Lost Memory of Skin By Russell Banks Clerkenwell Press, 416pp. £12.99
LIFE NEVER PROMISED the Kid anything; his mother did not so much raise him as share living space between enacting various dramas with her many boyfriends. He was small for his age and not so lucky with friends; as for girls, his most intense experience of them, aside from watching his favourite porn queen pole-dance, was courtesy of internet pornography. Nothing went well, not even his stint in the army, which ended when he was caught selling pornographic movies to his fellow soldiers. All the Kid ever had was his pet iguana, Iggy. At 21, the Kid is both invisible and all too visible, “not quite dead but not alive either”.
Russell Banks, whose work includes Affliction (1989); The Sweet Hereafter (1991); a superb short-fiction collection, The Angel on the Roof (2000); and The Darling (2005), a political thriller set partly in Liberia, is one of the United States’ bravest, most daring writers. In Lost Memory of Skin he again explores the world of the marginalised; it is his novel Rule of the Bone (1995) brought graphically up to date.
Both that earlier novel and this stark new one look to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Rule of the Bone was related by a narrator whose voice carried the book. This time Banks remains true to voice but uses the third person. The Kid is a sex offender, he lives in the shadows like a leper of old, he is alone and yet his image is freely available on the internet, where he is presented to the world in general, or at least to anyone with a reason to check his identity, as a sinner and as a criminal.
Set in a present-day Florida city referred to as Calusa, which is clearly Miami, the narrative is uncompromisingly balanced between Banks’s characteristic clear-eyed observation and the terse exchanges batted about by a cast of self-destructive characters, most of whom dislike themselves as much as they detest those around them. The Kid never had a childhood and quickly accepted being pushed around by whatever man was currently sharing his mother’s bed. So he retreated into an inner life and became a voyeur, feeding, from the age of 10, on the explicit pornography available on the internet. As well as being courageous, Banks is moralistic, an old-style polemicist unafraid of portraying technology as a serpent in the garden.
The Kid is tough and coarse but also disarmingly sympathetic and vulnerable: “Little girls. Just thinking about them – never mind talking to them – makes him self-conscious and insecure.” The only real thing his mother ever gave him was the iguana, and for the Kid it was a constant, developing from a tiny lizard into a creature the size of an alligator. For 12 years the Kid has managed to look after his pet, reluctantly entrusting him to his mother while he was in the army. Iggy just about survived Mom’s slap-happy stewardship. Banks plays few things for laughs in this novel, yet somehow, through the sincerity that shapes his fiction, he establishes an unnerving sympathy.
Throughout the story, and it is quite a story, he emphasises how difficult it is to break through the barriers that define society, and the contrasting hands that individuals are dealt. The Kid has nothing except the iguana and his iron will. He is abrasive and defensive but also bizarrely innocent and about as unlucky as it is possible to be.
His status as a sex offender has caused him to retreat to an encampment populated by fellow offenders. Tidy by nature, he keeps his tent organised, and the iguana discourages visitors. The other campers are a sorry bunch, and, as ever, Banks is good on character. The strength of the book, as of Banks the writer, is an enduring belief in the grey area. Very little about this novel is black and white.
Being the work of Russell Banks, it is not just about one young man’s various mistakes; Lost Memory of Skin is also about contemporary US society. It exposes the dangers of technology, the destruction of privacy and the complex horrors of human sexuality, including the sexualisation of children.
Banks can be angry and is often righteous, and there are elements of both in this novel. But his humanity shines through. Among the minor characters is Rabbit, an elderly man who was once a boxer. He is living in the camp because he was caught urinating in public and was reported for exposing himself. He doesn’t mind being labelled as an offender, as it has provided him with a place to live.
The squalor of the camp is brought to life, and there is a brilliant description of a hurricane and the havoc it causes. In one of the many superb set pieces, the Kid, whose mind sustains itself with memories, recalls the day he was given the iguana. It bit his hand and refused to release its hold, even after the boy and his mother had reached a hospital emergency room. The doctor on duty offered to kill the reptile, but the Kid wanted to keep him. The portrayal of the relationship between the boy and the silent creature is convincing and, ultimately, moving.
Banks is meticulous in his description of the iguana, while, late in the narrative, there are several wonderful passages describing the “Great Panzacola Swamp”.
In addition to the Kid, a character whose trauma and guilt enable him to dominate the story and whose voice is true to his nature, there is the Professor, a peculiar, compulsive-eating obsessive of genius-level IQ who arrives after a police raid on the encampment, intending to inspect the site for his research. Instead the self-styled expert on homelessness and sex offences meets the Kid and in him sees the dream interviewee.
Their interaction is intense and as ambivalent as is the Professor, a larger-than-life creature, “a man with two bodies, one 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 human skin”.
The Professor is a mystery, intriguing, perhaps sinister. He too embodies the ambivalence that seeps through the novel. It is no coincidence that Banks makes inspired use of Stevenson’s masterful Treasure Island (1883), in which an almost innocent Jack Hawkins is drawn to the ambivalent Long John Silver in a tale devoid of heroes that pivots upon moral corruption.
Lost Memory of Skin is pragmatic and elusive, at times allusive. The Kid sets off into a swamp wilderness that is initially presented as a primeval paradise. But there is no paradise, nor is there any real escape. Yet again Russell Banks, as committed a commentator as Don DeLillo, looks to – and at – his country in a novel that is uncompromising on the subject of compromise. This is a tough book, raising uncomfortable issues. Banks is dogged and determined, a visionary realist who believes in testing fiction – and his readers. Here is an unsettling narrative that will leave one queasy and sheepish on the question of right and wrong and good and evil. It also testifies to the validity of story as both entertainment and polemic. There may, perhaps, be better novels, but few are as important or as cautionary.
Elements of the Kid are in everyone, and Banks makes this apparent in a book that, rather like the iguana, refuses to relax its hold.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent and author of Ordinary Dogs, published by Faber
