Kick the Latch

by Kathryn Scanlan

Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch vividly captures the arc of one woman’s life at the racetrack—the flat land and ramshackle backstretch; the bad feelings and friction; the winner’s circle and the racetrack bar; the fancy suits and fancy boots; and the “particular language” of “grooms, jockeys, trainers, racing secretaries, stewards, pony people, hotwalkers, everybody”—with economy and integrity.
Based on transcribed interviews with Sonia, a horse trainer, the novel investigates form and authenticity in a feat of synthesis reminiscent of Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony. As Scanlan puts it, “I wanted to preserve—amplify, exaggerate—Sonia’s idiosyncratic speech, her bluntness, her flair as a storyteller. I arrived at what you could call a composite portrait of a self.” Whittled down with a fiercely singular artistry, Kick the Latch bangs out of the starting gate and carries the reader on a careening joyride around the inside track.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Novella, Literary Fiction, Horses, American, Book Club

170 pages, Paperback

First published September 6, 2022

About the author

Kathryn Scanlan's work has appeared in NOON, Fence, Granta, and Egress. Her debut collection of stories, The Dominant Animal, is forthcoming from FSG Originals in 2020. She lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews

[Jack Edwards · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kathryn Scanlan interviewed a horse-racing trainer and then used those interviews to craft this extraordinary hybrid of fiction and non-fiction. Providing a gripping insight into the often brutal world of jockeys, trainers, and racing, this is totally captivating.

It's a pithy series of events and observations -- a supercut of a life rather than a plot-driven novel -- but still a total page turner with a narrative voice that oozes personality. A quick read because I simply couldn't put it down.

[Pete · Rating 5 out of 5]

help me find more books like this. i don't have any opinions or insights about the author or the subject. this is like the cure for autofiction. blank perfect empathy, but also with some filigrees of made up shit to make it double-perfect. seriously if you know about other books that are this short this good give them to me immediately

[Katia N · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am really behind with my reviews, so I will try to get a few short ones out of the way. Though it is almost always when I think that it is going to be the short one, I end up writing a memoir:-) Anyway... I've first met Kathryn Scanlan's work when I've picked up Aug 9 - Fog⁠. I did not know anything about the book. But Aug 9 is my birthday. So the motivation of getting it was a sort of vanity I guess. But I was so deeply moved when I understood what I've bought. Many years ago, Kathryn found a stranger's diary at an antique auction. The diary was written by an eighty-six old woman. After 15 years Kathryn worked with it arranging the text, maybe doing some edits. But she gave voice to that unknown elderly woman. What came out is like the most astute, the most poignant poetry. I set a few times to write a review of it. But it is just too immediate, to bare to pile more words on it. Read it - it is a short book, but you would understand what I mean.

So this has lead me to "Kick the Latch". This and my reading of books by Murnane. Horse raising plays a very significant role in his work and his life. I do not know anything about horse raising at all. So when I saw a book about a horse trainer, I wanted to read it because of Murnane.

It is actually not "about" a horse trainer. Sonia, the horse trainer, tells her story herself. The book is the result of a number of interviews with her. It is presented as a series of short vignettes taken from her monologue. It seems that so called "oral histories" are currently on the rise. I've come across Osebol that seem to be another example of "oral history" I want to read at some stage. But whether a trend or not, "Kick the Latch" is a little gem. Sonia is a wonderful person. Or is she a character? Or both? Her voice is unique and her story is unique as well. I've heard somewhere that this book gives voice to "an ordinary life". But I do not see anything ordinary in Sonia's life. It is pretty much extraordinary. Also the ability of Kathryn Scanlan to give up her authorial presence, ability to listen is outstanding feature of the way how this story is told.

Now I feel as if I've been behind a racetrack for the first time in my life. There is no sentimentality in the voice, but it is so full of compassion to the horses and occasionally - to other human beings, it is palatable.

[Tom Mooney · Rating 5 out of 5]

A quietly amazing novel that takes one small, niche story and makes it appear to be about everything there is.

This is the life of Sonia, a young girl from Iowa, who grows up to become a racehorse trainer. From this one person and her quiet, normal but dramatic existence, all life seems to bloom. As Sonia works her way up from apprentice to fully fledged trainer, her story overflows with the comradeship of the track community and love for her horses, and is often blighted by violent men. Through it all she maintains a stoic dignity, an admirable matter-of-factness about what life throws her way.

Written in prose scraped right back to the bone, it builds a stunning portrait of a life lived on the margins. Scanlan devised this novel from interviews with a real life person, a friend of her mother's. How much of it is true we can only guess. Whatever the answer, Kick The Latch serves as a marvellous tribute to her life.

[Kerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kick the Latch feels like trading stories over beers at a dive bar with the tough old bitch I’ve always wanted to be. Despite my mother’s best efforts I never was a horse girl, but this book made me catch a little fomo for life on the backstretch.

[Trudie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Daunt books has the following accolades listed for this slim book -

SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2023/2024
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK AWARD 2023
A DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR
A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR
A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR
A NEW YORKER BOOK OF THE YEAR

And then I saw it popping up on some trusty readers recent reads - so off I popped to collect it from the library.
I am not going to lie, initially I was - what’s all the fuss ?
It’s very “horsey” and this put me off for a time but hang in there and you realise the author has captured an entire life in 144 pages. I have yet to puzzle out the fact vs fiction distinctions, I believe it’s based of a conversation with a real horse trainer ? But it’s fiction ? - IDK how it works exactly.

Maybe the Guardian can explain it best :

“ 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.”

Voice, character, restraint - a master class in writing.

[Emmkay · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a novel based on interviews the author did with Sonia, a midwestern woman in her 60s who worked with horses most of her life, primarily at race tracks as a trainer. Short vignettes, in Sonia's very direct, almost entirely unsentimental voice (except maybe about Rowdy, her first horse, about whom the sentiment is entirely justified), that read as if they were oral history but which clearly involve authorial license since Scanlan describes it as a work of fiction. Some of it is funny and some of it is terrible, but it's all set out with just the right balance of economy and detail. I'll note that the terrible fates of some of the horses was hard to take, but I was still so happy to have read it.

It's written so effectively and engagingly, conveying big life experiences, both the shared and the lonely. What an eventful and often hard life, too. Concise, refreshing, fascinating.

[Steph · Rating 4 out of 5]

short, sharp, vivid. unsentimental, yet filled with compassion. this is a special book.

i should have done my research before diving in, because my opinion of the book shifted when i learned that it's a fictionalized oral history. it's based on transcriptions of interviews scanlan conducted with a real horse trainer named sonia. the text may be a fictionalized version of sonia's life, but this woman's voice is the origin of the story.

it makes sense, because our narrator has such a distinct voice - strange enough that it has to be true. she's quirky and blunt, relaying disturbing events matter-of-factly. she's unsentimental, yet has such deep love and compassion for horses and humans. her bluntness brings a unique sense of humor to the storytelling. it's refreshing and so fucking good.

and one thing i loved about reading this is that it felt like entering another world. the insular community of horses, horse trainers, owners, and jockeys is something i've never learned about, and never much thought about. sonia describes the race track as its own little city, an odd microcosm that one can live within, rarely venturing to the outside "real world." there is brutality and camaraderie. what an interesting way to spend a life.

You live at the track, your life is full. You don't have time to go shopping at the mall. You lose touch with the outside. Things change. You don't hear about world news unless something major happens, because you're in your own world and you have enough news.

[Vartika · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kathryn Scanlan is a master of distilling found truths into compelling fictions. In her first novel, Aug 9 – Fog, she artfully conjures a singular portrait of life-sized ordinariness by rearranging fragments from a diary, once belonging to an eighty-six-year-old woman, that she found in an estate sale in rural Illinois. In The Dominant Animal, a collection of forty haunting pieces of flash fiction, she strips our experience of being human down to its essential eeriness and basest cruelties. Now, with Kick the Latch—her second novel and likely most propulsive work to date—Scanlan once again brings to light the touching strangeness of everyday mundanity, offering herself up as the medium for a midwestern woman named Sonia whose real-life experiences as a horse trainer are here presented as a fictionalized account of brutality, camaraderie, toil, and trouble on the racetracks.

Written in short, vignette-length chapters, Kick the Latch follows Sonia from the setback of her birth in 1962, when she came into the world with a dislocated hip and a doctor’s prescription for a lifelong impairment—”turned out I could walk”—into the contentment of a middle age that follows only a fulfilled, well-loved youth. In the course of just over a hundred and sixty pages, it bites clean through the flesh of her experience and into the rind, journeying across the development of her passion for horses and the adolescent years of mucking at local stables; through training, hungrily, at the provincial tracks leading to the wealthy realms of the Florida racing circuit; and into the quieter years of a present spent as a correctional officer and flea market vendor.

[Support an independent magazine and read the rest of this review over at The Rumpus, the loveliest literary community on the internet.]

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Winner of the Gordon Burn Prize

A PARTICULAR LANGUAGE

When I tell Jerry stories about the racetrack he doesn't say much. It's hard for people who haven't been there to understand. There's a particular language you pick up on the track. I'd come home for the holidays and try to talk to my family, but nothing I said made sense to them. What? they'd say. Huh? What do you mean?

I think my reaction to Kick the Latch is one of frustrated expectations rather than an objective one. It's a much praised novel from the (genuinely given I'm sure) blurbs, through its presence in many end of year lists and its award nominations (shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book Award and currently longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize - which it went on to win), to the publications that have featured interviews with its author on the novel's form - Lunate, The White Review, BOMB and Southwest Review are go-to publications for me for recommendations on innovative literature.

So then what I read - a short novella in stripped-down but jargon-heavy prose - wasn't perhaps what I'd expected.

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 be reapproved by the starter and you have to have eight clean breaks. Horses get fractious and bang around in their slots before you kick the latch, so they've got headers to hold them.

Here's Dark Side, in a middle hole, with a handler on each side yanking his head straight. On his blind side there's stamping and whinnying, heavy bodies slamming on metal, but he can't turn his head to look because the headers won't let him. That's when he'd panic and start in with his fits.

Morning workouts are from five until eleven. There's a lot of traffic. I'd walk him, just halter and lead shank, up to the starting gates to take a look around. I'd pet him and talk to him. I talked to the gate crews. Did a long lot of talking to the starters and headers. I said, Don't crank him down like that. Let him turn his head a little and look.

That said, the overall judges' comment on the longlist from the Gordon Burn Prize fits this perfectly, as an unusually structured fictionalisation of a life, based on transcribed interviews, and the understated prose fits the protagonist (whose life is actually remarkable):

As ever, the Gordon Burn Prize recognises work that innovates, interrogates, subverts and surprises; has voice, vision and verve. That challenges form, kicks back against what we’re told is ‘literary’ - in content and shape - and prioritises the original and the authentic.

And the author's comment on resisting genre a welcome one:

Yes, I regard it as fiction, a novel—that’s how I presented it to publishers, and I wouldn’t allow it to be marketed as such if I hadn’t—but I also like “fiction” as a sort of default or catch-all literary genre. The existence of a clear “boundary” between narrative nonfiction and narrative fiction seems unlikely—is it a single departure from fact, a single act of invention?—but I’m aware of a tension between the two when I write, and it’s a productive tension. To me, the idea of genre is useful as something to question, push against, make mischief with.

So a rather unfair 3 stars.

[Emmeline · Rating 4 out of 5]

One hundred and twenty brief pages of vignettes from the life of a female horse trainer in the late twentieth century. And many of these pages are half-pages. There’s a lot of white space, it’s extremely pared down.

She grows up poor-ish in the country, but she loves horses. Her parents work hard to get her riding lessons, then eventually a horse, and from there, when she graduates, she goes to work at a racetrack. It’s a fascinating account of a life on the margins, caring for horses from four in the morning until late, passing out exhausted, harassed by jockeys, loving the horses, living on the road. I learned a lot about the care of horses.

The voice is earthy and matter of fact, sharing racecourse wisdom in the same style as telling about an abusive partner. It’s based on a real voice, hours of interviews that Scanlan conducted with “Sonia,” a family acquaintance. And yet, she says, it’s a work of fiction. I’m consumed with curiosity to know how this book was put together. It was a real antidote, for me, to all the fiction about writers and artists. I'm always wishing literature would focus on stories from outside the artistic world, and this just reinforces my appetite.

It really is very plain in a lot of ways. Not my favourite book of the year, but the one that has me scrambling to get my hands on everything else the author has written.

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5, rounded up

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sparse superb prose and a great story. And that’s coming from someone who doesn’t even likes horses that much 😊

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

An easy 5 stars. Kathryn Scanlan is a genius.

It seems odd to have to little to say about a book that was so good, but sometimes the work speaks for itself.

[Esmé Boom · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is why you let your local bookseller talk you into things (in my case, Vera at Walter's Bookshop in Groningen) - this was a wild ride and I loved every page of it. Cannot recommend enough.

[Max Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Compulsively readable, oftentimes harrowing, but always so so full of love. It may seem like I’ve been throwing around 5 stars willy-nilly, but this might be an all-timer for me!

rip denis johnson you woulda loved this

[Deborah · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brief, remarkable account of one woman’s life working with horses. It’s billed as fiction, but it’s based on a series of interviews conducted by the author with just such a woman, and nothing could seem more authentic. Made up of many brief chapters, most just a single page (or less) long, the effect is like a series of lightning flashes, each shedding vivid bursts of light that accumulate to build a picture of a life. And what a hard life, full of financial hardship, rootlessness, and high risk of injury. And yet it’s clear that Sonia, the horsewoman, loves it and finds it rewarding in the ways that matter to her. Her voice is remarkable, and her anecdotes unfold in the language of the track (the terminology is undefined, but most of it is quite clear from the context). Not recommended for those who are sensitive about cruelty to animals. While Sonia has brief periods working at first-class racetracks with very valuable horses who are treated with kid gloves, most of her career is spent at tracks far down the scale, where the horses are deemed disposable and are run injured and unrested, with devastating consequences.

[Nikki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Geloof de hype 🐎🐎

[Andy Weston · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scanlan's writing has that extraordinary skill to it that makes it such a pleasure to read, the ability to extract a beguiling strangeness from the banal.

This is a fictionalised portrait of a woman's career in horse-racing in the American Midwest, based on a series of interviews the author did with an actual person. It is told in fleeting installments, from half a page to three or four pages, that trace its subject, known only as Sonia, chronologically throughout her lifetime.

This is a fine example of the sort of novel that forms an ordinary life into great art, but the succinct style Scanlan uses I have never come across before, except perhaps in poetry.
Sentences come across as being effective and competent. The first thought is to demand more, but the next is to think, why is that, as Scanlan's efficiency has said it all. Nonetheless, many beg for a re-read.

The anecdotes don't pull together as a conventional plot, they are more like a jigsaw puzzle, each a small part of the whole picture which gradually emerges.
Regardless of interest in sport, the reader is moved by compassion and courage. The compressed approach intensifies the violence rather than dilutes it.

The hundred or so pages give a complete experience, so much so that it passes through the mind as to why some stories require so much more.

This is a rare and astounding piece of prose, unassuming and sincere in its authenticity.
Keep an eye on it, it will go far.

There's something of Willy Vlautin in Scalan's writing, but I can't make out whether thats solely due to , or the approach used to describing of ordinary working folk.

[Ellie Beagley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Straight to one of my favourites of all time, so so perfect.

[Renée Morris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sonia’s not your regular horse girl, she’s a cool horse girl who takes no shit and doesn’t mince her words. She’s lived more life than most and Scanlan captures it with zero fluff.

[Nike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kick The Latch is gebaseerd op de memoires van Sonia, een paardentrainer uit Iowa. In korte hoofdstukken van nooit meer dan 3 pagina’s en soms maar één zin, lees je hoe Sonia van race naar race reist, zich te pletter werkt en meer dan eens het slachtoffer wordt van geweld. Een belangrijk thema is de band die we hebben met dieren en onze eigen dierlijke aard die maar al te vaak naar boven komt.

Ik ben een paardenmeisje, dus schrijf over paarden en ik ben verkocht. Maar Kick the Latch degouteerde me. Vergeet de romantiek van The Black Stallion of The Horse Whisperer. Kick The Latch brengt de rauwe realiteit van een vrouw die haar plekje wil verdienen in de zieke wereld van de paardenracen. Ze wil het anders doen, met meer aandacht voor dierenwelzijn. Dat loopt niet bepaald van een leien dakje.

Je kon me samen vegen toen het boek uit was. Het gaat over vreselijke dingen, maar het is ontzettend goed geschreven. Het is minimalistisch, nuchter en raakt gruwelijk efficiënt de juiste snaar.

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kick the Latch is a tight wee novella, told in vignettes about a horse trainer. This fictional narrative is based on a series of interviews the author did with a friend of her parent’s and I think this is very much what makes the stories and protagonist feel so alive. It’s easily the best book I’ve read this year. Super tight, clean prose, excellent as both a character portrait and a story about the horse racing industry, excellent for readers that aren’t interested in horses as much as those who are. Loved it.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kick the latch is one of those books which blur the line between fiction and non fiction.
Comprised of a years worth of interviews with a race horse trainer. The novel presents the varied events of this person in the form of page long vignettes. Sometimes funny, sometimes shocking, Kick the Latch is a brilliant read, whether you like horses or not. HIGHLY recommended.

[Anna Capde · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bon llibre i una història molt colpidora. No coneixia molt el tema de les curses de cavalls i m'ha agradat saber-ne més. La protagonista, una dona molt valenta!

[rachy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like I want to start this review by saying I like Kathryn Scanlan a lot. I like her vibe, I like her style and I like her ideas and the things she chooses to write about. Yet somehow, I don’t always love her books as I’m reading them as much as all that. It’s a peculiar relationship to have with an author’s work. It’s as if sometimes I like the idea of her work more than the reality of the work itself.

I also think it’s important to note that while I always knew I would pick up Scanlan’s next book whatever it was, I was definitely more than a little disappointed to learn it would be about horse racing. A sport that I personally abhor, with my distaste only heightened from growing up close to a famous racecourse and consistently being exposed to it whether I liked it or not. I’m not squeamish though, and in the same way I’ve read plenty of books about psychopaths and murders, I’m more than open minded enough to suspend my own feelings in order to empathise with and experience anyone’s unique position. After all, isn’t that why we all read fiction? I just think it’s important to say that I did already have a reason to dislike ‘Kick the Latch’ before I even began and I can’t be entirely sure how much this may have influenced my opinion of the novel.

Despite all this, I did actually enjoy the time I spent with ‘Kick the Latch’, albeit a little superficially. The thing that actually struck me most about it was my disappointment in finding that I actually had similar sorts of issues with it as with ‘Aug 9 - Fog’, something I genuinely didn’t anticipate. Stylistically, Scanlan’s MO is definitely to find an interesting source material and then to lean extremely hard into it. I think unfortunately, it tends to be a little hard for my liking. I feel as if she almost sticks too rigidly to the truth, not fictionalising quite enough to do what I want fiction to do. I can feel how faithful she wants to be to the source material, how taken she is with it, and that leads to not always enough invention to form a real narrative or emotional arc, and so always feels a little half baked to me.

I understand that she prefers to be sparse, and this certainly compliments her prose style (which is undeniably wonderful) extremely well, but while I always love what’s there, it’s just never quite enough to really satisfy me. I’d compare it to the experience going to a pretentious Michelin star restaurant and eating one of those tiny tasting menus - the skill is undeniable and often the enjoyment is too, but I might still want to grab a McDonald’s on the way home because I’m not fully satisfied in the way I’d expect to be after finishing a meal.

In ‘Kick the Latch’, there was little to no arc until almost three quarters of the way into the book, the rest was just interchangeable gritty anecdotes about life at the racetrack. These were entertaining enough, and well written, but didn’t come to much for too long for me. Even the characterisation could have been stronger. Once things did come together into more of a narrative, it was still a little too brief, too choppy and without much of a real conclusion (emotional or otherwise). I’d argue even ‘Aug 9 - Fog’ had more of a thread, really.

So as always, I liked ‘Kick the Latch’ but didn’t love it. I respected what Scanlan was doing here, adapting this from real interviews with a real horse trainer, but just too faithfully for me. As someone that doesn’t read non-fiction or memoir or biography, Scanlan’s work often veers too far into this for me. It does make sense though - most people don’t discriminate and read across these genres and love Scanlan’s work. As someone that doesn’t, I guess it isn’t so surprising that Scanlan’s work doesn’t always hit for me specifically in the same way it seems to for everyone else. I still like Scanlan’s work, and the idea of it even more, I just hope for some honest to goodness, straight up fiction at some point in the future. Something closer to ‘The Dominant Animal’ than this or ‘Aug 9 - Fog’. I think that would be the real tell of how much of a fan of Scanlan I really am.

[Samuel Moss · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unclassifiable. Eminently readable. Voice-oriented without being overbearing or pretentious. Clear attention to the sentence that still allows the narrative and humanity to shine through. Beautiful.

[Nadine in California · Rating 5 out of 5]

This slim book is a great kick in the head to gender stereotypes of women. It's hard to remember while reading it that this is a novella and not Sonia just telling me about her life as she goes about it - mostly working with horses in one form or another. The reason becomes clear in the Afterward, when Scanlan thanks Sonia for interviews recorded over the last few years. Scanlon has such a light and empathetic touch that she fictionalizes Sonia without erasing an ounce of her realness. Almost like she understands Sonia so well that she's written autofiction on her behalf.

[Baz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent character-driven narrative, excellent prose. An unsurprisingly fast-paced read, but a surprisingly engrossing story. The narrator was so charming. Much is held back but she’s so giving. I loved it. A book of mundane stuff that yields extraordinary results. The writing couldn’t be any sharper. It’s funny, it’s sad, it has a generous heart, and it was a total pleasure from start to finish. Yum.

[Victoria Casteels · Rating 4 out of 5]

guess i'm a horse girl now