Set the Controls

Lost Memory of Skin was my first exposure to Russell Banks and it definitely will not be my last. Banks is an elegant writer who dares to tackle subterranean subject matter centered on a 21 year old sex offender living under a bridge in a fictional Miami.

After reflecting for a few days upon finishing the book I get the impression that Banks was shooting for a mixture of one part teleology and two parts Mark Twain adventure.

The Kid is much like a John the Baptist figure living in the wilderness below a bridge among the lepers, reflecting on his transgressions and yearning for something beyond his usual urges. The fact that the Kid doesn’t even understand the consequences of his urges is one of the most salient points of the book. This Kid has been abandoned by a culture that has little to offer beyond consumerism and live for the moment bliss as exhibited by his only role model, his mother.

The mother reminds me a lot of Pappy in Huck Finn, and the Kids own version of escapism leads him on a Huck Finn like adventure among the lower classes of modern American society: decaying urban public schools, the military barracks, internet porn, jail and finally a life doomed to pointlessness as he lives below a highway bridge near a waterway with a government issue ankle bracelet monitoring his every move.

Once we get a sense of the place we are in, settings and characters begin to change rapidly, again much like Huck Finn’s river journey, as folks like Paco, The Rabbit, the Shyster, Trinidad Bob and others come and go with rapid pace.

There is even the loss of a ramshackle structure to the might of water to round out our Huck Finn analogy.

I agree with many of the criticism leveled at this book toward the poor development of the secondary characters the Professor and the Writer, but I give Banks a pass for attempting to remain focused on the thematic importance of the issues the Kid is dealing with. The descriptive writing really carries this book in the beginning (especially the scene setting at the beginning and end of a few early chapters) and once the hurricane hits the pace picks up. I struggled with the book for a week and then finished the second half in a day once the real action took off.

Banks does a great job of implying the thematic elements of the title throughout the work. The Kid has no sexual experiences in the real world to develop a memory of, instead a digital sex life of pixels on a screen. What memory of skin he does have is seeing his mother’s naked boyfriends when he was a small boy and interacting with a pet Iguana she brings him from a lost weekend in Mexico.

The Professor is looking to lose the memory of his family upbringing and his apparent service as a duplicitous government agent. He seems also to forget that his skin is his humanity and instead of abusing it with piles and piles of meatloaf and potatoes and pies he should treat himself with respect by taking care of his body.

Again, both the Kid and the Professor abuse their bodies amidst a culture that also seems to lack a memory of anything of value beyond a post World War II surfeit of temporary greatness.

Even the Writer character who makes a brief appearance at the end conveys a sense of this loss of value, at one point even telling the kid that magazine writers make up a lot of their stories based on cursory experiences with their subject matter.

Like John the Baptist living off locusts out in a ravine in the desert, the Kid shows us the frayed edges of the society we have created as he dumpster dives for day over the limit yuppie food to take back to his ramshackle abode beneath a freeway bridge on the outskirts of Calusa.