Lark Benobi's Reviews > Kick the Latch

“Kick the Latch” hovers, a little uneasily for me at first, between fiction and oral history. For a while I worried a good deal about attribution (the lack of it). In the beginning pages I kept snittily comparing what Scanlan does here to what Aaron Copeland did when he stole for himself the scratchy exuberant melody to Hoedown from a recording he'd found of an Appalachian fiddler.

But then I just had to let it go. Let go of the uneasiness in my head. I just had to say it doesn't matter in the end whether this is a mostly-accurate transcription of interviews Scanlan conducted with a woman named "Sonia," or was instead mostly invented, and marvelously transformed, by Kathryn Scanlan. It exists. It wouldn't have existed without both women contributing to it.

What is remarkable to me about this language, this story, is the way its relentless understatement makes everything feel so much larger, and more epic in scope, and more heroic and strange. Before long I was overcome by the profound simplicity of the language. My concern over where truth stood in relation to fiction dropped away and I was left with just one feeling, as I read forward: This is true. This is the way it really was.