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Journalism of Courage
Russell Banks,whose new novel,Lost Memory of Skin,is set in Miami first came to Florida in 1958. He was 18,had just dropped out of college and was hoping to join Fidel Castro and his rebels in Cuba. He never made it off the mainland but just being in Florida felt revolutionary. I was a New England kid,coming out of that world, he said. All of a sudden I could smell the Gulf Stream. There were palm trees,and people who didnt look like me,sound like me. Half a century later,I still get off the airplane and feel the same rush. Banks is now 71. Burly and white-bearded,he looks a little like Hemingway,if Hemingway could have been persuaded to wear a diamond chip in his left ear.
In 2007,from a series of articles by Julie Brown in The Miami Herald,he became aware that a colony of homeless sex offenders was squatting under that highway. In novels like Continental Drift,Affliction,The Sweet Hereafter and Rule of the Bone,he has specialised in characters who live on the marginsthe poor,runaways,illegal immigrantsand so,curious about the people who lived under the causeway,he drove over for a closer look. The place became the inspiration for his new book and for its main character: a 22-year-old known only as the Kid,who though he has been convicted of attempting to have sex with a minor,is actually a virgin. Hes an innocent whose greatest failing is an addiction to Internet pornography and a cluelessness that leads him not to suspect that the 14-year-old girl he flirts with online might be a police officer. The novels other important character is a mysterious and enormously fat social scientist (another marginalised creature) who becomes the Kids protector but also treats him as an academic resource and cultural canary: a harbinger of how the Internet has warped us,as the title suggests,from genuine sensual experience.
I realised this was part of a very classical pattern, he added. The younger person on a journey towards self-awareness,and the older one perhaps not as pure as he first seems. He said most sex crimes are committed not by violent predators but by family members or close relatives of the victim. Its become a national preoccupation,this fear of sex crimes. The causeway homeless were evicted in 2010 after they became too visible and embarrassing,Banks said. Another Miami place that figures in the novel is an old fishing compound. In the book it is called Benbows,but to anyone local its recognisable as Jimbos,a different kind
of shantytown.
Looking around,Banks said cheerfully,You know that youve come to the bottom of the continent here. Jimbos had originally been a stage setsome of the shacks had been built for a horror movie filmed thereand it was still used as a backdrop for fashion shoots and music videos,he pointed out. All of Miami is artificial, Banks added. The whole place is one big work of fiction. CHARLES McGRATH
