![Remarkable talent: American novelist Kathryn Scanlan](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2023/01/18/TELEMMGLPICT000321175513_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqWxGSA6EqCkNPLXCjaqkxzRa306WnPHVE_UdBq2uCdwc.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Novelist Kathryn Scanlan: ‘If you’re paying attention, reality can be very strange’
Regarded as one of the most remarkable modern literary talents in America, the 42-year-old writer discusses her latest work
![Remarkable talent: American novelist Kathryn Scanlan](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2023/01/18/TELEMMGLPICT000321175513_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqWxGSA6EqCkNPLXCjaqkxzRa306WnPHVE_UdBq2uCdwc.jpeg?imwidth=680)
When Sonia was a little girl in the late 1960s, her mother would take her and her sister from the Iowa city of Dixon to Jackson, Mississippi, where their father would place a bet or two on the horses while Sonia leaned on the rails and watched them run. The only thing she ever wanted to be was a jockey. She would do jobs around the house to pay for lessons at a local stable, riding bareback because she couldn’t afford a saddle. One day, on her birthday, she was allowed to rent her favourite horse for five hours straight. “He pawed in the crick [creek] and rolled in the water. We ate our treats and napped under a tree.”
Sonia’s obsession with horses – which would see her become a renowned trainer in Iowa – is both an everyday story and the subject of one of the most original novels you’ll read this year. After spending hours in her company – in person, in 2018 and then from 2018-2020, thanks to Covid, on the phone – the American writer Kathryn Scanlan boiled down hours of recorded conversations into what she calls “a novel”.
Kick the Latch details, in compressed and fragmented form, Sonia’s rise from schoolgirl to track hand to in-demand trainer: since quitting the racetrack aged 40, she has worked in law enforcement and now deals in antiques. It’s a ruthless, back-breaking life of devotion, through 4am feeds, casual brutality and constant risk of injury, both on and off the track. At one point, Sonia took a near-lethal fall; at another, a boyfriend tried to strangle her with a rope.
Scanlan ruthlessly edited, reshaped and rearranged and showed each revision to Sonia, who has become a friend. The trainer largely offered corrections to misheard words, but in an e-mail to Scanlan after the novel’s completion, she added: “Great job adding excitement to my life.” Yet Scanlan is adamant that Kick the Latch is a work of fiction. “I took the liberties of fiction in how I shaped the book,” she says on the phone from her home in Los Angeles. “Much of it is her voice, but some of it is mine. If I had tried to write a straightforward biography, it would have felt very stifling to me.”
![Kick the Latch details Sonia’s rise from schoolgirl to horse trainer](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2023/01/18/TELEMMGLPICT000321889160_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqjIwIjDXBmcU79gdGK1cNfv4Xpit_DMGvdp2n7FDd82k.jpeg?imwidth=350)
“I like to clear room around certain details so that they stand out as much as possible,” Scanlan says. “I’m very interested in narrative restraint as a tool, and a strategy for allowing a largeness to expand in the mind of the reader. But I also wanted to retain a sense of Sonia’s own character. She’s a very strong person, very upbeat, without a shred of self-pity.”
Few British readers have yet heard of Scanlan, 42, yet to her devotees she’s one of the most remarkable talents in America. The acclaimed short-story writer Lydia Davis, who favours a similar bone-dry style, is a fan; The New Yorker has called Scanlan’s writing “extraordinary”. In an American literary climate dominated at one end by showy doorstoppers from the likes of Jonathan Franzen and at the other by anguished examinations of selfhood from writers such as Maggie Nelson, Scanlan and her miniaturist portraits stand out.
Her debut novel, Aug 9 – Fog (2019), was similarly “scavenged” from another person’s life – a semi-illegible five-year diary begun in the late 1960s by an octogenarian Illinois woman. Arranged in brittle snippets – most pages contain barely more than a sentence or two – Scanlan’s collage-like reimagining brought to life a forgotten existence from a long-vanished America. “Such a lot of food sent in,” goes one entry, on the death of a family member. “Pies, cakes, salads, cookies. Two tinned hams.”
Yet Scanlan dislikes it when critics describe her work, as they frequently do, as concerned with ordinary American lives. “I get very confused by these words “ordinary” and “overlooked’,” she says. “It sounds wrong to me. Because what other sort of life is there? What is the word ‘ordinary’ being set against, and what is the ‘extraordinary’? And who gets to decide? Every person’s life is interesting if you write about it the right way. Sonia, for instance, survived in this often violent, male-dominated world.”
“The last sort of novel I want to read,” she adds, “is one about someone in academia, or where the main character is a writer.” (I take this to be an oblique reference to the sort of self-regarding East Coast story purveyed by the likes of Ben Lerner.)
Scanlan, like Sonia, grew up in Iowa. Her mother taught her to ride, and from the age of seven she had her own horse, which they kept in the yard. “I spent my childhood around horses, drawing horses, thinking about horses, and it was a bond me and my mother shared too. But now that I’m an adult, living in Los Angeles, I no longer ride. So listening to Sonia talk about being near them and caring for them the way she does – it was like hearing a part of my life that I’d half forgotten about.”
![A detail from the cover of Kick the Latch, out today](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2023/01/18/TELEMMGLPICT000321175514_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqBlmb6xGVnUvPy_Gy_0ajGOEF_BzZH9KgI5zMAB0l0FU.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Yet she isn’t nostalgic for the Iowa she left behind, nor does she see Kick the Latch as part of some romantic rural American tradition, honouring a noble-but-disappearing way of life. Her own memories of the landscape are unlovely. “We lived in a wooded area above the Mississippi near Interstate 80, and the old river-cities of Davenport and Rock Island. Already, those pockets of countryside were being aggressively redeveloped.
“The only other horse owner I had regular contact with was an old Leftist farmer, a family friend. He had the most beautiful little acreage, and in the summer my horse lived on his property. But developers were always coming for him, and the city threatened eminent domain for years. It’s a hideous sub-division now.”
Scanlan is succinct with her answers, not given to introspection or to generalisations. She may feel uncomfortable talking about her work, preferring the words to stand for themselves. Her writing has the dream-like air of an Edward Hopper painting, its clarity disorientating in the way an ordinary object can become so when stared at for too long. She keeps notebooks of snatched conversation and “found material”, much of which found its way in transmogrified form into her excellent 2020 short-story collection The Dominant Animal, which comprises 40 scenarios that seem both commonplace and disconcertingly mysterious. “I think if you are paying attention,” she says, “then reality can be very strange indeed. And I find that very exciting.”
In other words, Scanlan’s writing both stands within America’s venerable tradition of social realism and sits outside it. As a child, one of her favourite novels was Black Beauty, whose bedbound author Anna Sewell wrote in fragments – a process not dissimilar to how Scanlan assembles her own stories. At college in Iowa, she found herself drawn to Sherwood Anderson – whose story cycle Winesburg, Ohio is a classic of small-town American life – Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson.
She regularly writes for the New York literary journal Noon, edited by Diane Williams. “Every issue that comes out reinvigorates me and makes me want to work harder to write. Any writer can mail in their work and Diane will read it.” Not that she “hangs out” with writers; and she says she “probably ought” to read more contemporary fiction. But don’t mistake that for a lack of conviction. “I may be drawn to seemingly small moments in a life, rather than the great arc of history,” she says. “But I think Kick the Latch is, in its own way, a little bit epic.”
‘Kick the Latch’ is published today by Daunt. To order your copy for £9.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books