something to be touched
by
Douglas Messerli
Russell
Banks Lost Memory of Skin (New York: HarperCollins, 2011)
By
focusing on a young man in his early 20s called simply The Kid, who loves
animals (first an iguana, and then an old dog and an eccentric-speaking
parrot), Banks is able to remove much of his audiences’ innate fear and
detestation for child molesters, and consider the issue far more rationally
than he might otherwise have been able to, particularly given American's almost
rabid attitudes toward such offenders. For The Kid, strangely enough, is still
a virgin and has technically “done” nothing; his crime is perhaps that he has
also done nothing with his life. A lonely, almost abandoned child in his
sexually-active mother’s home, The Kid, coming of age, does little but sit in
front of the internet, obsessed with heterosexual porn sites. His entire understanding
of the world comes creeping in from the edges of these sites and other maternal
influences, none of which provides a true perspective on adult experience. Even
serving in the military gives him little comprehension of the larger world; a
loner even in communal military life, The Kid tries to gain popularity by
buying up a large number of sex tapes of his favorite performer, Willow,
handing them out to his fellow soldiers, an act which gets him kicked out of
out of service.
Now even more confused and lonely, The Kid
begins to participate in a chat room with a young girl going by the code name
of brandi18, who admits she is 14, but sexually chats in a far seemingly more
experienced and knowledgeable sexual language than The Kid, creating a kind of
innate disbelief in her reality. Stupidly, The Kid arranges to visit her at her
house, loading himself up with a bag of beer, dildos, and Vaseline for what may
potentially be his first actual sexual encounter. What he encounters instead is
the girl’s father who, having followed their chat-room conversations, confronts
The Kid with the facts, turning him over to the police.
The inevitable occurs, with The Kid
serving prison time and, throughout most of the novel, serving probation with
numerous other sex offenders, forced to live under the Calusa Bay, Florida
causeway since they cannot find places sufficiently distant from schools,
libraries, and other locations in which children live or frequent.
These sorry and unforgiven individuals
live in a kind of unspoken harmony as they attempt simply to survive the police
attacks—a result of the locals complaints for their very existence— and the
ravages of hurricanes. The men, although hardly speaking to one another and
seldom discussing their crimes, still function as a kind of dissociated social
community that allows them to survive—at least until they are too tired and
worn out to want to continue to exist.
Banks’ portrayal of these men alone is
worth the read. And, although Banks does not condone or simplify the villainy
of their actions, his portrayal of these men with nowhere else to go, weekly
revving up their ankle bracelets so that they might continually be tracked by a
society that no longer wants them, is sympathetic and moving.
Into this lower depths world comes a
larger than life figure, The Professor, determined to check out the
under-the-causeway society for his social and psychological studies. Coming
upon the encampment at the very moment when most of the men have been
temporarily dispersed, The Professor discovers The Kid, following him as he
shifts location to a seedy outpost named Benbows and back again to the
causeway, questioning, challenging, and even helping The Kid to financially
survive in return for his answers.
This “Haystack” of a man, as The Kid dubs
the large proportions of his body, is a genius with a wife and two children,
but with a past that even he can’t explain. If The Kid’s past is all too
familiar, The Professor’s past, we gradually discover, is a compartmentalized
world of contradictions as the author reveals his involvement with leftist
groups, and as an informant for various government and even international
agencies. The Professor’s world is that of 1960s and 1970s politics,
interminably complex and rationalized, like something—as The Kid says time and
again—out of a novel or a movie. Indeed, at times, Banks’ imagination of this
man’s past is so glib it almost seems that he has cribbed from The Man Who Came
In from the Cold and other such fictions. But then one doesn’t have to be a
conspiracy theorist to know that such individuals did and perhaps, still do
exist.
Slowly, as the two, an odd couple—the boy
a skinny outcast who attempts to dissociate himself from his body and the
highly obese man whose life is clearly centered in his heft—develop a kind of
relationship, playing out a kind of 2lst century version of Huckleberry Finn
and Jim—wherein the scrappy, uneducated Kid weathers all kinds of adventures
with the help the wiser slave to his own body and past.
As The Kid’s true self —if he has a “true”
self—is gradually revealed, so does the balance between the two shift, The
Professor ultimately insisting the boy interview him on camera, so that he can
leave a testimony to his wife. Fearing that elements from his past have
gradually come to haunt him, the Professor, with cold recognition, insists that
some scandal from his past will be created and that, eventually, he will be
found dead, apparently of suicide, after the accuser—individual, media, or
police—will disappear, the case dropped. The CD that The Kid produces through
the interview is to be given, after his death, to the Professor’s wife, so that
she and his children can know “the truth” as opposed to the rumors and lies
reported.
Indeed the Professor is found dead, in the
very canal which he has pointed out as a likely place to The Kid. But “the
truth” of what the Professor has “professed” comes under even greater scrutiny
as he and a new accomplice—a kind of Hemingway-like stand-in for the author
himself—enters the scene, The Kid, coincidentally, finding evidence through
papers of one of his fellow sex-offenders, that the Professor, under the name
Dr. Hoo, may have been deeply involved in child rapes.
Having been paid for his services with a
substantial amount of money, The Kid now reveals a deeper aspect of his being,
having to face the moral dilemmas of returning the money—wanting no gains from
a man who might have participated in these horrendous acts—or to accept the
$10,000 cash, allowing him to continue to feed his old dog and eccentric parrot
and himself survive for an indefinite period of time. Finally, it depends on
what The Kid wants to believe, whether he can make a leap of faith or will return
to the cynicism of his self-protective past.
When The Kid finally discovers that the
Dr. Hoo of the emails committed suicide by gunpoint years earlier, he accepts
the Professor’s own depiction of reality, which, in turn, permits him finally
to begin to perceive himself as a real human being with a third dimension, a
moral conscience which has a reality and standing in the world. Returning to
the Causeway, The Kid now perceives himself as “guilty,” as a man who has made
wrong choices, and he is determined to create a different, more substantial self,
while the authorial stand-in moves in with Bank's warmest character, the
Professor's librarian wife, Gloria.
Banks’ issues are profound moral American
dilemmas that have no easy answers. At times, for my taste, the author moves
too closely to correct thinking, arguing simplistically for the psychological
motivations of his figures relating to their lack of self-worth and other
societal deficiencies. In his disapproval of the internet addiction of too many
children and adults, Banks even goes so far as to suggest that our society, in
its endless fascination with the internet and pornography, is being transformed
into a world of two dimensional beings—to my thinking a kind clichéd vision, a
presumption that “pornography” is necessarily at the center of a horrific
cultural transformation. In truth, pornography, in one form or another, has
been always there. The issues Banks brings forward, however, are important
ones, worthy of being thought about with the greatest of subtlety without
religious and moral prejudice. And overall, Banks has gone further in helping
US readers than most writers to begin to recognize these important issues
concerning what to do with people who sexually and socially “cross the line,”
Banks suggesting that there may a way to bring them back into society instead
of pretending to exterminate them by continued imprisonment or damning them to
outcast, leper-like colonies. Despite his recognition of “guilt,” The Kid, is
still more innocent at fiction's end than most of us, and is also one of us.
Instead of being cast out of our midst should perhaps he should be carefully
embraced, something that might have made
him years earlier come to understand that he had a body, that his skin
was something not only be pulled upon, but is to be warmly and lovingly
touched.
State
College, Pennsylvania, April 2, 2012
Reprinted
[in a different version] from Rain Taxi
