kathryn Scanlan’s latest novel, Kick the Latch, with total ingenuity about its genre and style. On opening the book, I first noticed its dedicatory note, “To Sonia”, a couple of words that would later puzzle and challenge me in approaching the text. Kick the Latch immediately confronts the reader with a first-person narrator, a woman leading us through her own life story in what, at least at first, appears to be a fairly traditional narrative: “I was born October 1st, 1962”. In less than 170 pages we learn how, as a girl growing up in rural Iowa, she fell in love with horses and went into the horse racing industry, working as a groomer and a trainer, since she was too tall to be a jockey herself.  

We follow the narrator’s journey as she gets her first horse, Rowdy, follows the horse racing crews from town to town, from track to track around the US, and meets some good people and some terrible ones. The story is abundant in the specificities and lingo of the racetrack world, but still aimed towards a general audience, giving the impression that the narrator is trying to give us a picture of her life in the simplest possible way while making time to explain some of the very niche aspects of her complex world: “It’s hard for people who haven’t been there to understand. There’s a particular language you’d pick up on the track”. 

Although chronological, the story is divided into very short chapters, little vignettes of a life surrounded by white space on the page, making the book a fast-paced, agile read to be finished in one sitting. Some chapters are devoted to key events in the life of the narrator—when she learned to ride, when she trained a winning horse, when she injured herself badly—, but some of them are just about quotidian incidents that shed light on the nature of the industry and the hardships of leading a nomadic life, especially for a woman. Some chapters illustrate the relationships between men and women in such a male-dominated environment, and some present the harsh realities and cruelties of horse breeding and horse racing, as well as the gruesome aspects of the penitentiary system in the US, where the narrator worked for a while after quitting the racetracks. All of this is presented without sentimentality or romanticism. Instead, all occurrences are stripped of ornament and explanation. There is no attempt to elevate ordinary occurrences to an artistic status or to derive any moral or justification for the ugliest parts of life, yet both the simplest and harshest events in the book elicit a reaction from the reader. 

The language in Kick the Latch adheres to a casual, oral style that resembles an exercise on autobiography, an interview or a conversation. However, the artifice of Scanlan’s prose is visible in the lack of all those natural hesitations and unnecessary words that often appear in oral speech or stories of the kind that we see in popular media. Although the story might seem ordinary, there’s a sense that something else is happening behind this scant and unassuming prose, like a spell being cast as we turn the pages. 

We first become aware of such artifice when the narrator reveals her name, Sonia, whom the reader might remember from the book’s inscription. Later, the narrator addresses a second person —“I need to get you those pics of Rowdy”—, whom the reader might assume to be Scanlan. Is the book then an interview? A piece of nonfiction? In the Afterword, Scanlan writes that the book is both the transcription of an interview with Sonia and a work of fiction. How can it be both? The answer, Scanlan seems to suggest, is that we must forget all about fiction and nonfiction because whatever truth might be found in her writing lies in the craft and the style. Earlier I used the word spell not simply as a blurby compliment, but because Scanlan’s prose reminds me of an older use of language, not of discourse but of bringing things into being, if they are memories or dreams, it doesn’t matter much. 

Scanlan’s approach to literature could be considered a matter of style and language rather than a simple choice of genre. Although it reads like a conversation, the orality of the story is stripped to its bare bones, devoid of the natural hesitancy and rambling of an oral recollection. There is a conscious decision to sacrifice factuality in the pursuit of a distilled, concentrated and very small dose of truth, a quest in which both style and structure play a part: short chapters, one of them only consisting of a couple of lines, short sentences crafted to contain as much action and as little explanation as possible, few passive verbs, comparisons and adjectives; in their place, the verb to be appears many times. 

In one of Granta’s “Notes on Craft” series, Scanlan says of her own writing, “I try to write a sentence as unbudging and fully itself as some object sitting on a shelf in my office. In an object can be found meaning, pleasure and mystery, if one can see it unencumbered by ideas of how it is supposed to look”. Ideas of how things are supposed to be, or indeed how they’re supposed to be taken by the reader, are absent from Kick the Latch, even in the most traumatic moments in the story. In one of the book’s most gruesome events, when a horse was incorrectly euthanised and taken for dead, the scene is simply put in terms of what Sonia saw, never describing her feelings or the cruelty of the act, yet it is one of the most haunting scenes in the book. In another very traumatic event, Sonia’s sexual assault is described in just a couple of sentences, without discourse or attempts to process its aftermath, yet the blunt force of trauma leaves an echo through the rest of the narrative. It is this raw, unadorned prose reminiscent of Hemingway’s famous “show, don’t tell” philosophy that makes the text so effective. 

In its content, the book is also refreshing for its honest account of the female experience. Even in the worst of times, Sonia manages to bring up the beauty of a life with horses and the strength of the bonds she created with them, but hers is mostly a story of endurance, of rural life in its most unromantic ways, of gumption and surviving in a male world outside of today’s clichés of “empowerment”. It is a story about a woman with a calling which gave her life meaning. 

Kick the Latch might be a work of fiction based on a real person’s life, it might be entirely true, or it might be entirely made up. Does it matter? It is in its style and Scanlan’s piercing, blunt prose that we might find any shreds of truth about the human experience and the power of literature. If a story was a horse and a saddle the grips of ornament, explanations and other nonessentials, Scanlan’s prose forces the reader to ride bareback, feeling the heat and bones of the animal itself.