1. Isn’t it miraculous that Banks can make me feel compassion for a sex offender?
2. The book is shallow and poorly written.
I can see where people in both of these camps are coming from. In my own estimation, Lost Memory of Skin is an ambitious novel, but one that ultimately fails to live up to its promise. Yes, its primary protagonist, the Kid, is a sex offender, and Banks’s clear intent is to comment on the memory holes our society would prefer people like him would fall into. But the Kid is the most borderline of cases and is given the most sympathetic of backstories. Mostly abandoned by his single mother, his frame of human relations is shaped largely by the internet porn he watches in all of his free time. Reaching out online, he meets what he thinks is a fourteen-year-old girl, and he pursues an opportunity for them to meet in person for an illicit encounter.
sorry. had a phone call from my mom checking up on me. i’m sorta grounded.
what 4?
grades. so r u coming fri or sat?
i’ll come fri. c what happens and maybe sat. 2 if u like. u might invite me 2 stay over.
yr 2 old. and a guy. my moms’ll kill me if she finds out.
she wont.
bring the beer. my moms counts her stash when she gets home.
k. i’ll bring some surprises 2.
like what?
u’ll see. Around 10 ok?
k. Bye. gotta log out and delete. my moms is home. sometimes she reads my e-mails when she gets home. she’s a bitch. c u fri around 10.
That’s the online chat that leads to the Kid’s encounter; an encounter not with a fourteen-year-old girl but with the authorities that have been posing as one, and the Kid is convicted of solicitation of a minor, branded a sex offender, and forced to live on the margins of society, under a causeway in south Florida. But the Kid doesn’t yet know any of that as he contemplates the “surprise” he intends for his encounter: a porn video. He takes care in selecting one that he thinks will be appropriate to the situation, because even the Kid knows that the encounter will be different from what he has experienced online.
He’d look for one of those at Moviemasters tomorrow which was Thursday and watch it alone first to make sure it had enough of a story to interest a fourteen-year-old girl. It wouldn’t matter if it didn’t interest him because he’d already seen it and hundreds of others just like it. He’d be dealing with reality this time. Not illusion. He’d be watching and actually touching a real female human being’s body, skin, breasts, legs, ass, vagina, instead of just pictures made from electronic pixels whose colors and movement and arrangement on a screen were predetermined and controlled by a script and director and a half-dozen camera angles. That’s what frightened him. That’s why his hands were trembling as he lighted another cigarette. He was about 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.
And this is really the buried theme of the novel -- the territory that Banks is really interested in exploring -- this juxtaposition and the (sometimes violent) disconnect between the world as we would contain it in our minds and the world as it really is. We’ll see this theme teased again and again throughout the novel. For example, we’ll see it clearly in the hurricane that comes to disrupt the narrative -- both the one Banks is telling and the ones that his characters (like the Professor) weave around themselves.
The wind has ceased to buffet the sides of the Professor’s van, and he no longer struggles to hold it to the road, and the rain has let up. He’s situated in the eye of the storm, he thinks, the center of a two-hundred-mile atmospheric coil of low pressure twirling its way across the Caribbean and the Gulf like a colossal dervish. Right here at the still center is the place to stay, if only he can manage it -- no wind, no rain, no turbulence or uncertainty. The morning sky is a smooth-sided pale green bowl, the pressure so low it feels like a huge vacuum pump has siphoned the air away. The music plays on -- Bud Powell’s arpeggios and stomps -- and the Professor feels calm and lucid and safe: almost invisible. 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.
The Professor is the second major character in the novel -- a teacher and researcher who stumbles into the Kid’s story and wants to learn more about it for its sociological and academic value. And the Professor, like the Kid, is also a man shaped and torn by his inner passions. For the Kid, his inner drive is fed by pornography and sex. For the Professor, it is food and hunger.
Three times the Professor stops on his journey west and north to Alabama, twice for gas but otherwise for food, truck-stop food -- stew and biscuits and pie and ice cream -- and fast food -- Big Macs and fries and more pies. He does this without deciding to do it, as if his hunger is a constant ongoing need that can never be satisfied. He has no reason to check in on it and ask whether he is actually hungry again. It’s always there, like his breath. It is who he is and has been for as long as he can remember, a never-ending appetite.
The parallels between the Kid and the Professor are not hard to see, with Banks almost going out of his way to compare the prison created by the Kid’s unchecked desire (the one of sex offender registries, ankle monitors, and homelessness) with the prison created by the Professor’s unchecked desire (the one of obesity, heart disease, and isolation).
[The Professor] turns away and the Kid watches him waddle slowly up the long slope toward the parking lot and his van. He watches him the whole way. That’s the last time the Kid will see the man: 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 stressed 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 the 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, once 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.
We are disgusted by the Kid and the Professor both -- even knowing that they are victims of their own actions -- but they are both creatures who live more or less innocently inside their rough and offensive exteriors.
A third major character enters the novel in its final part, a freelance travel writer, also unnamed, referred by the narrator only as the Writer. He is supposedly writing a travel article about the fun things to do in the “Great Panzacola Swamp,” but his reporter’s nose catches a whiff of the Kid’s and the Professor’s tangled story -- a piece of which ends in the Professor’s mysterious disappearance and assumed suicide -- and he wants to learn more, too.
The Writer looks him over carefully. “You know something I don’t know?”
“Sort of. I shouldn’t be telling you all this. You’re probably gonna write about it.”
The Writer shakes his head. “No way I’ll write about it.”
“Yeah? Why not?”
“Who’d want to read it? Kiddie porn and child molesters, pedophiles and suicidal college professors? Jesus! Besides, I’m just a freelance travel writer, not some kind of investigative journalist or a novelist trying to depress people.”
Ah. I see what you’re doing there. Unfortunately, despite the promise of Banks’s ambition in Lost Memory of Skin, the character of the Writer and passages like this show that Banks is not really serious. He is only playing with the reader and, sadly, he’s not doing it very skillfully.
The most compelling part of the novel (for me) is when the Kid stumbles across Dolores Driscoll -- the school bus driver from Banks’s wonderful The Sweet Hereafter -- now remarried, living in Florida, and running a swamp boat supply business in the Everglades. Banks lets us spend a few pages in Dolores’s head, and in that span we get to hear her impression of the Kid.
The young man reminds her some of the little schoolboys she knew back when she was driving a country school bus up by the Canadian border years ago, before her invalid husband died and she moved as far south as she could do and still be in America to get away from the memories of all that and try to start her life over in her late fifties, which, thanks to finding Cat Turnbull, she has pretty much succeeded at. She remembers how every year or two a scrawny pale boy several years short for his age and looking almost malnourished would show up on the first day of school at the school bus stop outside a falling-down shingles wreck of a house or one of the rented dented double-wide house trailers on the outskirts of town, a new boy in town who couldn’t make eye contact with anyone, not even with the other children. They were born to lose, those little boys, no other words for it, and the other children recognized it instantly and turned on them the way a flock of hens will single out the weakest member of the flock and start pecking at its head and eyes until it bleeds and tear out its feathers one by one until they’ve made it so ugly and deformed that lying panting on its side in the dust it looks more like a grotesque version of a newborn chick than an adult hen. You couldn’t protect those persecuted boys from the other children, any more than you could protect the poor pecked-to-death hen from its flock, because those boys mistrusted adults, no doubt with good reason, even more than they mistrusted other children, as if the protective adult were merely a larger stronger version of the worst of the other children. If you tried to help then they turned surly and pulled away in sullenness from your extended hand and stumbled back into the eagerly waiting flock.
Here is a fatalism that neither the Kid nor the Professor ever possesses, not even with the Professor’s suicide or the Kid’s eventual return to life under the causeway with the other dregs of society. Despite their numerous and violent encounters with the real world, neither of them ever lose the compulsions of their inner lives, and seem more or less content to be continually driven by them to the end of time. Their exterior selves suffer -- suffer horribly -- but their inner selves never really do. Whatever it is that shaped them to be who they are, those forces are evidently more powerful than what anything -- even hurricanes -- can throw at them.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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