Kathryn Scanlan

Kathryn Scanlan’s Majestic Speedlube follows Happy and Early, couriers eking out a living driving unshippable objects—a taxidermied bear, a two-hundred pound crystal, a custom tombstone—across the country in their “club-cab bed-capped” rig. The resulting linguistic joy ride, powered by Scanlan’s signature live-wire style, is a hectic confluence of billboards, user reviews, overheard conversations, receipts, bumper stickers, bills of lading, diner orders and a very talkative radio—a discordant, clanking music of simulated gunfire, bleating microwaves, squealing dry vans and trains blasting their grievous mourning horns. Yet in the din of the novel are clearings and rest stops for bright bursts of pleasure—moments of stillness and profundity in nature, with animals, with children: a silent steel-haired couple dance a waltz, a woman saves a snapping turtle from getting crushed on the road, and light comes in “godly shafts through the trees.” Here the usual givens of the novel form are sidestepped in service to a narrative that pays precise, epiphanic and capacious attention to the vast and the infinitesimal in a feat of distilled radical empathy. Majestic Speedlube, as it barrels along—restless and relentless, lean and prickly—hums with power and mystery, with language that’s alive and kicking. It’s at once a comedy, a lament, an ecological elegy, an account book, a pastoral, a protest song—the Great American Novel thundering with consumption, where “the whole kit of life” can be seen through busted-out windows—and a new vision of how the “pure products of America / go crazy.”

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.

In an opulent villa near the English channel lives a well-to-do family. A man— husband, father, employer—has been shot dead. The bullet is from his own gun, which he got from the Germans during the war. In this family, the father has a safe, a monkey wrench, a wife, and a maid named Rose. The son has a swing, a croquet set, a rain coat, and a car. They all read detective novels to fall asleep (the father), to stay awake (the son), to distract herself from an empty marriage (the mother). Packed with brutal revelations, the novel centers on the twenty minutes of silence it takes for the family to alert the doctor (who lives next door) of the father’s death. Everything in this high-octane drama is subject to change, including the setting and the characters, who are truer to life than might at first appear. But who if anyone is the true criminal and who is the victim? In this marvelous and sui generis novel, written in Bessette’s signature taut and stripped-back prose, the detective novel is turned inside out and wholly on its head.