Kick the Latch feels like a chimera, a chemical concoction of oral history meets biography meets fiction meets a Lydia Davisesqe coiled punch. Kathryn Scanlan brings to life a fictional account of an Iowa-born horse trainer named Sonia.
Kick the Latch is 129 pages, weighs less than a feather, and many of its chapters — vignettes, really — clock in as a page or two in length. The author coalesced a story around interviews conducted with a real-life Sonia who Scanlan met through her mother. All writers have a subject. All writers borrow from their lives — whether the encounter comes through life experience or the experience is purposely manufactured. As a reader of Latch, we don’t know where Sonia’s life was changed, morphed, deleted, or transformed. Even so, the story, Sonia’s story, feels all the more real, and perhaps whatever fictional elements were added, only enhanced that truth.
Whatever changes Scanlan made, it’s still the specifics — specifics lent over via interview and conversations, edged and arranged by the creative choices of the writer — that make this book sing and leave the most powerful impression. When I finished the book I felt like I could hear Sonia. I could hear her magnificent specificity. I could hear the agitation of a horse banging in a silo before a race. I felt the heartbreaking life of a Vietnam veteran that befriends Sonia. And the blunt edge of physical and psychological trauma that Sonia races past in a few sentences. When I was done with this book I felt like I went on a walk with Sonia.
It reminds me of when we get stories from another living person. Like when riding with a rancher in Wyoming on a mountain side who encounters another driver. Both drivers pull over, and start talking, and then turn off their trucks to share their news, their gossip, stories. A conversation can weave from cattle and weather to a lost daughter or a bout with cancer. It’s these pull over moments I’ve had with people that Sonia reminded me of: the bearded dropout philosophy major who tends plants for a coffee shop in Portland, smoking cigarette after cigarette. A janitor at a major university who was working on a novel. The Alaskan fisherman getting ready for the summer season. They share their magnificent specifics and we listen. And if you listen closely, and are open, no matter how radically different that person is than you, you understand something about life, about who that person is and what they do in this world. We are our specifics and our stories. It just takes a bit of curiosity — the antidote to assumption.
And the beauty of Latch is that it’s not an ephemeral conversation that sticks (or doesn’t) to the neurons. It’s here, in this book, a life that can be experienced and thought over at the pace of reading. Such a gift makes me think of all the wild specifics, the stories packed and clustered on the tongue of strangers, family, and makes you want to write them down, record, preserve, share.
If you’d like, you can follow all reviews on my Good Reads.
ENDIT.
Great review! Adding this one to my reading list
Loved the "talk". Keep up the great writing Tucker! I love you🥰