09/24/2011
By SAM SACKS
Russell Banks
is a chronicler of American untouchables. In his 17 works of fiction he has depicted illegal immigrants, trailer-park dwellers, drug addicts and runaways. His brilliant new novel, "Lost Memory of Skin" (Ecco, 416 pages, $25.99), is about a homeless colony of convicted sex offenders living on the south Florida coastline. It may be his boldest imaginative leap yet into the invisible margins of society.The novel tells the story of a 22-year-old called only the Kid who has been found guilty of soliciting sex from a minor. At one point, the Kid reflects on how deeply his anonymity ran even before he was caught for the crime and expelled from society: "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 level of arithmetic, who was hooked for years and maybe still hooked on porn . . . and never had a girlfriend or a best friend and belonged to no one's posse."
The racing run-ons of the Kid's inner monologue make "Lost Memory of Skin" read like a continuation of Mr. Banks's scarily exhilarating 1995 coming-of-age classic "Rule of the Bone
," about a homeless boy's odyssey among biker gangs and drug traffickers. But the two novels are better thought of as opposite sides of a coin. The narrator of "Rule of the Bone" is a 14-year-old victim of sexual abuse; the Kid has been busted after showing up at a house where he expected to have sex with a 14-year-old girl he met in an Internet chat room. The girl turned out to be a police officer.The Kid's punishment, after a short jail sentence, is a 10-year probation period during which he must wear a tracking monitor and isn't allowed to live within 2,500 feet of any place children regularly gather. Because he also can't leave the county, there is effectively only one place he can go: a rat-infested strip of land beneath a causeway where other sex offenders have erected a shantytown. Mr. Banks is superb at individualizing these "Bridge People," as they're called, who range from public flashers to child rapists. (The creepiest is a former state senator nicknamed the Shyster, who talks about his pedophilia with unnerving sangfroid.)
Even in this clan, though, the Kid is an outsider. He's a sex offender but also, uniquely, a virgin (the one time he ventured beyond pornography he was arrested). He's guilty of a heinous offense, but his status as a pariah gives him a striking purity of vision—since the scarlet letter
of his crime is visible in his ankle monitor or in online registries, he has no secrets or hidden shames to cover up. Mr. Banks introduces the novel's richest motif when the Kid reads the Adam and Eve story from the state senator's Bible. His first reaction is to wonder whether "the whole tree of knowledge of good and evil thing was set up by God as a kind of prehistoric sex-sting with the snake as the decoy." He himself is abjectly fallen, yet he retains a strange prelapsarian innocence and honesty.The story is driven by the appearance of a social scientist called the Professor, who is himself a social outsider because of his intelligence—he is reputed to be the smartest man in the county—and his extreme obesity (he weighs nearly a quarter-ton). When the Professor waddles down to the encampment, the Kid is put in mind of "God stopping by to visit the Garden of Eden." The Professor wants to interview the Kid and help him turn the camp into an orderly, habitable society, and there is a threat early on that Mr. Banks will use the social scientist as a megaphone for his own theories about the causes of sex crimes. But this novel offers few lectures. It turns out that the Professor has a secret past—unlike the Kid's entirely exposed history—that becomes integral to the well-paced plot.
"Lost Memory of Skin" is 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.
Charles Frazier's "Nightwoods
" (Random House, 259 pages, $26) is the first of his novels—after the historical epics "Cold Mountain
" and "Thirteen Moons
"—to take place in the 20th century. Set in the "vertical country" of small-town North Carolina in the 1960s, it's a simpler affair that borrows the conventions of a romantic crime novel. When Lily, a young mother of twins, is murdered by her husband, the traumatized children are given shelter by her sister, Luce, at the remote mountain lodge where she is the caretaker. But then the husband, Bud, is freed when his murder trial ends with a hung jury. He sets out to track down the children, intending to extract a secret from them that their mother took to her grave.But just because the story is simple doesn't mean that Mr. Frazier has abandoned the grandiose, needlessly wordy style that helped make him a millionaire. Why write simply that neither child could speak, or describe a character as yelling angrily, when saying that "neither child displayed language" and someone is "yelling proclamations of anger" sounds so much more literary? The empty swagger of the writing, along with Bud's portentous philosophizing ("Blood mattered above all else, the sacred shedding of it"), is all there is to tide the reader over for hundreds of pages before the promised showdown between Bud and Luce. "Bud's patience had a fuse," we're told—about 50 pages past the point where ours had fizzled out.
