1 year ago
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In her 2019 book, Aug 9 – Fog, Kathryn Scanlan cut up, edited and arranged an elderly woman’s diary found at an estate auction in a small Illinois town. The accretion of brief, broken details about food, weather, people, illness – the stuff of life – had knockout poignancy. As in The Dominant Animal, her collection of 40 very short stories which came out the following year, reduction and compression facilitated a largeness. Kick the Latch, Scanlan’s novel based on the experiences of Iowa-born horse trainer Sonia, is similarly expansive in the way it creates a composite portrait of a life. In a series of vignettes drawn from transcribed conversations between Scanlan and Sonia, the reader encounters dilapidated trailers, racetracks, backs of vans, long hours, brutality, beauty and joy. Sonia’s voice is unsentimental and humane, alert to absurdity and human frailty.
“Galloping, a horse spends a lot of his time suspended in the air – flying really – or 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,” Sonia tells us. These horses – commodities, livelihoods – need great care. Sonia has her bandages, sheet cotton, hoof packing. She soothes legs with ice, or puts the horse in a turbulator, a kind of equine jet spa.
The world of the racetrack is hermetic, with tough camaraderie. In a novel full of kicks and broken bones, Sonia has a brawl with another trainer, Tim Tucker. Yet later, when she sustains a riding injury so bad she almost dies, it’s Tim and his wife who take care of her. Sonia returns to this episode twice, marvelling a little at her “racetrack family”.
It’s also a dangerous environment. Observe the butcher’s knife sitting in the window of Sonia’s trailer: “I kept it handy. You never know.” One episode describes the night when she woke up in her trailer with a man standing over her. “I got raped,” Sonia says, baldly. Later, she works for a spell in Onakona State Penitentiary: “Not many females working at a maximum, so the inmates – you can’t blame them. Sexual misconduct, flashing their dicks … I’d worked at the racetrack all those years. I was used to it.”
Sonia talks about other people: the jockeys who, to sweat off excess pounds, slap on glycerin and clingwrap and sit in hot cars, or the ones who try to make their horses go faster by giving them electric shocks. There’s Thorby, who got drunk on the paint for the horses’ legs; Bobbie Mackintosh, who broke her neck when galloping a three-year-old; Tommy Blue, who said he was only joking about killing himself before doing just that. There’s no gaudiness here, nothing meretricious. When a young man says that Sonia saved him from drowning, her response is typically unshowy: “I don’t know if I saved him or not. All I did was go into the water and bring him back to shore with me.”
And then there are the horses, such as Dark Side, so called because he had an eye knocked out. Sonia saves him from the “kill truck” and he becomes the success that wins her recognition as a trainer. Sold on to someone else, he would still spin his head round and whinny when he saw Sonia at the track. Sonia’s memories of Rowdy, her first horse, frame the book: “When things were bad I’d go to the horse and the horse would make it better. That’s why I always say my horse raised me.”
I’ve really only spoken of Sonia, haven’t I? So where is Scanlan? There is, I think, just one reference to her in the book. “I’ve got to get those pictures of Rowdy in the mail for you,” Sonia says. And so Scanlan is nowhere, and yet everywhere, in the shaping and patterning, in the rendering of a voice so distinctive and rich and true. Zola said that art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament. Well, we’re doubly blessed here, in having the sensibilities of both Sonia and Scanlan. Let’s be done with this awful “ordinary lives” talk, as though there is any such thing. Sonia is extraordinary and many other people would be perceived as such too, had they Scanlan to listen and make sense, artistically, of their days.
Wendy Erskine’s latest short story collection is Dance Move (Picador).
Kick the Latch is published by Daunt (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
English (US)