Russell Banks has long been considered one of the finest writers of literary fiction in America today. His portrait of the American landscape’s dark side and the tortured souls who inhabit it have leapt from the small page to the big screen in award-winning films such as Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter. LOST MEMORY OF SKIN presents perhaps the most challenging work of Banks’s career. With controversial and dark subject matter that is expertly handled, he creates a novel that will linger in the memory of its readers long after the final page is turned.
"LOST MEMORY OF SKIN presents perhaps the most challenging work of Banks’s career. With controversial and dark subject matter that is expertly handled, he creates a novel that will linger in the memory of its readers long after the final page is turned."
The main characters are not as much “people” as they are symbols and metaphors. With the exception of a few tertiary characters, the central figures here have no names. The protagonist, a convicted sex offender, is known simply as the Kid. In his early 20s, his life is already all but over. Convicted of soliciting sex with a minor, he has done his time in prison and is now forced to live under a causeway in Miami that is inhabited by fellow ex-cons and social miscreants. They represent the sad underbelly of society from which most people avert their eyes; they are the invisible minority.
The Kid is unable to get worthwhile employment, he cannot live within 2,500 feet of where children may gather, and he must wear an electronic device on his ankle for a decade, preventing him from wandering beyond the county limits. Whether the Kid was actually guilty of the crime for which he was incarcerated or set up in a string of potential sex offenders becomes almost irrelevant. The Kid, like most people, h