Lost Memory of Skin

Locations
Call Number: Fiction, Adult Book / Fiction / General / Banks, Russell
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Westgate Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction	4-week checkout	Due 05-06-2024
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Banks, Russell	4-week checkout	On Shelf

This is a novel that illuminates the shadowed edges of contemporary American culture with startling and unforgettable results. Suspended in a strangely modern day version of limbo, the young man at the center of this morally complex new novel must create a life for himself in the wake of incarceration. Known in his new identity only as the Kid, and on probation after doing time for a liaison with an underage girl, he is shackled to a GPS monitoring device and forbidden to live within 2,500 feet of anywhere children might gather. With nowhere else to go, the Kid takes up residence under a south Florida causeway, in a makeshift encampment with other convicted sex offenders. Barely beyond childhood himself, the Kid, despite his crime, is in many ways an innocent, trapped by impulses and foolish choices he himself struggles to comprehend. Enter the Professor, a man who has built his own life on secrets and lies. A university sociologist of enormous size and intellect, he finds in the Kid the perfect subject for his research on homelessness and recidivism among convicted sex offenders. The two men forge a tentative partnership, the Kid remaining wary of the Professor's motives even as he accepts the counsel and financial assistance of the older man. When the camp beneath the causeway is raided by the police, and later, when a hurricane all but destroys the settlement, the Professor tries to help the Kid in practical matters while trying to teach his young charge new ways of looking at, and understanding, what he has done. But when the Professor's past resurfaces and threatens to destroy his carefully constructed world, the balance in the two men's relationship shifts. Suddenly, the Kid must reconsider everything he has come to believe, and choose what course of action to take when faced with a new kind of moral decision. In this novel the author examines the indistinct boundaries between our intentions and actions. It probes the zeitgeist of a troubled society where zero tolerance has erased any hope of subtlety and compassion, a society where isolating the offender has perhaps created a new kind of victim.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Not good submitted by evs201 on July 22, 2011, 6:18pm i dont like this book

almost, but not quite submitted by pwiener on November 23, 2011, 10:21am Though it contains superb, humane descriptions of the invisible life of homeless sex offenders (those in the Federal Registry) in southern Florida - many of whom are very minor, harmless criminals doomed to a horrific life of unemployment, scapegoating, denied humanity, recovery, restitution, growth and justice thanks to the Puritanical, hateful heritage of American know-nothings and perverse politicians - Banks manages to make only one or two characters real and denies them any chance of growth and existential choice even though he gives them the experiences and intelligence to have earned it. As a side benefit, his descriptions of Florida's natural coastal flora and fauna, swamps, and untamed water wilderness are among the greatest ever penned for this beautiful, doomed, lawless state. I was extremely disappointed by the end, and by much of the second half of the book. It was as if Banks didn't know where to take the story and his main character, and felt his message of moral outrage far outweighed his authorial responsibility to fiction.