Fiction – so close to lying – has always been a suspicious enterprise, not least to those undertaking it: from the elaborate frame narratives of the 18th century (all those found texts and epistolary novels) to the research expeditions of Victorian realists to the autobiographical turn of the present, authors have long found ways to avoid seeming to make things up, or what Rachel Cusk once called the “fake and embarrassing” business of “making up John and Jane and having them do things together”.
US writer Kathryn Scanlan has some especially crafty workarounds up her sleeve. One of her previous books, Aug 9 – Fog (2019), comprised sentences repurposed from the diary of a stranger. Her new book, Kick the Latch, is a kind of ghosted memoir drawn on conversations with Sonia, a horse trainer from the midwest, taking the form of a few dozen reflections and vignettes that range in length from three pages to just 15 words, as she looks back on her life and work from childhood deep into middle age.
It opens with an eight-line reminiscence in which we learn Sonia was born in 1962 with a dislocated hip, a setback overcome within the course of the paragraph (“Ended up I could walk”), quietly sounding the keynote of a book in which trauma is never allowed to become definitive. Fending for herself in a poor neighbourhood while her largely offstage parents make rent, she wants to be a jockey from an early age, learning to ride at weekends on a horse hired by the hour: “Once, on my birthday, I got to rent him for five hours straight.”
By her teens she’s spending summers working at stables in exchange for lodging, learning “about feeding and conditioning and interval training and selective breeding and line breeding and hoof care, anatomy”. The reader learns, too: about, say, how the lungs of a racehorse are liable to fill with blood on the track, and how to stop it happening without falling foul of a dope test. Or how easily hooves shatter: “Galloping, a horse spends a lot of his time suspended in the air… 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.”
Sonia, a girl in a world of men, tells us she is “known as the Coca-Cola kid, because everyone wanted to buy me a drink, get me drunk, but I’d ask for soda instead.” She’s 17 when a jockey breaks into her trailer and rapes her at gunpoint; she says nothing because she doesn’t want to risk losing the career she wants. “The guy sobered up, I knew him, I seen him every day, I knew exactly who it was, it was bad, but anyway, I survived. I cut my hair real short after that.”
It’s far from the book’s last bout of violence, but in all sorts of ways Kick the Latch refuses to follow the paths we might expect. Names waft through the text unglossed, adding to a heady sense that these are real people, not characters. Although there’s much tenderness as the book follows the highs and lows of Sonia’s subsequent career, including a late left turn into prison work, the overall toughness of the narration – sinewy, matter-of-fact, neither glib nor maudlin – seldom fails to jolt the reader. When an accident leaves a newly wed pal paralysed, she says: “The husband dumped her, of course. He dumped her right away.”
Scanlan has been praised in the US by the experimental writer Lydia Davis and her techniques resemble Davis’s own strategies for avoiding invention by using found text. But in its emotional impact, her artfully artless minimalism most recalls Lucia Berlin, another great writer of women and work. You might object that the lack of contrivance entails a loss of narrative shape – yet if we’re left wanting more, we’re also left wondering what more we could possibly want from a book so stuffed with life.
Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan is published by Daunt Books (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
