Lost Memory of Skin

by Russell Banks

The author of Continental Drift , Rule of the Bone and The Sweet Hereafter returns with a very original, riveting mystery about a young outcast, and a contemporary tale of guilt and redemption.

The perfect convergence of writer and subject, Lost Memory of Skin probes the zeitgeist of a troubled society where zero tolerance has erased any hope of subtlety and compassion. Suspended in a modern-day version of limbo, the young man at the centre of Russell Banks's uncompromising and morally complex new novel must create a life for himself in the wake of incarceration. Known in his new identity only as the Kid, he is shackled to a GPS monitoring device and forbidden to go near where children might gather. He takes up residence under a south Florida causeway, in a makeshift encampment with other convicted sex offenders.

Barely beyond childhood himself, the Kid, despite his crime, is in many ways an innocent. Enter the Professor, a university sociologist of enormous size and intellect who finds in the Kid the perfect subject for his research. But when the Professor's past resurfaces and threatens to destroy his carefully constructed world, the balance in the two men's relationship shifts. Banks has long been one of our most acute and insightful novelists. Lost Memory of Skin is a masterful work of fiction that unfolds in language both powerful and beautifully lyrical.

Genres: Fiction, Book Club, Literature, Contemporary, Novels, Literary Fiction, Audiobook

416 pages, Hardcover

First published September 27, 2011

About the author

Russell Banks was a member of the International Parliament of Writers and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into twenty languages and has received numerous international prizes and awards. He has written fiction, and more recently, non-fiction, with Dreaming up America. His main works include the novels Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, Cloudsplitter, The Sweet Hereafter, and Affliction. The latter two novels were each made into feature films in 1997.

Reviews

[Will Byrnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1952 Ralph Ellison's seminal novel, Invisible Man, was published. No, not the one that was made into a film with Claude Raines. Ellison's Invisible Man was about how the black man in America was invisible to the wider culture. His towering novel looked at a very troubling aspect of mid-20th century America. Russell Banks has cast a bright light on a segment of our society that 21st Century America not only wants to remain invisible, but which it is actively trying to erase.


Russell Banks - image from the Barclay agency

The Kid lives under the Causeway in a coastal Florida city. He is 22 years old, small, unambitious, and largely destroyed. His knowledge of his father was no more than a snippet of conversation. The Kid was raised by a mother who engaged in serial relationships. He saw far too much of her at-home activities, and was home far too often unattended. Always small for his age, he was a bully-target and lacked sufficient self-esteem to form much by way of friendships. So, a loner. What he found himself doing to pass the time and, in a drug-like way, to numb the pain of his existence, was to watch porn. When Mom made no objection to his using her money to pay for his essential entertainment, damage was ensured. Eager to finally meet someone real, he looks on Craig's list and enters into an ongoing on-line exchange with a girl a few years his junior. When he finally comes to her house, he is met by the police and his life, at 18, is effectively over.

There are plenty of sex offenders in the world. Some are dangerous. Some are not. Some are tarred with this brush for thoughtlessly urinating in a public place. We might as well cancel the St Paddy’s Day parade. There are criminals of many sorts who serve their time, spend a period on parole, and eventually find their way back to some semblance of a normal life. But for those labeled sex offenders, punishment almost never ends. Even after being released from prison, they are placed on public lists and are subject to limitations that require them to remain specified distances from places where children do or may congregate. The result is that they have become 21st century lepers, relegated to locations at the fringes of society, unable to use public libraries, unable to even exist within large swaths of the territory of the modern world. Political predators who feed on public fear seek favor with the voters by targeting sex offenders, regardless of the expected efficacy of their actions. That is addressed here as well.

Banks looks at the world that the Kid inhabits. A community of offenders comes together in one of the few locations within the fictional city of Calusa, Florida where they can be without violating the law. Enter the Professor, also nameless. He is our window into this world, a sociologist doing research on homeless offenders. He patiently forms a friendship with the Kid, intending to use him for his research, but offering assistance along the way. He comes to care for the young man.

The kid reminds the Professor of Huckleberry Finn somehow. Here he is now, long after he lit out for the Territory, grown older and as deep into the Territory as you can go, camped out alone where the continent and all the rivers meet the sea and there’s no farther place he can run to. The Professor wants to know what happened to that ignorant, abused, honest American boy between the end of the book and now. After he ran from Aunt Sally and her “civilisin,” how did he come years later to having “no money, no job, no legal squat”?

But the Professor has issues of his own. He is a huge man of maybe five hundred pounds, and spends long hours feeding his own addiction, eating. While society may regard his addiction with increasing disdain, no one suggests that fat people be shunned into leper colonies at the edges of town. The Professor has some rather darker secrets as well, which play into the final stages of the book. I will not reveal that info here, but the fact that he has a secret past helps link the Professor thematically with those he is researching.

When my youngest was still in elementary school, I often came along on class outings, usually on foot, trying desperately to keep up with the teachers who all seemed to me to be in training for the marathon. I suppose the pace makes it tougher for eight, nine or ten-year-olds to wander from the assigned route. On one such outing, we walked from a subway station in Brooklyn onto the Brooklyn Bridge. En route, we passed a bus stop which had on its side a larger-than-life-size image of a young, scantily clad female, an inducement to buying some product, underwear, beauty product, goat cheese, something. As we passed this, one cheery young boy turned to me and said “I bet you’d like to tap that, huh Mister Byrnes.” I was horrified. But ours is a culture that worships at the holy altar of profit and if getting from product to profit means coarsening the culture, even to the point of publicly exposing passing children to salacious images, just do it. Sexual content is pervasive in daily life. Billboards show models that have to be considered jail-bait primping about in all manner of undress. And don’t get me started on Brats dolls.

When a society commodifies its children by making them into a consumer group, dehumanizing them by converting them into a crucial, locked–in segment of the economy, and then proceeds to eroticize its products in order to sell them, the children gradually come to be perceived by the rest of the community and by the children themselves as sexual objects. And on the ladder of power, where power is construed sexually instead of economically, the children end up at the bottom rung.

I do not want to give the impression that this is a bloodless lecture on a social issue. Banks is a great novelist and he has given us relatable characters. The Professor struggles with his secrets and addictions. The Kid recognizes that he has done something wrong, but finds some light, instead of succumbing to the sort of dark depression that anyone in such a situation might experience. There are some fog-thin background characters, and some who step a bit out of that mist into further clarity, but the humanity of the Kid and the Professor are primary. There are even non-human characters who work incredibly well as emotional foils. Iggy is the Kid’s rather large pet iguana and bff. Later Einstein, a parrot with a few pretty good lines and Annie an elderly dog add to the warmth factor.

Banks displays his gift for imagery and description as well. He makes use of the local climate as an outward expression of plot and internal character conflict, but offers a wink and nod to the reader while doing so.

The eye of the hurricane: it’s a metaphor for the mental and emotional space where he’s lived most of his life. He thinks this and smiles inwardly. Never quite thought of it that way. Nice, the way the world that surrounds one, the very weather of one’s existence, provides a language for addressing the world inside.

Our secrets and lies make for us a skin to protect our inner selves from the world. What happens when that skin is perforated, or removed? Are we freed or endangered? And what is the truth anyway? The book takes a bit of an existential turn. A new character, the Writer, is introduced late in the game to insert the author into the story. A conversation between the Kid and the Writer embodies this.

If everything’s a lie and nothing’s true like you said, then it doesn’t matter if the Professor’s story is bullshit, right? Is that what you’re saying?
What you believe matters, however. It’s all anyone has to act on. And since what you do is who you are, your actions define you. If you don’t believe anything is true simply because you can’t logically prove what’s true, you won’t do anything. You’ll end up spending your life in a rocking chair looking out at the horizon waiting for an answer that never comes. You might as well be dead. It’s an old philosophical problem.

Early on, the Professor uses a treasure map to inspire the Kid, and the inspiration is drawn from belief, not from the reliability of the map. While I take Banks’ point that belief can go a long way toward inspiring one to success, that opens access to a very slippery slope. Not all beliefs are equal, and many are downright dangerous. Putting the contrast between a faith-based worldview and a scientific one in such black and white terms, with the corresponding judgment, is insulting and dangerous. It offers sustenance to those who would seek to inflict their personal beliefs on people who do not share them. There is plenty of room for both science and feeling in this world.

There is a bit of fun to be had with imagery. A giant python crossing a road could easily have Eden-ic implications, but while there are dark and dangerous aspects of life that thoughtless people have inflicted on us all, those on a literary treasure hunt will mostly go home unsatisfied.

I expect that Lost Memory of Skin will not be kindly received in some quarters. The subject matter might make some folks uncomfortable. Good. It should make people uncomfortable enough to take a fresh look at what is largely a very limited view of people who have been painted, en masse, with the same scarlet brush. Like a pointillist image there are enough elements that make up our image of what society calls “sex offenders” to warrant a closer look at what the term actually means.

UPDATES/LINKS

May 15, 2012 - Switterbug recommended this August, 2011 NY Times article on Sex Offenders as the Last Pariahs in her comment and has ok'd my adding it here

My review of Banks' 2013 short story collection A Permanent Member of the Family

[Orsodimondo · Rating 2 out of 5]

PECCATO


Kid non è alto, mingherlino, sembra più giovane dei suoi ventidue anni. Il professore è un omone obeso grande e grosso.

Le intenzioni sono buone, anzi ottime. Le migliori.
La realizzazione meno, il risultato mi ha lasciato alquanto a desiderare.
Mi spiego meglio.

Russell Banks continua a cantare l’America degli emarginati, quei figli di un dio minore senza istruzione, con famiglie disastrate, abitazioni che sono spesso roulotte, quando non si vive direttamente per strada, o in una specie di tenda sotto un viadotto come succede qui.


Una iguana maschio è il miglior amico di Kid.

E come non percepire la migliore tradizione americana, quella letteratura che ha fatto sognare intere generazioni e continenti: Bone, del precedente Rule of the Bone – La legge di Bone, e Kid, questo suo fratello altrettanto randagio, maggiore di Bone anche se mentalmente e caratterialmente forse invece fratello minore. Sono entrambi fratelli di Huckleberry Finn (figli? nipotini?).
E qui, nel sogno di Kidd sul tesoro nascosto dal pirata, si ritrova anche quel capolavoro del grande Stevenson (sì, d’accordo, Stevenson è inglese, anzi scozzese, non americano: ma la lingua è la stessa) intitolato Treasure Island.


I condannati per reati sessuali in libertà vigilata finiscono col vivere accampati sotto un viadotto.

E poi gli Stati Uniti d’America, dove, Banks ci racconta e dimostra, la prima e più importante forma d’esistenza è quella in veste di consumatore, prima ancora che essere umano. L’umanità è sparita risucchiata dallo schermo di un computer, internet ha inghiottito tutti, e il porno, la principale attivata del e sul web, ha reso tutti più soli spenti e isolati.
E la società a stelle-e-strisce è ancora più perversa, non si limita a creare consumatori prima che uomini, oggetti prima che individui. È una società che ha indotto i propri figli, nel senso di bambini, a diventare schiavi del porno online, bombardandoli con immagini dalla forte impronta sessuale, meglio dire pornografica, anche nella più banale pubblicità.
Ma nello stesso tempo è una società che ha paura, una società sessuofoba, che prima crea lo spettatore porno dipendente e poi lo punisce, lo isola, lo rende un paria, senza fare distinzione tra l’esibizionista, lo stupratore e il pedofilo.


Il romanzo è ambientato nella Florida del sud tra mangrovie, canali, isole e isolotti, acquitrini, baia e golfo.

Cominciando da questo poco più che ventenne, per tutti Kid, che è ancora vergine, ma ha passato giornate intere a guardare siti porno, otto-dieci ore al giorno, principale, se non unica attività. È ancora vergine ma accusato, condannato, punito, ex galeotto col bracciale elettronico alla caviglia, colpevole di un reato sessuale, che da vergine che non ha mai baciato nessuno, da persona non violenta e amante degli animali, sembra molto difficile possa avere davvero compiuto.

Una società che ha abbandonato i propri bambini è una società che non ha più anima, diceva in The Sweet Hereafter – Il dolce domani, e qui in altre parole lo ribadisce, lo dimostra di nuovo.



Fin qui la mia pars costruens di lettore affezionato a Banks.
Ora passo a quella destruens di lettore deluso da questo specifico Banks.

Qualcuno definisce questo libro potenzialmente disturbante e disgustoso perché si parla di reati sessuali, di pedofilia, di pornografia. Per me, nessun disturbo e nessun disgusto: piuttosto, sbadigli, noia, e domanda mentale sul tipo “ma perché sto leggendo ‘sta roba? Che me ne importa?”
Dal mio punto di vista è sbagliato l’approccio di Banks, il suo modo di trattare i due personaggi, il giovane reietto Kid e il Professore, la figura paterna di rito, il Long John Silver di turno. Troppa distanza. Non ci porta mai dentro. Restiamo sempre fuori dall’animo, i pensieri, i sentimenti, le emozioni sia di Kid che del Professore.



Pensavano fosse un sempliciotto. Anche un po’ ritardato, quantomeno borderline. Si comportava così da sempre, a scuola, al negozio di luci e nell’esercito. Fino alla sera in cui aveva preso l’iniziativa di fare l’autostop fino a Ottawa per vedere Willow, la sua pornostar preferita, e aveva portato in caserma tutti quei dvd per regalarli ai suoi commilitoni. Che errore madornale! Dopo quell’unica iniziativa, quell’unica volta in cui aveva smesso i panni del ragazzo docile e compiacente, era subito tornato alla sua solita e consolidata personalità, come una tartaruga nel carapace.È difficile penetrare nel punto di vista di un essere umano simile se lo scrittore non aiuta il lettore. Se chi scrive adotta un affettuoso tono scherzoso qua e là dileggiante, io lettore sono portato a non percepire l’umanità dei personaggi, a considerarli schemi, teoremi, paradigmi, ma non persone.



Anche nell’aspetto fisico sembra che Banks voglia prendere le distanze dai suoi personaggi: perché mai sceglierne due con caratteristiche somatiche così accentuate, due fisicamente così eccentrici?
E intanto le pagine passano, e si aggiungono, e le quattrocentoquindici finali sono davvero tante, in più punti non indispensabili.


L’ottimo Kevin Bacon in un bel film che parla di pedofilia in modo non banale: “The Woodsman – Il segreto”.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Posted at Shelf Inflicted

Before reading this book, I never bothered looking at the National Sex Offender Registry. Maybe it’s because I don’t have children, or I don’t care to know that much about my neighbors, or I have my doubts that all the people listed are truly dangerous. Now that I’ve finished the book, I decided to go have a look. First, I found all 8 sex offenders in my area. After studying their faces closely, noting where they lived and how old they were, I looked at sexual offenders in other neighborhoods I’ve lived in and some from random locations. There were even a few women on the list. What in the world did these people actually do to get themselves in such a horrible predicament?

There are lots of very bad people out there who should be behind bars for a long time. But most criminals – murderers, drug dealers, wife-beaters, gangsters, arsonists, burglars – regardless of the crime, serve a portion of or their entire sentence and are then free to live their lives, trying to blend into society, often without their neighbors knowing a thing about their past. Sexual offenders, after serving their time, must continue to endure public humiliation, making it very difficult to find a decent job or a place to live. There are vicious sexual predators and psychopaths out there, and the need to protect a person’s privacy must be weighed against the need for public safety. But not all sexual offenders are a danger to society. The young man who sleeps with a precocious girl who lied about her age, the guy who leaves the pub and gets caught urinating in a public park, the guy who takes upskirt photos with his cell phone, the teenager who sleeps with a younger teen. The peeping tom. And let’s not forget those who were falsely accused. Some of these crimes are creepy, others are just the result of poor judgment. Should these minor offenders be treated the same way as violent criminals who are likely to commit crimes again? Therein lies my problem with the National Sex Offender Registry. The definition of sexual offender is way too broad and lots of innocent people are suffering unnecessarily because of dumb mistakes. While we are busy protecting our children from people who may not pose a danger to them at all, we are not knowledgeable of the possible danger from the neighbor who was arrested for dealing drugs or the alcoholic who habitually drives drunk.

It was very easy for me to feel sorry for the Kid. His father left while his mom was pregnant with him. His mom, busy with her boyfriends, mostly left the Kid to his own devices, even ignoring his developing addiction to porn. He’s always been a loner, never had a girlfriend or any close friends for that matter, other than his pet iguana, Iggy. He joined the army, and then got discharged while he was in basic training for distributing porn films to his buddies. He’s tired of porn and wants someone real. He chats up a girl on the internet and they make plans to meet. Now, the Kid is living under a highway with other convicted sex offenders. He’s done his time, but his identity is public and his activities are monitored. In Florida, he is restricted from living 2,500 feet from where children are. So that doesn’t leave him many options.

Enter the Professor, a grossly overweight sociologist, and a man with his own secrets. He wants to interview the Kid for his research on homeless sex offenders. They form a tentative bond and gradually learn more about each other. The Kid remains reclusive, distrustful of others, with no plans for a future. The Professor shows him another way to live, while providing the basics he needs for his existence. He does, however, care very much for the animals he is now responsible for, an older dog and a parrot with damaged wings. For the first time in his life, the Kid begins to think better about himself and sees there are possibilities.

I’m in awe of Banks’ ability as a writer to make me feel for such undesirable characters, some who have no doubt committed horrible crimes, others just guilty of making bad choices. I spent some time studying sex offenders in my sociology and criminal justice classes and once the classes were over, the subject got forgotten. This book highlights a problem that should be addressed in a more humane way, without sacrificing public safety and at the same time allowing the offender to have an opportunity for rehabilitation and a chance to live a normal life. It is thought-provoking, no matter how you feel about the rights of sex offenders. For many reasons, this is a difficult subject to explore, and I felt Russell Banks pulled it off admirably. I look forward to reading more of his work.

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 5 out of 5]

The main character of Banks’ new novel, a twenty-two-year-old registered sex offender in South Florida known only as “the Kid,” may initially repel readers. The Kid is recently out of jail and on ten-year probation in fictional Calusa County, and is required to wear a GPS after soliciting sex from an underage girl. Ironically, he is still a virgin.

The Kid cannot leave the county, but he also cannot reside within 2,500 feet from any place children would congregate. That leaves three options—the swamplands, the airport area, or the Causeway. He chooses the Causeway and meets other sex offenders, a seriously motley crew, who consciously isolate from each other. He befriends one old man, the Rabbit, but sticks to his tent, his bicycle, and his alligator-size pet iguana, Iggy. Later, he procures a Bible.

These disenfranchised convicts are enough to make readers squirm. Moreover, in the back of the reader’s mind is the question of whether authorial intrusion will be employed in an attempt to manipulate the reader into sympathizing with these outcasts. It takes a master storyteller, one who can circumnavigate the ick factor, or, rather, subsume it into a morally complex and irresistible reading experience, to lure the wary, veteran reader.

Banks’ artful narrative eases us in slowly and deftly breaks down resistance, piercing the wall of repugnance. It infiltrates bias, reinforced by social bias, and allows you to eclipse antipathy and enter the sphere of the damned. A willing reader ultimately discovers a captivating story, and reaches a crest of understanding for one young man without needing to accept him.

An illegal police raid on the Causeway, provoked by hatred and politics, disrupts the Kid’s relatively peaceful life early on, and now he has nowhere to turn. Subsequently, a hurricane wipes out the makeshift homes of the inhabitants. The kid becomes a migrant, shuffling within the legal radius of permitted locales. At about this time, he meets the Professor, who the Kid calls “Haystack,” an obese sociologist at the local university who is the size and intellect of a mountain, an enigmatic man with a past of shady government work and espionage. He is conducting a study of homelessness and particularly the homeless, convicted sex offender population.

The Professor offers the Kid financial and practical assistance in exchange for a series of taped interviews. He aims to help the Kid gain control and understanding over his life, to empower him to move beyond his pedophilia. They form a partnership of sorts, but the Kid remains leery of the Professor and his agenda. The Professor’s opaque past, his admitted secrets and lies, marks him as an unreliable narrator. Or does it? Later, perilous developments radically alter their relationship, a fitting move on the author’s part that provides sharp contrasts and deeper characterization.

Sex offenders are the criminal group most collectivized into one category of “monsters.” Banks takes a monster and probes below the surface of reflexive response. There is no attempt to defend the Kid’s crime or apologize for it. We see a lot of the events through his eyes, and decide whether he is reliable or not.

He acquires an undernourished, skulking yellow dog and a crusty old grey parrot with clipped wings and a salty tongue. His relationship with these animals is rendered without a lick of sentimentality, but it bestows the most resonant and powerful feelings in the reader compared to anywhere else in the book. The care and feeding of dependents bring out the Kid’s protective instincts and help keep him focused.

The book is divided into five parts. Along the way, Banks dips into rhetorical digressions on sex, pornography, geography, and human nature, slowing down the momentum and disengaging the tension. These intervals are formal and stiff, although they are eventually braided into the story at large. However, despite these static flourishes, the story progresses with confidence and strength.

Most characters, whether stand-up citizens or sex offenders, have a moniker, which deliberately mechanizes them, but between the author and reader, humanization occurs between the pages. There’s Shyster, the pedophilic, disbarred lawyer and ex-Senator; Otis, the Rabbit, an elderly, disabled member of the tribe; and a Hemingway-esque character, the Writer, who incidentally resembles Banks himself; and others who personify their names.

Overall, the languid pace of the novel requires steadfast patience, but commitment to it has a fine payoff. Readers are rewarded with a thrilling denouement and a pensive but provocative ending. It inspires contemplation and dynamic discussion, and makes you think utterly outside the box.

Read my full review on http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/2... (mostlyfiction.com)

[Larry Bassett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not quite 10 years later I finished listening to this book in the audible version after I read it normally as a paper book previously. Last time I decided to give it four stars instead of five. This time I decided to give it four stars instead of three. I don’t think I can explain the reason for the difference of my perspective. One reason is probably because 10 years later the only thing I could remember about this book is that it was an attempt to provide a relatively sympathetic view of People we generally consider unsympathetic and hopeless: sexual predators. I think the book was successful in trying to portray these people as just that - people. But I think it failed to give us any hope that we are moving in the direction of understanding this disability and finding ways to deal with it other than attaching electronic bracelets and forcing them to live in horrible circumstances. The range between sympathy and hope is extraordinarily wide yesterday and today and apparently tomorrow. I am disappointed that in a decade I had so little recollection of substantial parts of this story. I certainly need to take the majority of the responsibility for that failure. But I need to take the author to task for at least some portion of it.

***************
I like books that deal with social issues. Lost Memory of Skin did that with a topic that is not common in current fiction but is a significant but mostly hidden issue: homeless convicted sex offenders. It humanizes people who are most commonly reviled and helps us realize that this is our problem and not just theirs and may have something to say about our development of relationships in this computer and digital age.

This book includes a tour of a place where convicted sex offenders live for lack of any other place. It’s under the deck of a causeway in a fictionalized barrier island area on the southern Atlantic coast, most likely the Miami region. But it’s more than a tour. You actually spend some time there. One of the residents has a gasoline powered generator the residents pay to use so they can recharge the batteries on their ankle GPS monitors and their cell phones. The protagonist has a six foot long iguana that lives with him chained to a cinder block. That’s the iguana on the cover of the book!

So, yes, it is a strange book. Russell Banks gives us a sympathetic portrayal of a twenty-two year old sex offender living on the margins of society. In the book he is called the Kid, and you will like him or at least come to understand something about him. And you will like his iguana, Iggy. This might be seen as a book for bleeding heart liberals: You can see all the reasons why the Kid became the person that he is as a result of how he grew up. At least what Russell Banks imagines are the reasons.

Lost Memory of Skin is an education. You will be surprised at how much you want to know about homeless convicted sex offenders. It made me want to read more by Russell Banks. This is my first. But, to coin a phrase, it won’t be my last.

The Professor is the other major character in the book. An instructor at a nearby university, he is “maybe the smartest man in the state” and weighs, the book says, a quarter of a ton. The Professor is about as strange as the Kid with his gargantuan size and world view. You know there is something not right about him and Banks keeps you waiting for that weak link to appear.

This is bleak stuff, with flashes of humor that land like sparks on dry grass, and also pretty fascinating. A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, Banks may be the most compassionate fiction writer working today, and the Kid is only his most recent lens into the souls of seemingly decent men who do terribly indecent things out of ignorance, thirst and desperation in a deeply uncaring world. Balancing impressively on a moral tightrope, Banks never absolves the Kid of his actions even as he sympathizes with him. Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/boo...

Can we imagine a sex offender struggling with a moral dilemma? I saw this book, probably in a B&N online ad, and bought it. Homelessness has been a topic of interest for me for many years. Perverts seemed an unlikely attraction but Russell Banks got good marks and I had never read anything by him. As often happens, the book sat on my TBR shelf for a while. I am glad that I finally got to it.

This is one of those books where the characters have no names: The Kid, The Professor, The Writer, The Wife. The Jose Saramago books Seeing and Blindness similarly have no names, just titles. And then there is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I will have to look into this aspect of writing to find its origin and intent. I note that until recently these authors had no name to me since I had not heard of them. What bridge was I living under? Goodreads has brought me out into the sunlight of so many authors previously unknown to me.

It is a thought provoking book. It stirs things up. Its effort to be a spy book was weak and only detracted slightly from the overall impact. John Le Carre, your place in literary history is not challenged by Russell Banks. While dealing with online pornography, the book will satisfy no prurient interests. But it will give you a firsthand view of the issue, an addiction and disability that harms both victims and perpetrators. Sexual deviants and predators are often placed in the incurable category. This is an attitude that Russell Banks encourages us to reexamine.

I come very close to giving Lost Memory of Skin five stars. However, it will have to be satisfied with four. I expect to read additional Russell Banks’ works and look forward to judging the current work in the context of his larger body of writing. I have some things to learn from him.

[Robert · Rating 2 out of 5]

What is wrong with the world out there? This dreadful, pretentious, simple-minded, badly structured, cliche-ridden book was not only recommended to me by my shrink (and that's *really* worrying) but it was reviewed by the NY Times thus: "Banks may be the most compassionate fiction writer working today ... Banks remains our premier chronicler of the doomed and forgotten American male ... 'Lost Memory of Skin' is a major new work by Russell Banks destined to be a canonical novel of its time."

OK, both the Times reviewers noted that the book was not without its faults, but even to have taken this airport novel trash seriously is absurd. The central characters are all referred to by (presumably would-be existential-ish) titles, the Kid, the Professor, the Wife, and - hilariously - the Writer. None of them is treated to any serious character development and all suffer from profound unintentional inconsistencies. The Writer is only dragged in on page 350 to tie things up like the brilliant detective at the end of a crime novel.

A few other bits of nonsense: the Professor drives most of the way from Calusa (a thinly disguised Miami) around the Gulf Coast to somewhere in Alabama and back in the eye of a hurricane - it conveniently shifts direction as he does; on a single page the Kid is supposed to understand a reference to the leeches in The African Queen but doesn't understand that Brown is a university; one of the characters who lives under the freeway (which can only be accessed by a steep muddy pathway) keeps his Harley Davidson down there.

The author attempts psychology, sociology, academic theory, and moral philosophy. All are handled with the same superficiality.

A very bad book indeed.

[Kathrina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything I want to say about this book feels more like a defense than a review, and I don't want to go that road. For some reason, maybe it's my several years working with sex offenders in a prison book group, watching them empathize and identify with the same characters I empathize and identify with, or it's the injustices I've researched in offender and ex-offender access barriers to information and resources that can help rebuild their lives, and the intentional structure of our society that feels justified in removing all possibilities of forging a successful future for some at the expense of us all, but this is more than a novel to me, it lives deep under my skin, and I cringe when I read some of the naive, boorish reviews here by readers unwilling to step away from their telescope sight. This book tells us explicitly -- you can never know another -- all their secrets and lies they tell you and themselves -- no one is who they appear to be, for better or for worse and mostly evenly both, and no one stays the same. Your judgement is an interpretation, and we believe in what supports our own stories of ourselves. If I believe I have three dimensions, I may begin to actually take up space, and not apologize for doing so.

[Andrew · Rating 1 out of 5]

Does anyone else think this writer's style is awful? My brain gets tired following the rambling, run-on sentences. The book has an interesting premise, but I am not about to endure 400 pages of sentences like this one:

"But he hasn't spoken to any of them not even his mother in over a year and whenever he accidentally on the street spots somebody he once knew slightly from school or from hanging out at the mall in the old days or his job at the light store before he enlisted in the army which happens every now and then even though he never visits his old neighborhood anymore he stares straight ahead and keeps pedaling or if on foot cuts across the street or just turns on his heels and walks the other way."

Diagramming that sentence is one difficultly level below the Sarah Palin challenge. I assume that the writer is trying to convey something about the main characters young and inexperienced thought process and point of view, but it ends up just dragging the reader down.

[Gerhard · Rating 4 out of 5]

SF has long grappled with the dehumanising impact of the Internet -- you just have to recall the 'meat' from Gibson's Neuromancer. JG Ballard also wrote often about the 'death of affect', in how technology not only estranges us from our essential humanity, but sets loose our moral compass. The NY Times review of Skin breathlessly called the book 'canonical', conveniently forgetting such antecedents. What I found more impressive and troubling about Skin was its impassioned account of the consequences and implications of sex-offender legislation, definition and rehabilitation in the US. Apparently Calusa is a fictional city, but the '2,500 feet' law did (does?) exist in Miami-Dae county, according to one review. I think the book could have done with an Afterword explaining a bit about the actual legal situation and social impact.

[jo · Rating 2 out of 5]

i have read books by russell banks that i have liked a lot -- i have a tremendously fond memory of Rule of the Bone and Continental Drift and his book about liberia, The Darling, certainly has value -- it's a pretty brutal look at liberia's terrible history of massacres, though i'm always a bit wary of books about africa's wounds written by first worlders.

still.

this book would get 5 stars solely for the fact that it focuses on the horrible plight of convicted sex offenders, a violation of human rights so blatant it makes your stomach hurt. since almost no one knows what paroled sex offenders must go through, i recommend the book just so that folks might learn what we as a society do -- the human sacrifices we require -- in the name of our fantasy of "wholesomeness." sex is the ultimate canary in the coalmine. if you are following the republican primaries you know what i am talking about. never mind poverty, third-world-level education, perennial wars, lack of basic healthcare. it's the sex lives of americans who determine whether we are a good or a bad nation. end of debate.

so, sex offenders, alone among felons, enjoy the privilege of being banned from the proximity of children for a ridiculous amount of years after completion of their sentence, and of being on the sex offender registry for the rest of their lives. to qualify as a sex offenders it is enough to be, say, a 19 year old who had sex with his 17 year old girlfriend, or to have been caught with your dick in your hand in a public place (say you were talking a piss; say you are homeless; say you got very very unlucky). i kid you not.

in miami, where this book is set, sex offenders used to have (for all i know still have) only three places in which they could live. every other spot on the map was within the prohibited 2,500 ft from a school, playground, homeless shelter etc. the three places were: 1) under a specific bridge of the julia tuttle causeway 2) at the airport and 3) in the south everglades. since places 2) and 3) were not exactly practicable, this little sex offender city sprouted under the bridge, where these guys lived in tents or makeshift shanties while trying to keep a day job and support themselves. occasionally the police would raid the shanty town for sanitary reasons. it was awful.

the miami herald and other news outlet (google "miami sex offenders") brought this shame to the attention of the public and now the men have been relocated. i should know where but i don't. i'm sure it's not much better.

so this is the subject of this book. the protagonist, known only as the Kid, is a very shy 22 year old who grew up in a dismally neglectful family and developed an addiction to porn (banks has theory about why people develop “perverse” sexual desires). one day, trying to overcome his almost total isolation, arranged to hook up with a 14 year old he had met online. father called the police, end of story. the Kid is now entirely uninterested in sex and wholly interested in making it through the day. he's also so internalized the sex offender label that he could not perceive himself as anything else.

etc. etc. there is a story but it's a lame story and the book drags. i didn't even understand how it ended. i'm talking about the last 4 lines. i don't get them.

so, not a spectacular literary effort, but clearly banks cares about these guys and spends some serious effort trying to make the reader understand what goes on in the mind of the sex offender and what goes on in the society who punishes him so harshly.

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Russell Banks’ Lost Memory of Skin is a very, very good book that’s very, very hard to like. Actually, I take that back. It’s easy to like if you’re a reader who accepts that protagonists can be flawed, possibly beyond redemption. If you’re a fan of Banks, you know to expect this. This is, after all, the same guy who’s made a career of trafficking in problematic characters – from militant abolitionist John Brown (Cloudsplitter) to an opportunistic lawyer and incestuous father (The Sweet Hereafter) to a perpetually angry drunk (Affliction). So when it becomes clear that the main character in Lost Memory of Skin is a convicted sex offender, your attitude will largely depend on how familiar you are with Banks’ work. And even if you’re very familiar, like I am, it’s still going to be one of the most uncomfortable reading experiences you’re likely to have.

The Kid is the book’s anchor, the sex offender we meet in the opening chapter, newly released from prison and nervously going to the public library (a forbidden location) to access the Internet (a forbidden activity) to verify for himself his presence on the National Sex Offender Registry. He’s scared away when his photo pops up on the screen and the librarian recognizes him, and he flees to the Causeway, an area beneath an overpass where local sex offenders have pitched tents and built shanties because it’s one of only three places in the county where they won’t be within 2,500 feet of children. One afternoon he meets the Professor, a morbidly obese academic from the local university who wants to interview the Kid for a research project. It’s the Professor’s hypothesis that sex offenders have only been led to offend because they don’t feel in control of any other aspect of their lives, and they can therefore be redeemed by having some measure of control and success – jobs and responsibilities – that give them the confidence they need to no longer assert their control by preying on the young. Lost Memory of Skin is primarily about the relationship that develops between the Kid and the Professor – friends would be overstating things – and how what begins as a simple interview project develops into a weirdly symbiotic partnership.

The question throughout the book – the problem that the whole thing hinges on – is if the Kid is beyond redemption. Banks wisely withholds the nature of his crime for a while, but I can’t do that here and still talk about what I think is a central theme of the book. So …

HERE BE SPOILERS

Banks makes the Kid more a pitiable character than a reprehensible one, but rather than making things easy on himself this opens up a moral gray area that’s far more satisfying than if the Kid were an obvious bad guy. He’s painted as a neglected child, cared for by a single mother more concerned with finding a man than taking care of her only child. The Kid has no friends and no girlfriend, and almost by accident he stumbles across online pornography. He quickly becomes obsessed, probably addicted, and rather than attempt to forge meaningful relationships with his peers, simply drifts around in a fog of online videos and masturbation. He enlists in the Army but finds himself just as friendless there. In a misguided attempt to force camaraderie on the rest of his platoon, the Kid buys a bunch of pornographic DVDs to hand out, but is busted during inspection and discharged. Back in his mother’s home, he returns to the Internet, and that’s where things get tricky.

The Kid strikes up an online correspondence with a teenage girl. She initially claims to be 18, then admits she’s 14. This begins as an innocent conversation about the Kid’s pet iguana, Iggy, but it slowly escalates over a period of weeks and ultimately becomes more explicit. Eventually the Kid schedules a rendezvous at her home, shows up with a backpack full of beer, porn, and condoms, and is busted by the police in what is clearly a sting to catch sexual predators.

And here’s where Banks has been very canny with what I think is meant to be criticism of these kinds of operations, as well as sex offender laws in general. The escalation to explicitness that I mentioned earlier is initiated and facilitated entirely by the girl, with the Kid playing along only when the girl prompts him. It’s never made clear if there ever was a girl or if the online conversations were with the police all along, so if you’re reading it the way I’m reading it, there’s an argument to be made that the Kid is the real victim in this situation, manipulated into a potential crime by police who preyed on a lonely, depressed individual. Of course the Kid should have never gone to her house (again, assuming there’s a her at all), should have known the difference between right and wrong, should have steered clear altogether. Of course it’s disgusting behavior. But I keep being drawn back to the issue of manipulation. If it was a police operation all along, and the Kid was only going to “her” house because he had been goaded into it by law enforcement, is the Kid really guilty of anything? He certainly never commits a sexual act. As the conversation plays out, he never even propositions the girl. He’s guilty of being a skeezy dude who shows up at a teenage girl’s house with beer and porn, and that’s about it. Gross, yes, but is it worthy of the penalty, which is six months in jail, ten years with a GPS bracelet on his ankle, and a lifetime of stigmatization on the Sex Offender Registry?

I don’t know. Even as I typed some of those sentences it felt indefensible. He went. He had designs. Surely that counts for something. And I think that’s where the Kid is sort of an ingenious creation. He doesn’t give the reader an easy way out, and he also allows us to ask tough questions about some of our country’s legal practices.

FOR THE SPOILER-AVERSE, IT IS NOW SAFE TO READ AGAIN

Also on Banks’ radar are the restrictions placed on the sex offenders in Calusa County (Banks never says Florida by name, but he’s not kidding anyone). They can’t be within 2,500 feet of schools, playgrounds, libraries – anywhere there’s likely to be children. That leaves them with their shantytown under the Causeway, the international terminal at the airport, and the Penzacola Swamp (a stand-in for the Everglades). This restriction lasts for ten years. Do you see the problem with this situation? How easy is it to get a job when your address is the swamp? How likely are you to gain meaningful employment when you’re living in a tent under the highway? In this situation the sex offenders are released straight from prison and into ten years of homelessness, which, let’s face it, after ten years will likely exist into perpetuity. I’m all for making sure offenders pay their debt to society – and in many cases they deserve all they get and more, especially when small children are the victims – but the book makes us ask if this lifetime penalty is appropriate for lesser offenders. Does the Kid deserve his life sentence, based solely on the circumstances? Is he beyond redemption? Banks gives us a definitive answer at the end, but the beauty of this ugly book is that it leaves room for dissent.

There’s more – much, much more – to say. It’s not an easy read. The Kid is not an easy character to like, nor is the Professor (whom I haven’t really discussed at all, but about whom I could easily write another thousand words). But if you want to read something that will make you ask important questions about our society, the importance of community, and the possibility of redemption, Lost Memory of Skin is worth the discomfort.

Read all my reviews at goldstarforrobotboy.net

[K · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hmm. I really did like the premise of this one. Banks takes a young sex offender and makes him sympathetic, giving him a minor offense (one which ends up being largely theoretical when all is said and done) which is understandable in the context of his sad childhood and incredible social isolation and lack of nurturing. The offender, called "the Kid," must take up residence under a causeway together with other offenders who are rendered homeless by restrictions forbidding them to live within a certain radius of places where kids gather. A professor with secrets of his own takes an interest in the Kid and in this situation in general and forms a relationship of sorts with him, only to have this relationship end when the professor's own damaging past catches up with him.

It sounded great on paper and in fact had its moments; unfortunately, reading this 400+ page book was a major slog with not a great deal happening. Although there was a story here, I spent most of my reading time inside the head of one character or another which would have been fine in smaller doses but not as the vast majority of this very long book.

I have a lot of respect for Banks as a writer and was a fan of The Sweet Hereafter; this book, however, needed a more patient reader.

[Betsy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a disturbing book to read because it focuses on the outcasts of today's world: sex offenders. The larger question posed in myriad ways is this, "What do we do with the pariahs of society? Where do they live? How can they live?"

As with Banks's Rule of the Bone, the central character is a young boy, though in this case the Kid is barely in his twenties. His associates are a motley crew who, like him, live under a viaduct. "The Professor" plays the corpulent symbol of the decadence of overabundance, and it is through the device of his research interviews that we learn much about the Kid's background.

Banks excels at making us uncomfortable even while compelling us to read on, and he does that extremely well in this book. His characters are richly drawn, and the action of the book lies not only in the dramatic events that unfold but in the lively internal dialog to which we are privy.

The book is longish, but well worth the time, and the second half really races along.

[Dennis · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me, the primary focus of this book is what to do with convicted sex offenders who have done their time. If you’re not going to kill them or lock them up for life or send them to some mythical place where polite society will never have to gaze on them again, what do you do with them? Since the crime is so abhorrent, it’s no surprise when politicians compete for the most drastic solution, the overreach of which is often more counterproductive than anything – not to mention the overreach in defining what a sex crime is or how dangerous to society the offenders are.

The story is set in Miami and the situation is modeled after Bookville (as the Julia Tuttle Causeway Sex Offenders Colony was known) which existed from 2006-2010. Without going into details, Florida law stated that sex offenders couldn’t reside within 1,000 feet of where “children gather”, such as schools and parks; this left a wider range of places where offenders could be housed, including in their family’s homes in some cases. However, lobbyist Ron Book, who was also responsible for an agency charged with housing the homeless, decided that wasn’t far enough and extended it to 2,500 feet, meaning the only places far enough were Miami-Dade Airport or the underpass of a bridge, the Julia Tuttle Causeway, where the offenders set up a shantytown. (All of this is available by internet, including photos.) In the novel, the names are changed but it’s easily recognizable, and that’s where the protagonist, the Kid, is forced to live.

There is a hierarchy here, depending on type of offense: sex with children, statutory rape, indecent exposure, etc.; however even the latter is fairly arbitrary because indecent exposure could mean, in some localities, public urination (a “crime” which most men in the world have been guilty of at one time or another – I remember a locality which made the definition so broad that men couldn’t even use public restrooms since it’s impossible to use one without being, um, out there.) I also remember reading of a young woman who was convicted of indecent exposure for mooning the home of the school principal from a moving car. Legislative overreach at its finest.

There are two protagonists in the book, the first of which is the Kid, a convicted sex offender who is in a sense our guide to the whole chain, from how he became a sex offender – he didn’t have physical contact with his “victim” as his entire sexual history is via internet where he became addicted to porn – and if any sex offender can evoke comprehension and compassion, it would be him. In the grand tradition of Russell Banks characters, he is the typical fuck-up, someone whose only exit from any problem is to make it worse for himself through his attempts to solve it. His mother shows no interest in him, only in pursuing a series of losers as lovers, and his father is unknown, even to the mother. He’s a misfit whose only friend is his pet iguana and who loses himself in internet porn and chats, spending any money that he earns and maxing out his mother’s credit cards to pay for these. Even his stint in the military ends in tragicomic form, involving his addiction. Like a ping-pong ball, he bounces around the colony and outside world with no real chance of escaping his situation.

Then he meets the second protagonist, the Professor, who’s a misfit in his own manner, morbidly obese and extraordinarily tall, a wall of humanity who’s also a super-genius from birth, never scoring any failing note in his life and now an academic in a local university. His idea is to form the colony of “societal lepers” into a functioning community, an intellectual experiment for him to feed his enormous ego. He’s married and the father of twins but his own sex life is far from normal. The rest of his life is similarly warped, including a somewhat shady past which plays a larger part towards the end. Opposites attract: the Kid with almost no real intellect or self-esteem, to the Professor with two much of both.

I liked the idea and message of the book a bit more than the book itself. While the Kid is very well-defined, as well as how he got to this point in his life, the Professor is just too vague for me and not as believable, and this probably why the end didn’t work as well for me. It felt like Russell Banks had an idea of what he wanted to say and where he wanted to put the spotlight but began to get tangled up as the Professor began to take protagonism. It’s certainly not a bad book, just not one of his best. I’d recommend it more for its theme than how it plays out, but I think it’s certainly worth reading.

[Alex Templeton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book ended up being my top adult fiction pick of 2011, which should not be such a surprise considering that Banks’ “The Sweet Hereafter” is pretty much my top adult fiction pick of all time. What is evidenced in both that and this novel is that Banks has a tremendous empathy for his characters; he’s able to look into the darkness of their souls and come out seeing humanity rather than darkness, depravity, and what have you. His protagonists in this novel are the Kid, a teenage sex offender, and the Professor, an incredibly obese man studying sex offenders. The book is about both their relationship and their figuring out who they are and what what they are means in the world. OK, maybe most books are in some way about that, but I found this one stunning. I zipped through to the ending perhaps too quickly, and didn’t take the time to fully think about the philosophical ramifications behind what I was reading. The questions about the Professor’s true identity and how that relates to the Kid’s choices and perceptions of the world are just fascinating; the ending that considered these things really was the thing that knocked the book out of the park for me. I also direct your attention to the fabulous scene in which the Professor is driving through a hurricane: a breathtaking piece of writing. Beware: this book will make you uncomfortable. I think that’s why I recommend it so highly.

[Ruth Seeley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Banks has always written about the disenfranchised, and this novel is no exception. Sometimes his characters are the disenfranchised by birth, but more often it's those who've managed to do it to themselves. It's a rather unsparing look at a segment of society we prefer not to know about, convicted sex offenders who've paid their dues/done their time, but continue to be condemned to a half life of homelessness and electronic surveillance. So much for rehabilitation when the conditions of your release restrict you to living in the wastelands of a city under a bridge, in a shanty if you're lucky and a tent if you're not. After a serious overdose of historical fiction this year, I was so glad to read a contemporary novel about some of our world's less glossy people. Some very familiar elements here, especially the lack of nurturing of the main character.

For more on this one, see: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/15/boo...

[Harriett Milnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good story built around the situation sex offenders find themselves in when they are released from jail. The Kid, cannot live within a certain number of feet of any place where children live, go to school or meet. He also cannot leave the county. In Lost Memory of Skin, this leaves him 2 places to live: under a highway and in the Everglades. I did not understand the insertion of the geological formation of the Everglades. I also thought the ending was a little far-fetched, but a good story.

[Gavin Armour · Rating 3 out of 5]

Auge um Auge, Zahn um Zahn – in mancherlei Hinsicht mutet das amerikanische Strafrecht biblisch an, eher wie ein Rache- und Vergeltungsmittel, als ein Straf- oder gar Resozialisierungsrecht. Russell Banks beschreibt unter anderem die Gnadenlosigkeit dieses Systems in seinem Roman VERSTOSSEN (Original LOST MEMORY OF SKIN; erschienen 2011).

Ein junger Mann, der sich The Kid nennt, lebt unter einer Autobahnbrücke in Calusa, einer Stadt am Golf von Mexiko in Florida. Um seinen Fußknöchel trägt er einen Sender, der der Polizei und seiner Bewährungshelferin immer verrät, wo er sich aufhält. The Kid ist ein verurteilter Sexualstraftäter. Er darf nirgends wohnen, wo er sich auf 750 Meter Kindern nähern könnte, weshalb ihm und seinesgleichen nicht anderes übrig bleibt, als an Orten wie der Halbinsel aus Beton unter dem Calusa Causeway zu hausen. Kids einziger Freund ist ein Leguan, den er seit Kindestagen besitzt. Eines Nachts wird die kleine Siedlung der Ausgestoßenen von der Polizei hochgenommen. Anderntags begegnet Kid hier einem Professor der Soziologie, der an der örtlichen Universität lehrt und gemeinhin als Genie gilt. Der Professor will eine Art Sozialexperiment durchführen: Wenn man Sexualstraftätern die Möglichkeit gibt, sich zu organisieren, dabei Macht zu spüren und Verantwortungsbewußtsein zu entwickeln, müsste sich ihre Neigung legen. Zwischen Kid und dem Professor entsteht eine Art professionelle Freundschaft, bis die Dinge zunächst durch einen sich nähernden Hurrikan, dann durch eine Anfrage der Polizei sowohl bei den Eltern des Professors, als auch bei seiner Frau, beginnen, sich zu überschlagen. Nicht nur The Kid ist sich nicht mehr so sicher, mit wem er es beim Professor eigentlich zu tun hat…

Banks hat ein sehr waches Sensorium für die amerikanische Wirklichkeit. Seine Beschreibungen des Lebens im Abseits sind genau, zwingend und oft schwer erträglich, weil er in der spröden und distanzierten Sprache der Soziologie von ihnen erzählt, was die Lektüre, gerade auf den ersten 250 Seiten des Buches, eher anstrengend macht. Erst spät lässt er seinen Roman Fahrt aufnehmen, gibt ihm so etwas wie Spannung und ein wirkliches Handlungsgerüst. Dies scheint aber nicht sein vordergründiges Anliegen zu sein. So gerät der Plot um den Professor – ein unglaublich großer, sehr fetter Mann, der einen nie zu stillenden Appetit ununterbrochen zu befriedigen sucht – ein wenig zur Kolportage. Da kommt eine geheime Vergangenheit ins Spiel, die sich auf den letzten Hundert Seiten des Romans noch einmal wandelt und nicht nur The Kid, sondern auch den Leser zusehends an der Integrität des Mannes zweifeln lässt. Das ist im Rahmen der Grundhandlung – Verbrechen und angemessene Bestrafung – sicherlich ein gelungener Kniff, bleibt aber spürbar hinter den Möglichkeiten zurück, die der Roman, hat man sich erst einmal an Banks Stil gewöhnt, zunächst zu bieten scheint.

Banks´ Beobachtungsgabe spiegelt sich in der Wahrnehmung Kids. Wer lebt, wie dieser junge Mann leben muß, wird seine Umwelt sehr genau beobachten müssen, um zu überleben. Nicht nur, weil Gefahren legaler wie illegaler Natur, drohen, sondern auch, weil er überleben und dafür schnell begreifen muß, wo sich Chancen auftun. Kids Vergehen ist nicht wirklich eine Sexualstraftat, eher eine mutmaßliche, deren Strafe unangemessen hart erscheint. Daß der Autor diesem Fakt auf der Spur ist, zugleich versucht, psychologisch und soziologisch zu ergründen, wie aus einem vernachlässigten Kind ein Mensch werden kann, der die Welt, wie er selber sagt, nur zweidimensional durch das Internet wahrzunehmen scheint, indem er schon als Elfjähriger massenweisen Pornos konsumiert, ist immer spürbar. Banks hat ein Anliegen. Allerdings ist dieses Anliegen möglicherweise nur schlecht in Literatur übersetzbar. Es droht die Kitschfalle, der Banks eben durch seine nüchterne, distanzierte und manchmal doch auch ausgesprochen drastische Sprache entkommt; es droht aber andererseits auch die Gefahr, mit eben dieser Sprache den Leser auf Distanz zu halten, ihm weder Identifikation, noch einen emotionalen Zugang zum Geschehen zu bieten. Wenn seitenlang die Sichtweise des Professors erklärt wird, rutschen Banks Beschreibungen in die Nähe eines rein soziologischen Werks, wenn dann seitenweise Kids Erfahrungen mit Internetpornographie erläutert werden, droht es schlicht langweilig zu werden.

Interessant und gelungen sind die beiden Antipoden. The Kid ist ein Überlebenskünstler, allein, fast ein wenig feindselig gegenüber einer Welt, die ihm nie gut mitgespielt hat, von der er sich fernhält, deren Wertesystem, das ihn stigmatisiert, er aber bedingungslos übernommen hat. Er hält sich für schuldig und schämt sich und macht dabei wenig Unterschiede zwischen sich, der sich eines eher geringfügigen Vergehens schuldig gemacht hat, und jenen Männern, mit denen er gemeinsam unter der Autobahnbrücke haust und die teilweise wirkliche Schwerverbrecher sind. Banks konterkariert diese Figur mit dem Professor, der sicherlich geniale Züge trägt, in seinem Innersten – der Mann hat ebenso autistische Züge – aber so unsicher ist, daß er sein Leben, seine Vergangenheit(en) in Schubladen verpackt fein säuberlich voneinander trennt. Kid ist agil und wendig, der Professor fett und langsam, lediglich sein Kopf funktioniert in Hypergeschwindigkeit. Dieses ungleiche Paar ergänzt einander und schließlich ist der Professor in seiner Not genauso auf Kid angewiesen, wie dieser – scheinbar – auf ihn.

Diese Ergänzung, respektive Gegenüberstellung, gelingt Banks auch mit der Fußfessel und dem Internet. Das eine ein Strafinstrument, das der Überwachung dient, das andere angeblich ein Geschenk an die Menschheit, ein Befreiungsinstrument, das demokratisch sein, Wissen vermitteln und die Menschen näher zueinander bringen soll, sich bei näherer Betrachtung aber als genau das entpuppt, was die Fessel ihrem Wesen nach ist – ein Instrument der Überwachung und Verfügbarkeit. Erst durch das Internet ist der Professor für seine Eltern, die er nahezu 30 Jahre nicht gesehen hat, aufzuspüren. Das Internet macht es möglich, Menschen für immer zu stigmatisieren. So stehen Kids Name und sein Konterfei in einer Verbrecherdatei, die, immer und für jeden abrufbar, seinen Wohnort und seine Taten verrät. Das Internet – eine Binse – vergisst nicht. Die amerikanische Wirklichkeit in VERSTOSSEN ist das diametrale Gegenteil dessen, was dieses Land immer versprochen hat. Nicht Freiheit ist die Verheißung, sondern immerwährende Überwachung, immerwährende Verfügbarkeit aller Daten, ob richtig oder falsch. So wird der Roman auf den letzten Einhundert Seiten noch einmal interessant, als ein Journalist ins Spiel kommt, der auf die Relativität hinweist, die letztlich allen Glaubens- und Wissensgrundsätzen innewohnt. Was wahr ist, was falsch – wer will das mit letzter Sicherheit sagen? Also muß man glauben. Selbst an physikalische Wahrheiten muß man in erster Linie glauben. Wenn aber alles auf Glaube basiert, ist letztlich nichts mehr wahr. Und darin steckt ein gerüttelt Maß an – Freiheit.

VERSTOSSEN ist ein sicherlich kluges Buch, ein genau beobachtendes Buch, auch ein spannendes, nimmt man die Entwicklung der Story. Doch kommen sich diese Ebenen allzu oft auch ins Gehege. So ergeht es Banks auch mit der Sprache, die er nutzt. Manchmal gerinnen Passagen, die als subjektive Beobachtungen von The Kid beginnen, zu Abhandlungen über das Wesen sozialer Bedingungen oder psychologischer Bedingtheiten, für die dieser Junge aber keine Sprache haben kann. Nicht daher, wo er her kommt und auch nicht, wenn man seine Bildung bedenkt. Hier verrutschen gelegentlich die Ebenen, was schade ist, weil die Figuren in sich und aus sich heraus glaubwürdig und gut getroffen sind.

Russell Banks, der mit AFFLICTION (1989) und THE SWEET HEREAFTER (1991) die Vorlagen zu zwei der besten Filme der 1990er Jahre geschrieben hat, hat sich für diesen Roman viel vorgenommen, vielleicht zu viel. Verbrechen und Strafe, das Internet als Entfremdungsfaktor, die soziale Wirklichkeit gesellschaftlich Geächteter, äußere und innere Freiheit, das Ganze in einer möglichst neutralen Form dargeboten – es ist schwierig, all diese Aspekte zugleich zu behandeln. So wird der Lesegenuß nachhaltig gestört, auch wenn es immer wieder Momente und Abschnitte gibt, die wirklich spannend zu lesen sind. Fast will man meinen, weniger Plot hätte diesem Roman gut getan, und weiß doch nicht, wie man das alles dann zu einem Ende hätte bringen können. So ist ein Werk entstanden, das wichtig ist, das wahrhaftig ist, das sich aber zu oft selbst im Wege zu stehen scheint.

[Jay Gertzman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Russell Bank’s _Lost Memory OF Skin _ is about a 22 year old who was entrapped by the FBI, with the help of a 14 year old girl's patriotic and religious father , into visiting the chick that he had met on the internet, which he shouldn't have done. He never saw her, but must live, with a tracking anklet, so far from any church, school or house that his only recourse is to live under a causeway with other so-called pedophiles. Banks is great at showing how the nation's media have sexualized childhood in adverts to sell them and their families clothes, accessories, food, and shoes, etc. Citizens know they cannot control their kids' early teasing, prurient sexualization. They need a scapegoat, a person(s) who they can hold responsible, since Corporation America’s citizens are steered from the real culprit, their commodified culture and their ignorant (b/c unreflective), although neither stupid nor cold-hearted, selves. I saw a film recently about another example: the Central Park 5. Five black kids without the resouces to withstand the good cop-bad cop routine. They "confessed" to rape and assault, and spent from 7 to 14 years in prison, before being let go after a confession by, in fact, the real culprit himself, who the cops knew about at the time of the incident, but had already worked a "confession" out of the 5. Mayor Koch had been screaming about "monsters" and he was delighted at the quick "solution." Just the tabloid coverage was an amazing example of 1989 racism, and the film ends with stating we are not a "post-racist" society.

_Lost Memory’s_ protagonist, the 22-year old "Kid," is shamed by his situation (and constant survceillance (today we are all under it), without any faith in himself, afraid of any feeling, even if sincerely offered by a friend. He cares for animals instead. Enter a strange, brilliant, very fat and tall, professor of sociology, who tries with some success to cooperate with the authorities to prevent the cops from breaking up the "sex offenders" encampment when a DA needs a good rep boost (also sounds familiar).

But the professor has a shadowy past. He says he is being stalked by the CIA, which has found out he himself may be a sex offender, or which is now afraid of secrets he has for when he worked for them. CIA suspicion means “disappearing” the non-trustworthy person. It is also possible the prof was in fact a pedophile. Banks' description of the way he has "compartmentalized” his wife so his loved ones cannot know him is very provocative.

The novel is in paperback, with a brilliantly tactile cover, including an iguana. The latter was the Kid's pet before the cops killed it when they brutally invaded the enclave under the causeway—a publicity stunt of course, just as the cops raids on the old times Square’s movies And porn stores were. The Kid is just about as helpless as the iguana, but that seems to change, miraculously.

Bank's novels are a history of America, a brilliant reality check, just before the dark.

[Steven Buechler · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my Top Ten reads of this year. This is what good literature is suppose to be about - looking at society and asking difficult questions about what is wrong with it. A MUST READ!!!

Page 72
"He opens Larry Somerset's Holy Bible. It's the only book in the tent. The Kid's never been much of a reader and he has hoped for a long time, every since he first heard of it. that he suffer from attention deficit disorder because in school and in the army most people regarded him as borderline retarded. He's pretty sure that he not but he's had a hard time coming up with a better explanation for what gone wrong with his life so maybe he is borderline retarded.
He's not actually read the Bible before. All or even in part. His mother never made him go to Sunday school or church but he's known about the Bible all his life of course and he respects it - just as he knows about and respect the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence which he's also never read and Shakespeare and a few other famous writings that weren't required reading in school and some that were but which he never got around to reading. Supposedly those are the chief books and documents where people se down in print the basic rules that you have to obey in order to live a good productive legal life. A moral life. Everyone in authority when you got down to basics concerning right versus wrong quotes from them or at least refers to them but the Kid always figured that since every rule and regulation in the world was based on them you didn't have to read the originals.
But lately he's started to wonder if the authorities have been misrepresenting the originals here and there or at least interpreting thme in a way that is more to their own advantage that to the good use of people like the Kid who are both ignorant and pretty much powerless and therefore usually have to depend on the authorities to tell them what's right and what's wrong."

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lost Memory of Skin was a timely read, because right in this morning's headlines is: Florida Man Gets 2.5 Years for Having Sex on the Beach. Despite protesting that there was no actual sex going on beneath their blanket, this man will be going to jail for two and a half years, his girlfriend received time served, and the two of them will be on the National Sex Offender Registry for the rest of their lives. And the thing about being put on the registry – as demonstrated in the book – is that there is no distinction made between violent rapists, high school sweethearts who have one partner over and one under 18, the guy who is caught peeing in the bushes, or those who create and those who collect child pornography: everyone on the registry is equally a sex offender under the law, and society is free to use this information to discriminate against the offenders regarding housing, employment, child custody, etc. Author Russell Banks performs a tidy trick in this book: without expecting the reader to completely empathise with or forgive the sex offenders, he simply wants you to consider what is fair treatment after they've served their time.

The book takes place in the fictional city of Calusa in an unnamed state (recognisably Miami-ish), and in this city (as in many in real life), sex offenders, while on parole, mustn't live within 2500 feet of a school, daycare centre, park, playground – basically anywhere children might be found – and as the overlapping no-go zones cover most of the county, there are only three places where they might legally reside: at the airport; in the swamp; or under a causeway that links the city to some man-made islands. The description of the shanty-town that exists under this bridge sounds even worse than a Mumbai slum, but one just like it is actually found in Miami.

In this community, we meet the Kid – a twenty-two-year-old sex offender, recently released from prison, who will need to live apart from society (while remaining in the county, confirmed by ankle GPS) for the next ten years. Although his tent home is at risk from police raids, vigilante violence, and the weather – this is Florida – he has nowhere else to go, and in the beginning, is determined to make the best of it. Eventually we learn his backstory, and although it might go some ways towards explaining why he did what he did, it isn't used to excuse his actions.

He was no more or less than what he seemed to be – a fatherless white kid who graduated high school without ever passing a single test or turning in a single paper, a kid who could barely read and write or do math beyond the simplest arithmetic, who was hooked for years and maybe still was hooked on porn and jacking off and never had a girlfriend or a best friend and belonged to no one's posse – but that was okay to the Kid back then.

Soon enough, we meet the Professor – a respected academic who thinks that he might have something to offer the homeless sex offender community – and he's a monster of a different sort:

A huge hairy figure sweating inside the ten yards of brown cloth it takes to cover him with a suit, a man submerged in a body as large as a manatee's, graceless, slow moving, arms and thighs rubbing themselves raw, spine and knee and ankle joints nearly to the breaking point by the weight they must support, enlarged heart thumping rapidly from the effort of shoving blood and oxygen through all that flesh, overheated lungs gasping from the work of getting that enormous bulk up the incline to the parking lot, liver, kidneys, glands, digestive tract, all his organs overworked for half a century to the point of exhaustion and collapse – a man with two bodies, one dancing inside his brain, a hologram made of electrons and neurons going off like a field of fireflies on a midsummer night, the other a moist quarter-ton packet of solid flesh wrapped in pale human skin.

Lost Memory of Skin has plenty of plot (used mainly to illustrate the daily lives of those under the causeway), but most of the book happens inside the heads of the two main characters. While the Professor – as a recognised genius – feels superior to everyone around him, the Kid feels superior to those ranked below him on the sex offender ladder (and especially, superior to the baby rapists). They both lie, struggle with shame over their cravings, hide their pasts, and have suffered from feelings of unreality. In a way, their childhoods were similar, with the Professor feeling isolated because of his extreme intelligence and his parents' focus on only each other, and the Kid being physically isolated by his absent father and his mother's neglect. Although their paths have been very different, it's a fascinating idea that there but for the grace of God, one of these men is respected and the other shunned. While considering how disconnected he feels from his own past, the Professor muses:

Perhaps that's the one constant that is shared by all those separate compartments he lives in – a profound sense of isolation, of difference and a solitude that is so pervasive and deep that he has never felt lonely. It's the solitude of a narcissist who fills the universe entirely, until there is no room left in it for anyone else. In every life he has led, every identity he has claimed for himself and revealed to others, his profound sense of isolation was then and is now his core.

And the Kid remembers the first time he felt like a real person (as he was being taken down by the police):

(T)he second he saw himself on the screen he felt like all his atoms were instantly reconfigured. It was as if he had never seen himself in a mirror before. It was like being touched by an angel. He had an actual body and it was not just his body, something he merely possessed, it was him!

The Kid wonders if being a grown up man just means pretending to be a grown up man; if acting like he has three dimensions will give him a third dimension; if he should behave as if life were a giant reality show. The Professor believes that he was safe in the past, when he pretended to be people that he was not, and is now in danger for seeming to be what he actually is. This existential crisis is key to both main characters, and in what I thought to be an odd move, a character named “the Writer” is introduced to settle these questions, advising that people are whoever they say they are, and shouldn't be judged too harshly if they get creative with their biographies as that's something we all do.

What you believe matters, however. It’s all anyone has to act on. And since what you do is who you are, your actions define you. If you don’t believe anything is true simply because you can’t logically prove what’s true, you won’t do anything. You won’t be anything. You’ll end up spending your life in a rocking chair looking out at the horizon waiting for an answer that never comes. You might as well be dead. It’s an old philosophical problem.

The Writer is a late-appearing travel journalist, and while the Kid thinks he looks like Hemingway, it's obvious that the physical description matches that of Russell Banks as well. So, he inserted himself just to resolve the philosophical questions that he himself asks? Since I was waiting for the Writer to not be who he said he was, this whole aspect of the book was a disappointment to me.

This really is a timely subject: will the Florida man I opened with need to live out years of parole under that Miami bridge after he's released from jail? From the comments on the article, no one agrees that he should be going to jail in the first place, so how can schlepping him off to a modern-day leper colony after he's done “paying his debt” be considered justice? Would we feel differently about him if he was a baby rapist? If he was just a guy caught peeing in the bushes? Are all sex offenders monsters, or are there shades of offense? Do even the worst of the monsters deserve to live under a bridge like an animal or a fairytale troll? I applaud Banks for making me think about all this, and especially, for not forcing me to excuse the Kid – there's plenty of black in the shades of grey which made me feel unmanipulated.

[Sheri · Rating 4 out of 5]

So this is a case of it being late (for me anyway) and having a full day tomorrow and knowing that I am just not going to do this review justice. But not wanting to come back to it tomorrow, wanting to just shelf it and move on. So, I apologize for both my brevity and lack of depth on this one.

The book is good. It is not over the top fabulous (mostly because it is so repetitious), but it is above average solid. And part of the reptition is in fact the Kid's voice; so maybe it is better than above average. If I spent some more time thinking about it, I might talk myself into 4.5 or 5 stars.

For those who like happy books, this is not one. But it does have a happy ending of sorts. More importantly, it is real and raw. The characters are empathetic and interesting, but also homeless sex offenders. And Banks does a great job of explaining the systemic problems that prevent people from being able to act like humans. He also has a great (and convenient and not so subtle moral lesson) way to switch the lens such that the main character (who is in fact a homeless sex offender) comes off as rather innoncent and his "savior" (a genius academic) comes off as rather guilty and disgusting.

I also really like Banks social commentary (as a sociologist, the Professor believes all human behavior is socially constructed) and his understanding of addiction (along with his filtering of the group therapist's advice about addiction).

Overall it is a bit heartbreaking and very thought provoking; ultimately the moral is that we can never know the truth and therefore there is no truth. We all just believe what we believe and do our best to avoid being too lonely.

[Booklover, Indianapolis · Rating 3 out of 5]

(Jan) When you tell people you are reading a book about a young man who is on the Sex Offender Registry, it's hard to get them interested in hearing more. The book was well written for the most part - I'd describe it as interestingly written. We never know the name of the main character (well, it's Billy, I think) - he's referred to as The Kid. The Kid is a slightly built 21 year old virgin who was raised by a mom who was not the best mom, and left alone, he discovered porn at a very young age and never really looked back. Lacking in basic social skills and much more than a basic education, he makes a few mistakes and first gets booted from the army and then after a failed assignation with a teenage girl, ends up in jail. Now out, he's on the SO list and due to the rules and regulations for those on the list, is forced to live under the Causeway. If the book had focused more on his background and his current life, I'd have given it a 4* easily. However, he meets The Professor - a grossly overweight, incredibly intelligent man who wants to do research on the men who live under the Causeway - almost all of them are also on the SO registry. The Prof helps them set up a living situation with rules and regulations, all of which was interesting, but then a hurricane blows through, the area is flooded and most lose everything, and they scatter. Again, following the Kid to his next living situation was a good segment - but then there came the rest of the book, which focused way too much on the Professor. His storyline a) didn't make sense (I was left still questioning) and b) took away from the Kid, who I found much more interesting to spend time with.

This book does bring up interesting questions about the lives of Sex Offenders. Yes, some are truly bad, bad guys (and gals) who sexually and physically abuse their victims of all ages. Bu then there are those like The Kid, who never really did anything (at 21, he planned to have sex with this girl who was flirting with him online and invited him over to her home - I think she was 14? And I'm not trying to victim shame or anything, but there are definitely young and middle teens who put themselves out there in a very sexual way that would make a 21 year old think - well, why not? And we all know if it was a 21 year old girl who was trying to hook up with a young-middle teen, the freak out would not have been as severe, if it happened at all). Was he guilty? Yes. Does he belong on a list that will punish him for life? 100% no. In many (most?) states, the list of what makes someone eligible for the SO list is incredibly broad - from urinating in public and exposing yourself to rape and child molestation. You can be Bernie Madoff, who ruined the lives of tens of thousands of people, you can be a murdered, you can lie and steal and damage and who knows what else - yet when you get out, you are out. You may be on parole, but you have the freedom to get a job and live anywhere you want. If Charles Manson was released tomorrow, he'd have less restrictions then someone on the SO list. Once on the SO list, you can't live within a certain amount of yards from a school, a library, a park, etc. - leaving most released SO no where to live. Yet you can't leave the county. And you can't live on the streets, because that's vagrancy and you can end up back in jail, which is what people want anyway. And forget about most of them finding a job. It's a broken system that seems make the punishment often more severe than the crime, and it's a never-ending punishment. For those like The Kid, he's now forced into filthy homelessness for at least 10 years (not sure if that meant his parole was over and he could leave the area but still has to register, or if his registrations requirements ended then too). I don't know what the answer is, but I do know the way it is now is not working.

[Miriam Bridenne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Calusa—a city strikingly similar to Miami, nowadays. Under a causeway that shelters sex offenders, the Kid lives in a tent with his bracelet alarm and the obligation to stay at 2,500 feet from anyone under 18 years old. At 22, he feels like a stranger amidst this crowd of outcasts. He works as a dishwasher in a restaurant, stays on his own and talks to no one but Iggy, the 6-foot long iguana he has owned since boyhood. Raised by a neglectful single mom—much more of a lost child than an adult herself—the kid has been addicted to porn since childhood.
On an unfortunate day, he meets a grotesquely obese professor of sociology dressed in a three-piece suit. While the Professor claims his desire to help the Kid and to give the ramshackle encampment a human face, he really seeks to interview him for his research on the commercialization of sex within the United States. Behind his brilliant academic records and his outstanding IQ, the Professor hides a shameful secret that the Kid will expose in the most tragic circumstances.

Lost Memory of Skin is a fearless journey into the darkest side of our society, the perfect counterpoint to Russell Banks’ classic coming-of-age novel Rule Of The Bone. The Professor and the Kid have lost the ability to connect, to find a place for themselves in an increasingly disembodied world. Surrounded by a plugged-in/tuned-out Internet culture, they wander adrift in the misty zone between reality and imagery, no longer able to tell the difference. As the Kid makes headway on the path to maturity, he moves from helpless innocence to enlightened dignity, from all-consuming shame to glimmering self-knowledge. With the heart and soul that characterize his greatest works, Russell Banks beautifully crafts the compelling and challenging portrait of a society whose members have lost the memory of each other’s skin. The towering achievement of one of America’s finest novelist.

[Lauren · Rating 1 out of 5]

this is a poorly written, shallow book missing all the character development and compelling story line of his other novels. I knew it was about a young man living on the streets after being convicted of a sexual crime so I expected it to be dark and hard to read yet was interested as I thought it would offer a unique perspective on a difficult topic. Based on the great reviews I read I was looking forward to reading.

After reading most of the book, and other reviews, I am left wondering if I read the same book? The book, though described as darkly humorous, to me, was simply dark and depressing. It was incredibly slow moving, and I often felt that I had to really push myself to keep reading. I felt little sympathy for the main character making it hard to care what actually happened to him.

It's a rare book I want to put down without finishing, but this book I just couldnt finish. I found it crude, dull, and slow. I found some of the scenes lewd and uncomfortable for no other reason than possibly for shock value. It didnt strenthen the story or enhance the understanding of the characters to any degree. I do not understand the popularity of this book and would not recommend it.

[Glen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like Russell Banks enough to say that this is not one of his best books. He swings for the fences by taking on the modern day equivalent of the leper--the sex offender--and exploring what it means to be totally outcast by society while being, in many ways, just like everyone else, only guilty. Alas, he ends up hitting at best a sacrifice fly, scoring on a few counts but missing on some others. The introduction of the character of the professor is unnecessarily convoluted and frustratingly vague, since in the end the story comes back to the sex offender protagonist, known only as The Kid, and the Professor's real story is left for the reader to puzzle over. There is the return of the anti-hero to the community under the bridge, the society of outcasts, and clearly some moral growth has taken place in The Kid, but not enough to justify 400+ pages. If you haven't read Banks I'd recommend Cloudsplitter or The Sweet Hereafter or The Darling before I'd recommend this book. Now that Banks has broken ground on this topic, perhaps another writer can make it bear better fruit.

[Debbie "DJ" · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have no idea how to rate this book. The subject matter is that of child pornography. What do we do with the different levels of acts committed, and where can these people live, or even get a job. The true pariahs of our society and how we treat them. It is actually a story of a young man and what he indures. It asks a lot of important questions of us as a society. What is the truth? There were lots of times when I wasn't going to finish it as I do not like reading about perverted sex, yet the story kept me going. I don't think I would recommend it.

[Tuck · Rating 5 out of 5]

:0
looks at usa's sex offender laws, usa orgy of 'law n order', usa's coming apoc storm of fat cats, freaks, weather, cops, kids, and stupid people, usas inadequacy and immorality.

nancy has a really good review here, that could make a whole lot more sense https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Anna Janelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

7-14 Final Thoughts:

It was a game-changer in terms of my thoughts regarding sex offenders and our society's prevailing laws regarding where they can set up residence. I'm still on the fence regarding my final thoughts and feelings in that my head and heart are don't agree. On the one hand, I'm horrified by the very act of sex offences; on the other hand, I'm not certain that our current rules and regulations account for the different types of offences and offenders. Regardless, I'm not comfortable with the thought of a convicted sex offender living next to me (and I have a feeling that this sense of comfort will radically decrease as I have children). In the same sense, this novel challenged my thoughts about rules regarding the online Sex Offender Registry and the rules surrounding where sex offenders can legally reside. Namely, what chance do these primarily male offenders have at a successful life post-conviction? There is no hope of privacy or secrecy surrounding their offense. Everyone has the opportunity to discover the details of their past life - with no opportunity for digression or selective revelation. Again, what hope do these offenders have for rehabilitation?

SPOILER ALERT: The answer is none. Which was confusing to me because 75% of the way through the novel Kid had an opportunity to succeed. Even 90% of the way through the novel, he seemed to have a chance at normalcy - living on the older couple's houseboat, a couple that still accepted him after learning about his past transgression. He stood in the Garden of Eden (to stick with the long running metaphor Banks' keeps reverting to throughout the course of the novel) and decided that he did not deserve to stay. Even though Kid is still a virgin - even though he STILL has not kissed a girl despite of (or perhaps because of) his conviction, he shuns the society that does not accept him and reverts back to living under the Causeway with the rest of the offenders. Kid decides his pets deserve a better quality of life than that which he condemns himself to and leaves them with the older couple. He has a choice - and he makes the decision to rejoin the rest of refugees as a homeless offender. This choice was heartbreaking to me. Almost as heartbreaking as the final sentences of the book, which leaves Kid pondering the quality and availability of pornography after he gets off probation in another nine years. While I wouldn't be inclined to predict that Kid will re-offend, who's to say that the company (i.e. other offenders) that he keeps could change his prospective in another few years?

The Professor's story-line was certainly compelling. At the end of the novel, his life (covert government double-agent or corrupt pedophile?) and death (suicide or government cover-up/murder) is still not made clear to the reader. It is clear that no evidence exists to prove one version of the truth over the other. While Kid is inclined to believe that he is a pedophile, the Professor is not the Dr. Hoo that had conversed with the Shyster (via previous emails) under the Causeway.

Definitely a four star read. Most probably a four-and-a-half star read for it's social relevance and ability to provoke thought and challenge beliefs. Not the lightest/easiest read. I would certain revisit this novel in the future and purchase it for my physical library (it was read on my Kindle).

7-11-12

I'm including some thoughts and quotes that I'd like to remember while I'm still in the process of reading the book. I don't think that I've "highlighted" any book so much on my Kindle as I have with this novel. Like I have mentioned before, it's extremely thought provoking and somewhat disorienting - to have your long-established thoughts about something so (seemingly) clear-cut as convicted sex offenders.

QUOTE: "The Professor's theories about pedophilia are rapidly evolving. When a society commodifies its children by making them into a consumer group, dehumanizing them by converting them into a crucial, locked-in segment of the economy, and then proceeds to eroticize its products in order to sell them, the children gradually come to be perceived by the rest of the community and by the children themselves as sexual objects. And on the ladder of power, where power is constructed sexually instead of economically, the children end up at the bottom rung...Because it's not about sex, and it's not about gender; they carry no weight in the equation. It's about power. Control. Dominion. Dominance? Well, yes. When you feel you have nothing and no one you can dominate, you turn to children. And when children have been transformed into sexual objects and you have no other way of controlling them, you dominate them sexually."

"These men are human beings, no chimpanzees or gorillas. They belong to the same species as we do. And we're not hardwired to commit these acts. If, as it appears, the proportion of the male population who commit these acts has increased exponentially in recent years, and it's no simply because of the criminalization of the behavior and a consequent increase in the reportage of these crimes, then there's something in the wider culture itself that has changed in the recent years, and these men are like the canary in the mine shaft, the first among up to respond to that change, as if their social and ethical immune systems, the controls over their behaviors, have somehow been damaged or compromised. And if we don't identify the specific changes in our culture that are attacking our social and ethical immune systems, which we usually refer to as taboos, then before long we'll all succumb."

It's a very theoretical way to look at sex offenders. Instead of condemning them for their actions, the novel is looking at these men waste by-products from our rotten society - a society that does not permanently incarcerate these men - but has no room for them outside of jail.

I'm roughly 50% through with the novel, but I feel something not-so-nice brewing on the horizon for Kid. I do have two complaints: 1). For as much as the Professor claims to be observing, he's most certainly inserting himself in Kid's life - with good intentions but for selfish motives. The not-so-nice feeling centers around the Professor's (see also: Kid's) community; the Prof is acting as social engineer but is he taking on a society of individuals that he doesn't fully understand? 2). Kid's story behind his crime is a let-down to the reader only in that he's not an actual sexual offender in that he violently raped someone (think - "To Catch a Predator" starring an awkward teenage virgin showing up at the door of a fourteen year old). (And I know that it's pretty terrible that I'm let down by that - but with the awful circumstances surrounding Kid's current lifestyle, I was at least hoping he'd done something equally awful to justify the curcumstances that he's found himself in). And I know that's terrible to say, "not an actual sexual offender." I know that's not PC. And Kid's behavior is certainly not ethically or morally or legally right. I'm not defending creeping on children on the internet, and I'm also not advocating anyone who makes sexual advances or plans to make sexual advances om children in real life. But can it be compared to a man who rapes at knife point? A serial child molester? A child pornographer? All this leads me to the next thinking point - should all sexual offenders be classified the same way? Should Kid be lumped in with the chomos (child molesters, slang picked up from the novel) under the Causeway? I’m not so sure. It makes me second guess watching shows like the aforementioned "To Catch a Predator" - because those men (regardless of their slime-factor) are lonely, disturbed people whose lives are distroyed and family members irrevocably shamed all for the sake of entertainment. Again, I'm not saying that these men are innocent or in-the-right; they are criminals. But are the punishments and consequences worthy of the crime?

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overly verbose, with a loose, shaggy style, when parable-like clarity might have made for a more obviously rewarding reading experience. However, the book only seems more sage and sad now that America has a sexual offender elected to the highest office in the land. Having dated a 16/17-year-old girl/ child (if we're being clear-eyed and honest) at the same age as The Kid and with a similarly lonely (though less impoverished) background, I found much of the novel hit very close to home. Indeed, I wonder if Banks' argument had have been stronger had The Kid's "victim" (quotation marks because she may not exist) been 16 or 17 herself, highlighting how someone can be just a skeezy young man in one state and an irredeemable monster just one state over for exactly the same actions. I doubt a day has gone past over the last decade in which I have not thought about the fact that were I not sat here in Britain, but in California, I'd be likely labelled as a non-human monster due entirely to my own youthful selfishness, entitlement and stupidity, like The Kid. As such, I appreciated the bitter irony of the book's ending - while The Kid might look forward to 10 years in the future (the gap of years I am now at, as it happens) as being the end of his parole, we know that as a lifetime sex offender his only future options are likely homelessness or suicide. Indeed, though I am against capital punishment, I believe execution with a sincere expression of "God have mercy on your soul" is more merciful and fundamentally honest than a society pretending such a felon is free after a year when really "they know that we know that they know" they are forever outside of the human race, persona non grata. Of course, this is how many perpetrators make their survivors feel so we can consider it a fair and steely punishment in many cases so the question is perhaps more one of usefulness and efficiency and whether all such punishments are conducted by the state in good faith. It is a queasy irony that so many of the perpetrators identified by Project Yewtree here in Britain or #metoo in America are of the same Baby Boomer generation that, in office, created Sex Offender Registries in the 1990s and rapidly increased zoning restriction. As with far less serious drug crimes, one wonders how many of those who passed the laws broke precisely the same crimes in their adolescence and early adulthood. Think Bill Clinton, Brett Kavanaugh, Trump, et al.

**SPOILERS**
'Lost Memory of Skin' is to be praised for stirring up these kinds of thoughts and debates. I find it interesting that Banks in interview says that he originally intended for The Kid to finish the novel upon his boat, but felt that would be letting him off the hook for his crime and so sentenced him to live out his parole at the camp, with The Kid finally internalising his criminality/ otherness from law-abiding society. This makes me fear that Banks genuinely believes that The Kid could be re-accepted into society come the end of his parole, which it seems most readers recognise as very unlikely indeed.