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Books: Migration and Russell Banks’ “Lost Memory of Skin”

A shared prize set novelist Jonathan Franzen (“Freedom”) and biographer Isabel Wilkerson (“The Warmth of Other Suns”) on the same stage last Sunday. http://www.chicagohumanities.org/ through Nov. 13th. (Thanks for the treat, Deborah.)

Migration figures in both works. In “Freedom,” Patty leaves the East Coast for a kinder, gentler life in the Midwest. In “Warmth…” six million African Americans abandon the Jim Crow South. These wrenching departures — leaving one’s home and family, forever, for the unknown — is the only solution for desperate situations. Patty leaves a household indifferent to her athletic achievements and hostile to her reported date rape. Wilkerson’s subjects leave home to be freed from a caste system that kept them segregated and disenfranchised.

I finished reading Russell Banks’ “Lost Memory of Skin,” the same evening I heard Franzen and Wilkerson discuss migration and freedom.

Which left me thinking: what about those who can’t leave, who are stuck in an intolerable situation, even if it’s of their own creation?

That’s the starting point for Banks’ novel about a convicted sex offender in contemporary Miami. The Kid, as he’s known, wears a monitoring device on his ankle. He can’t live or visit any place within 2,500 feet of an area frequented by children. He’s an adult, but not much older than the teenage girl he arranged to meet, via the Internet, for sex. The Kid lives under a causeway within a tent city peopled by fellow sex offenders. None of them can leave the county — they’re monitored, too — but they can’t live easily within it, either.

After a publicized police raid of the encampment, a Professor from a nearby university persuades the Kid to be part of his study of sex offenders and homelessness.

The Kid is a fully realized character: we learn of his unfortunate past, his hopes and fears for the future, his everyday disappointments. We understand his few relationships. Hooked on porn as a preteen, the Kid is backwards and withdrawn. Even in the camaraderie of an Army platoon, the Kid is alone. Poorly educated, a social misfit: who’s to blame?

The Professor is the first person to point the Kid to a better life. Theirs is an unlikely but endearing relationship.

As the Kid’s confidence grows, the Professor’s life spins out of control, quite spectacularly.

There is comfort in this book’s end: the Kid is in the same place physically but in a better place mentally and emotionally. He accepts that he’ll never understand the Professor’s life, or motives. (Neither will I.) He’s still stuck wearing that ankle monitor for the next nine years.

This was not my favorite Banks’ book — those would be “Continental Drift” and “The Darling’ — but it’s certainly worth the read. A porn-addled sex offender worth rooting for: that’s no small feat.

Banks is one of our greatest living writers.

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