Kathryn Scanlan “writes about ordinary life in extraordinary ways by compacting it radically, like pressurizing carbon into diamonds,” Leslie Jamison writes.
When I was a child, my grandmother and I played a game that involved walking around her neighborhood pretending to be aliens, from a planet called Algernon, trying to discern the nature of every object we saw. That garden hose? It was a snake that spewed poisonous tears from its rusty mouth. Those tree roots? They were the knobby fingers of a giant sleeping under the sidewalk.
Scanlan’s new book, “Kick the Latch” , interlaces the dark threads of violence that run through “The Dominant Animal” with the unsentimental rituals of caregiving that anchor “Aug 9-Fog.” “Kick the Latch” is perched ambiguously between novel and oral history. In an author’s note, Scanlan calls it a “work of fiction” based on interviews that she conducted with an Iowa-born horse trainer named Sonia.
But the effect of Scanlan’s work rises as much from its form as from its content. As with a sculpture, you’d be as likely to describe it in terms of its shape as its materials. Reading Scanlan often feels like encountering something akin to Wallace Stevens’s jar on a hill : forceful in its presence but hard to penetrate, self-contained and opaque. “I try to write a sentence as unbudging and fully itself as some object sitting on a shelf,” she has said.
Sonia emerges as a compelling character: kind beneath her gruff exterior, charmed by surprising things , dry as a bone and cool as a cucumber, consistently understated about her own pain. Describing a riding accident that puts her in a coma, she says simply, “I was at the bottom of the pile.” When Sonia eventually leaves the racetrack life, she moves back home to take care of her ailing parents and ends up working as a corrections officer at a maximum-security prison.
What was left of her house was a scorched concrete hole in the ground. That’s where she lived. . . . She had clothes-pins and wire hanging from trees. Down in her hole in the ground was an old-fashioned bathtub and a little cast-iron camp stove. She had test tubes with rubber stoppers, little blue bottles, jars of jellies she made from her raspberry bushes. . . . Her voice was high, cracked, eerie like a witch’s.
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