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Lost Memory Of Skin (2000)

by Russell Banks(Favorite Author)

3.55 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0061857637 (ISBN13: 9780061857638)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

review 1: This book was too weird for me. I always described to my friends as a book about a sex offender and his iguana that live under a bridge. Spoiler alert: the iguana gets shot. And it only gets stranger from there. Towards the end it turns into a spy novel? I found that I wasn't enjoying the book because I didn't like the characters. There was nothing rateable about them. I didn't like them so I didn't really care what happened to them, and I wasn't dying to read on and find out how they end up.
review 2: Read for my Night Owls group. I respect Banks's oeuvre; his work has sometimes been excellent. I had the pleasure of meeting him several years ago during an Albany conference in honor of Albany's William Kennedy (subject of my dissertation and book). I respect... more and applaud Banks's taking on yet another character from the marginalized fringes of American society; in LOST MEMORY OF SKIN, it is an early 20s convicted sex offender who goes by the quintessential "name" "The Kid." The Kid has served his sentence and now lives on parole, staying the prescribed legal distance away from children, wearing the requisite tracking device firmly secured to his ankle. In his area of Florida (Florida! No offense, Floridians, but I'll never "get" Florida, but I think Banks set The Kid in the right place), that means living rough, usually under a causeway, with fellows in similar circumstances. The Kid is an intriguing character and is the heart and soul of the book, proof, to me, that a reader can be intrigued by a character whom one would never seek out on one's own. However, the main plot line involves another character, "The Professor," entering The Kid's life (and space) and trying to take control, and the convoluted history (or fiction?) of The Professor's past sends the novel too far off target. The best parts of the book are those during which the reader can see that The Kid, for all that he has done wrong, is not dumb, not an evil-hearted monster, and not without introspection. If only Banks could have avoided getting lost in The Professor's mess of subterfuge and conspiracy theories (or real conspiracies? ... my point is that I just didn't care which they were), I think the novel would have real potential, in the ilk of the best of Banks's previous work - AND in the ilk of the best of William Kennedy's work. The epitome of Kennedy's work is the epitome of late 20th-cnetury American literature's consideration of marginalized characters, and Banks is clearly a devotee of Kennedy. But when Banks tries to have The Kid meditate on not being a victim but being a warrior ... ouch! It isn't a valid allusion to Kennedy's foremost warrior who is never a victim, Francis Phelan, the Ironweed of IRONWEED; it reads more like a blatant rip-off. That upset me. less

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