Lost Memory of Skin: A Novel (edition 2011)

Hard to describe my thoughts about this book. Well written and thought-provoking, for sure. It makes me think about what it means to be punished and isolated; the role of social systems and support, the way there is no turning back for some outcasts in our society. I didn't think I would find myself wanting things to get better for a sex offender, but by virtue of his crime being uncommitted, in a sense, i had permission to have more compassion for the protagonist.

In terms of the plot - very unusual series of events that helped reconnect The Kid with his own humanity and sense of self, even if that is to be in the shadows. I also found the lack of names for all the main characters to be an interesting device. The Kid, the Professor, The Wife, the Writer...in some ways they were archetypal more than individual. At first it was annoying to me, but as the layers deepened for these characters, I found it worked.

So, a compelling read that got me thinking about an uncomfortable subject. Recommended. ( )

A rare book that combines legal ostracism iwith an existential setting. The reader, although (hopefully) not identifying with the main character, can easily develop some empathy with him, despite never even knowing his real name. this book does give rise to a small question which I must google: does an electronic ankle transmitter work after being submerged? ( )

This starts out as a very interesting novel, from the point of view of a convicted sex offender who lives under a causeway with other convicted sex offenders. Unfortunately, the novel eventually becomes murky in a melodramatic way which detracted, for me, from some of the insights Banks has his protagonist realize. Interesting to read but ultimately unconvincing because of the plot twists. ( )

My review of A Memory of Skin floated in rough draft on my computer for several months after I finished reading the novel. The novel was my first exposure to Russell Banks. I saw the movie based on The Sweet Hereafter and I understood that he had a committed following who praised his explorations of uncomfortable social themes but I had never read any of his novels until A Memory of Skin. I did enjoy that first exposure.

Banks can write exceedingly well. There is an easy fluidity to his style that moves the reader effortlessly and rapidly through the pages. The descriptions are smooth and unencumbered with hindering excesses: they are typically numerous linked ideas shot forward in rapid-fire clauses or sentences. Here an example from early on in the novel when Banks is telling the readers something of the Kid’s parentage:

His mother’s name is Adele and she was not married to the Kid’s biological father who was a roofer who drove his pickup down from the North for work after one of the bigger hurricanes and was a sort of boyfriend for a few months but when she got pregnant with the Kid the roofer moved back to Somerville, Massachusetts, where he was from originally. She told the Kid his father’s name and not much else because there wasn’t much else to tell or so she said. Except that he was a short good-looking Irishman and had a funny accent and drank too much.

In Lost Memory of Skin the reader does not need to probe beneath the surface of the words as one often needs to do with, for example, Hemingway, nor does the reader need to struggle with a stylistic sophistication that requires profound attentiveness with, for example, a Cormac McCarthy in his early works.

It was not his writing that stalled my written reflections of the book. Rather what got me stuck was the sense I got from other readers that the book’s controlling theme was the world of homeless sex offenders.

Certainly Banks touches that world. His main character has been convicted of solicitation of a minor and is forced to live isolated from the community-at-large and to wear a GPS ankle bracelet continually tracking his where-a-bouts. And besides the main character of the novel, we meet several other convicted offenders living in forced isolation.

While all that is true, the novel itself, at least for me, was less about a community of sex offenders than about one individual: the Kid. The Kid—the novel’s main character whom Banks identifies only as “the Kid”, a simplification we will learn of his probable last name “Kidd”—is fully three-dimensional. We see him as a unique figure of flesh and blood, a modern-day marginalized child enveloped in both shame and guilt. He is a 22 year old disconnected loner who, in Bank’s rendering, emerges almost as one icon of the American marketplace that is systematically engaged with the commercialization and glorification of sex and youth. Raised without a father and with an emotionally absent but sexually promiscuous mother, the Kid’s only friends as he matured were an iguana and a computer. The former he fed and housed; the latter was a portal to online pornography and his addiction:

When he sat down and booted up the computer and mouse-clicked his way straight to the porn sites he favored he could feel and almost hear a corresponding series of clicks in his brain. A warm spot would emerge at the back of his skull and spread up over the top of his head until he felt like he was wearing a heated cap.

Before his conviction for solicitation of an under-aged girl, he had a short stint in the military from which he was discharged for distributing pornography to his fellow recruits. When the novel opens, the Kid, having been convicted of soliciting sex with a minor, is living in an ad hoc community populated with other convicted sex offenders. He is living there by judicial edict since it is only one of three places in the book’s fictionalized city where convicted sex offenders can live distant enough (at least 2,500 feet) from under aged youth. He and his companions are, by virtue of their sexual deviation, legally and effectively disengaged from the broader society—segregated from the society at large.

As the novel unfolds, we continue to enlarge our understanding of the Kid as he struggles with his own identity and with his place in the world about him. In a certain sense, the novel is a coming-of-age story: by the end of the work we see the Kid sorting out his own inner demons and coming to grips with both his present and his future:

There’s a difference between shame and guilt. And the Kid has begun to realize that he’s not ashamed of having spent most of his life so far watching pornography and using it to give himself orgasms: he’s not a bad person, he knows that much, and being a bad person is what makes you feel shame. No, he’s guilty instead because that’s what you are if you do a bad thing.

For me, the Kid with his struggles was the core of the book. But Banks introduced a second major character, named on the “Professor,” who was more an unwelcomed distraction or intrusion than an attribute to the Kid’s story.

The Professor stumbles into the novel with an academic interest. He sees the Kid as a subject through which he can explore his professional interest in an aspect of homelessness. And the character does serve, particularly in the first part of the novel, as one vehicle for fleshing out the reader’s view of the Kid. But Banks also gives the Professor a back story and a mystery that, as they play out in the latter part of the book, seem an unnecessary detour from the primary thrust of the novel.

In spite of what seems to me some difficulty with the plot’s structure, Banks does take his reader into a life—that of the Kid—that is not often experienced or seen. It is a life that emerges from one American, urban community without roots or grounded morality. It is certainly a view of on person’s inner life that is greatly unsettling and that does not make A Memory of Skin an easy read.
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Surprisingly engrossing read. ( )