Lost memory of skin /

IN a country now famous for its second acts - the philandering politician, the reformed insider trader, Charlie Sheen - virtually the only American denied another chance is the sexual offender, branded in perpetuity, his whereabouts tracked by the government, a modern-day boogeyman unable by law in many states to live anywhere even remotely habitable. In his 12th novel, "Lost Memory of Skin," the formidable Russell Banks bravely explores this specific plight, trying to find humanity in people who are feared and despised, frequently for good reason, and raising questions not only about the often horrendous public treatment of these outcasts but also about the ways the larger culture may contribute to their crimes. As a vehicle he has created a memorable character, known as the Kid, a young man so lost and lonely and deprived it would take a heart of stone not to feel for him even at his most repulsive. Abandoned by his father, uncared for by his mother, it is no wonder that as a preteen without friends - except for his giant pet iguana, Iggy - the Kid fell into the dark Oz of online porn to assuage his isolation and boredom. Now, at 22, he is a paroled sex offender, forced to live with a tracking device damped to his ankle among his fellow social lepers in an ad hoc colony of felons beneath a viaduct His crime? After stumbling onto a chat line on Craigslist, the Kid arranged to meet an underage girl with the handle "brandil8" at her home while her parents were away. Recently discharged from the Army for planning to distribute pornography to his fellow soldiers in an effort to win favor, and now unemployed, the Kid arrived for the assignation via city bus with a backpack full of beer, condoms, X-rated movies, lubricant and high hopes "to bump up against and break through an invisible membrane between the perfectly controlled world locked inside his head and the endlessly overflowing unpredictable, dangerous world outside." Instead, he was greeted by Brandi's father and five cops who "do like a SWAT team takedown." Convicted of soliciting sex with a minor, he spent three months in jail and was released on good behavior into a world where he was forbidden for the next 10 years both to leave the jurisdiction and to reside within 2,500 feet of anywhere children gather. In the Miami-like Floridian coastal city Banks has invented, this leaves three housing choices: a swamp, an airport or a dry spot underneath a causeway. The Kid has pitched his tent there among "the polyethylene lean-tos ... and the salvaged plywood huts nearby and the men who live in them standing around like bored ghosts." He calls himself the Kid because his real name, typed into a search engine, will prevent him from renting an apartment or landing a job, and also because "it's what he looks like anyhow: a kid." The fact that after all he's been through the Kid is still a virgin is yet another way Banks underscores his innocence (to use a loaded word). 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. The plot kicks in when a police raid scatters the truly pathetic and creepy inhabitants of this ramshackle community, and brings in the Professor - a genius sociologist and mystery man of astonishing physical bulk and gluttony. He can eat for pages. His fridge holds "containers of ready-to-eat food - potato salad, macaroni and cheese, beef stew, lamb stew, curried chicken, fried chicken, pork dumplings, chicken pot pies, half a ham, chunks of cheese, egg salad, tuna salad, sliced meats, marinated tuna steaks, mashed squash, creamed spinach, meat loaf, Cuban, Chinese and Indian takeout ... and much, much more." Drawn to the ravaged tent city, he finds the Kid, who reminds him (and us) of Huck Finn, and arrogantly, generously intends to "cure" him. The Professor can also theorize for pages, and his ideas "are rapidly evolving": "When a society commodifies its children ... the children gradually come to be perceived by the rest of the community and by the children themselves. as sexual objects." He later expands on this thinking about pedophilia: "If it is a mental illness, then the entire society is to one degree or another sick with it. Which makes it normal." Normal? Then again, the Professor's normal may not be everyone's, given his own sexual proclivities (masturbating on a "forest green leather Barcalounger" while his wife poses naked) and his secrets and lies (he claims he was a spy and a double agent for "blackbox agencies" that "aren't as well known as the F.B.I. and C.I.A."). Indeed, the Professor's blatant grotesquerie makes him a disturbingly original character - there's nothing quite like him in American literature - but also, at times, an unfathomable one. His theories and ideas, extrapolated and repetitive, loom large and heavy in this novel. To be honest, and perhaps this is my bad, by the end of the book I still couldn't completely make sense of him. After a skillfully rendered hurricane and a trip into the heart of darkness in a swamp, the Kid is delivered by the Professor's thorny games of deceit and manipulation into an association with the novel's slightest character: a magazine writer who, as Banks describes him, looks a little like both Ernest Hemingway and Banks himself. This writer derails the narrative while cheerfully and peculiarly extracting the best from a hideous situation and an unsettling ending. Here is what he leaves us with: "What you've got to do, Kid, is forget logic, admit its limitations, suspend your disbelief and believe!" This may sound like advice for a Disney heroine, but at its hyper-real best "Lost Memory of Skin" is proof that Banks remains our premier chronicler of the doomed and forgotten American male, the desperate and the weak, men whose afflictions and antagonists may change over the years but whose fundamental struggle never does. As a side note, you can also plot key moments in cultural devolution through Banks's books. In "Continental Drift" (1985), Banks's doomed protagonist Bob Dubois has a fleeting moment of grace when, in a desperate hour, he runs into the great retired ballplayer Ted Williams in a bait and tackle shop, "and it's as if he's stumbled onto a saint or an angel." Twenty-six years later, the Kid enjoys a similarly transcendent moment when he spots O. J. Simpson: the Kid's "legs go all watery and his breathing turns shallow and fast. ... The Kid has never been this close to a real coldblooded killer before. He somehow hadn't realized O. J. Simpson was a real person and not just a famous killer who existed only on TV." If you're looking for a quick way to explain the last three or four decades of American life, the arc from Williams to O. J. isn't a bad one. And by the end of this ambitious, complex and not wholly coherent story, the Kid knows, as Bob Dubois with his illusions of exceptionalism did not, that he "is not a victim." The only one heroic enough to save the Kid is the Kid himself. Redemption, in Banks's America, is harder won than ever. After stumbling onto a chat line, the Kid arranges to meet an underage girl with the handle 'brandi18.' Helen Schulman's most recent novel is "This Beautiful Life."

*Starred Review* Banks is in top form in his seventeenth work of fiction, a cyclonic novel of arresting observations, muscular beauty, and disquieting concerns. An unloved runt of 22, the Kid thinks he might b. slightly retarded. but his narrational voice evinces a smart, sensitive, and witty, if dangerously uneducated, mind. With only a pet iguana for a friend, the Kid became addicted to online pornography, which leads to his becoming a virginal convicted sex offender on parole, camping out beneath a causeway at the water's edge in a city much like Miami. The Kid joins a veritable leper colony of sex offenders rendered homeless due to a law forbidding them to live within 2,500 feet of any place children may gather. Enter the Professor, a sociologist whose gargantuan mental powers are matched by his astonishing bulk. Humongous, arrogant, generous, brash, and secretive, the Professor, a character of startling and magnetic originality, latches onto the Kid first as a case study, then as an ally, until things go catastrophically wrong. Banks dramatically contrasts the soulless cybersexual carnival with the thorny complexity of flesh-and-blood encounters and our inner lives, the fecund wildness of a vast primeval swamp, and the fury of a hurricane to create a commanding, intrepidly inquisitive, magnificently compassionate, and darkly funny novel of private and societal illusions, maladies, and truths. . HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Banks is among our living literary giants, and promotion for this daring novel includes a print, television, radio, and online campaign and a coast-to-coast tour.--Seaman, Donn. Copyright 2010 Booklist

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. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

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. [See Prepub Alert, 4/18/11.]-Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Myers, FL (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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 with condoms, K-Y jelly, porn and beer after some sexy Internet chat. But Banks makes it clear that there are plenty of actual child molesters and "baby bangers" camped out with the Kid under a Florida causewaybecause they're prohibited from living 2,500 feet from any place children under 18 congregate, which is pretty much everywhere. It's less clear whether the author agrees with the Professor, a sociologist specializing in the causes of homelessness, that pedophilia is a response to feelings of powerlessness and a disease of the modern media world that sexualizes children in advertising. Ambiguity rules in Banks' knotty narrative of the Kid's odyssey after police break up the encampment under the causeway (it's an election year) and he loses his job as a busboy. Was the Professor really a government informer back in the 1960s? Are his former bosses trying to kill him, as he claims? Maybe, but it's hard to tell. And Banks doesn't make it easy to like the Kid, addicted to porn since he started watching it on the Internet at age 10 to blot out the sounds of his mother having sex with her various boyfriends, so isolated by his own wounds that other people don't seem very real to him. 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.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.