Lost Memory of Skin (Banks)

Lost Memory of Skin
Russell Banks, 2011
HarperCollins
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061857638


Summary
Suspended in a strangely modern-day version of limbo, the young man at the center 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, and on probation after doing time for a liaison with an underage girl, he is shackled to a GPS monitoring device and forbidden to live within 2,500 feet of anywhere children might gather. With nowhere else to go, the Kid 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, trapped by impulses and foolish choices he himself struggles to comprehend. Enter the Professor, a man who has built his own life on secrets and lies. A university sociologist of enormous size and intellect, he finds in the Kid the perfect subject for his research on homelessness and recidivism among convicted sex offenders. The two men forge a tentative partnership, the Kid remaining wary of the Professor’s motives even as he accepts the counsel and financial assistance of the older man.

When the camp beneath the causeway is raided by the police, and later, when a hurricane all but destroys the settlement, the Professor tries to help the Kid in practical matters while trying to teach his young charge new ways of looking at, and understanding, what he has done. But when the Professor’s past resurfaces and threatens to destroy his carefully constructed world, the balance in the two men’s relationship shifts.

Suddenly, the Kid must reconsider everything he has come to believe, and choose what course of action to take when faced with a new kind of moral decision.

Long one of our most acute and insightful novelists, Russell Banks often examines the indistinct boundaries between our intentions and actions. A mature and masterful work of contemporary fiction from one of our most accomplished storytellers, Lost Memory of Skin unfolds in language both powerful and beautifully lyrical, show-casing Banks at his most compelling, his reckless sense of humor and intense empathy at full bore.

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—a society where isolating the offender has perhaps created a new kind of victim. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—March 28, 1940
• Where—Newton, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—University of North Carolina
• Awards—John Dos Passos Award for Fiction
• Currently—lives in upstate New York


Russell Banks was raised in a hardscrabble, working-class world that has profoundly shaped his writing. In Banks's compassionate, unlovely tales, people struggle mightily against economic hardship, family conflict, addictions, violence, and personal tragedy; yet even in the face of their difficulties, they often exhibit remarkable resilience and moral strength.

Although he began his literary career as a poet, Banks forayed into fiction in 1975 with a short story collection Searching for Survivors and his debut novel, Family Life. Several more critically acclaimed works followed, but his real breakthrough occurred with 1985's Continental Drift, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel that juxtaposes the startlingly different experiences of two families in America. In 1998, he earned another Pulitzer nomination for his historical novel Cloudsplitter, an ambitious re-creation of abolitionist John Brown.

Since the 1980s, Banks has lived in upstate New York—a region he (like fellow novelists William Kennedy and Richard Russo) has mined to great effect in several novels. Two of his most powerful stories, Affliction (1990) and The Sweet Hereafter (1991), have been adapted for feature films. He has also received numerous honors and literary awards, including the prestigious John Dos Passos Prize for fiction. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
[A] major new work…destined to be a canonical novel of its time…it delivers another of Mr. Banks's wrenching, panoramic visions of American moral life…This book expresses the conviction that we live in perilous, creepy times. We toy recklessly with brand-new capacities for ruination. We bring the most human impulses to the least human means of expressing them, and we may not see the damage we do until it becomes irrevocable. Mr. Banks, whose great works resonate with such heart and soul, brings his full narrative powers to bear on illuminating this still largely unexplored new terrain.
Janet Maslin - New York Times


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.
Helen Schulman - New York Times Book Review


[L]ike so much else Banks has written, this novel is ambitious and often compelling—a book that works with important ideas about the way we're reshaping our lives in the Internet age, while being reshaped ourselves, spiritually, sexually.
Sue Miller - Washington Post


Lost Memory of Skin...may be [Banks] boldest imaginative leap yet into the invisible margins of society...a haunting book, made so by the fraught, enigmatic relationship of the Professor and the Kid. The contradictions that seem to split the Kid—his obsession with sex but innocence of it, for instance—are never resolved. Mr. Banks in not an apologist, only an observer; he has brought the novelist's magnifying glass to bear on figures we otherwise try hard not to notice.
Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal


For his latest novel, the acclaimed author of Cloudsplitter and The Sweet Hereafter again takes inspiration from a sanctuary of sorts. "The Kid," a young sex offender, lives with other registered offenders (including a disgraced state senator) in a makeshift camp beneath a Florida causeway based on a real colony that was shut down in 2010. After a police raid, the Kid meets "the Professor," a pompous, rotund man claiming to be researching homelessness. He wants to study—and cure—the Kid in order to prove his theories about society. But just as the study commences, the Professor, claiming that his life is in danger because of past work as a government spy, turns the tables, paying the Kid to interview him instead. Bloated and remarkably repetitive, this is more a collection of ideas and emblems than a novel. Though the Kid remains mostly opaque, he's a sympathetic character, but the nature of his crime, once revealed, lets Banks off the hook and simplifies rather than complicates matters. Banks continually refers to the Professor's weight and mental superiority, the latter a contrivance allowing for long rhetorical passages into the nature of man, sexual obsession, pornography, truth, and commerce that come as no surprise. Most frustrating is Banks's almost pathological restating of his characters' traits and motives, resulting in a highly frustrating novel in desperate need of an editor.
Publishers Weekly


From his makeshift tent in the shantytown under the causeway, the Kid can see the sun rise over the city of Calusa and feel the Atlantic breeze riffling the royal palm fronds. But the dichotomy between paradise and the squalor of the encampment is not lost on him. The only area within the city limits that is more than 2500 feet from a school, park, or library, the causeway bridge shelters homeless sex offenders on probation with nowhere else to go. Living in anonymity, the damaged group runs the gamut from a politician with a penchant for little girls to this lonely, asocial boy, whose only sexual relationship took place in an Internet chat room. When the Professor arrives to interview the Kid for a sociological study, the Kid wants to trust the man, and we hope he'll be saved through human interaction. But the Professor has his own demons. Verdict: Multiaward winner Banks (Affliction) has written a disturbing contemporary novel that feels biblical in its examination of good and evil, penance and salvation, while issuing a cri de coeur for penal reform. The graphic language may be off-putting for some but necessarily advances the theme of illusion vs. reality in the digital world. —Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Myers, FL
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Banks is in top form in his seventeenth work of fiction, a cyclonic novel of arresting observations, muscular beauty, and disquieting concerns… a commanding, intrepidly inquisitive, magnificently compassionate, and darkly funny novel of private and societal illusions, maladies, and truths.
Booklist


Banks (The Reserve,2008, etc.) once again explores the plight of the dispossessed, taking a big risk this time by making his protagonist a convicted sex offender. He hedges his bets slightly: The Kid is a 22-year-old who got jailed for showing up at a 14-year-old girl's house,,,, Though there's plenty of plot, including a hurricane and a dead body fished out of a canal, the slow growth of the Kid's self-knowledge and his empathy for others is the real story, offering the only ray of hope in an otherwise bleak consideration of a broken society and the damaged people it breeds. Intelligent, passionate and powerful, but very stark indeed.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Lost Memory of Skin (Caution: PLOT SPOILERS ahead):

1. What do you make of the Kid? Do you find him sympathetic or unlikable? What is the nature of his sex offense? Does the punishment fit the crime?

2. What role did the Kid's mother play in his life and developing sex addiction? To what degree is she responsible or not responsible?

3. What is the symbolic significance of the Adam and Eve story? How does the story of Eden and the serpent tie into the Kid's sojourn in the Panzecola Swamp?

4. How do you feel about the Professor? In what ways is he similar to the Kid (starting with the fact that their last names are the same)? Is it difficult for you to get beyond his size to find him sympathetic—does his weight affect how you view him? Why might the author have chosen to create the Professor as an obese character?

5. Gloria, the Professor's wife, suggests that sex offenders are "just programmed to do what they do. You know, hardwired." The Professor disagrees, responding:

If, as it appears, the proportion of the male population who commit these acts has increased exponentially in recent years...then there's something in the wider culture itself that has changed..., and these men are like the canary in the mine shaft.... [It's] as if their social and ethical immune systems, the controls over their behavior, have been somehow damaged or compromised (p.125-hardcover).

Later, we learn that the Professor intends to cure the Kid of his pedophilia....

He intends to cure the Kid by changing his social circumstances. By giving him power. Autonomy. He believes that one's sexual identity is shaped by one's self-perceived social identity, that pedophilia...is about not sex, but power...about one's personal perception of one's power (p. 159-hardcover).

—Who do you think is correct? Is the Professor correct in his belief that pedophilia is a societal condition and curable? Or is Gloria correct in that pedophilia is hardwired into the brain and incurable?

6. What is the ongoing significance of Captain Kydd's treasure map? What is the Professor's purpose in telling the Kid about the buried treasure...and why does he provide him with a phony map?

7. Why do you think the Professor estranged from his parents? Why does he turn away at the last moment when he has driven all night to see them?

8. What symbolic role does weather play in this novel, especially the hurricane?

9. Do you believe the Professor's story? Do you believe he is murdered...or that he commits suicide? Does it matter? Why do you think the author has left his death an open question?

10 . The Writer tells the Kid whether something is true, or not, doesn't matter:

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 something is true simply because you can't logically prove what's true, you won't do anything. You won't be anything (p. 398-hardcover).

a) Do you agree with the Writer's philosophy? Or are you skeptical—like the Kid, who says, "If everything's a lie, then nothing's true."
b) Where do you think Russell Banks comes down on the question? In other words, does the weight of the novel suggest that the Writer or the Kid is correct?

11. Why does the Kid shy away from, even reject, Dolores's maternal kindness?

12. What role do pets play in this novel? Why is the Kid so devoted to them? Is there a difference between his attachment to Iggy at the beginning...and Annie and Einstein later on?

13. What is the significance of the book's title?

14. Why are the three main characters referred to as the Kid, the Professor, the Writer—their names aren't used, although the secondary characters are named.

15. Why does the Kid return to the Causeway at the end? And why does he decide to move his tepee out of the light and closer to the overhang of the Causeway?

16. The kid makes a distinction between shame and guilt. He comes to the conclusion that he is guilty but that he need not feel shame. Talk about his distinction. Do you agree with his assessment?

17. Should the Kid have returned the money to the Professor's wife or not? Did learning, later, that the Professor left the family well provided for affect your answer?

18. What revelation does the Kid undergo at the end of the novel. What future do you see for him?

19. Some reviewers claim that Banks hedges the very issue he wants to explore in his book by not making his protagonist a hardcore sex offender—that, because the Kid has engaged in a lighter offense, the author hasn't truely grappled with the hard issue of habitual sex offenders. What do you think?

20. Has your understanding, or your opinion, of sex offenders changed after reading Lost Memory of Skin? Is their position as society's untouchables fair or unfair, deserved or undeserved?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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