Lost memory of skin...

Last night I finished the troubling, nuanced, creative and insightful new novel by Russell Banks: Lost Memory of Skin. Writing in the NY Times, Janet Maslin concludes:

This book expresses the conviction that we live in perilous, creepy times. We toy recklessly with brand-new capacities for ruination. We bring the most human impulses to the least human means of expressing them, and we may not see the damage we do until it becomes irrevocable. Mr. Banks, whose great works resonate with such heart and soul, brings his full narrative powers to bear on illuminating this still largely unexplored new terrain.    

(go to: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/26/books/russell-bankss-novel-lost-memory-of-skin-review.html))

The story about a young and naive sex-offender challenges our sensibilities:  the  22 year old "Kid" aches for intimacy, but has only learned to experience it through Internet pornography.  From the time he was 10, his mother attends only to her own sad search for pleasure rather than guiding her flesh and blood. Consequently, the Kid is allowed to let his aching impulse for love lead him into degradation and addiction - without any clue that it is happening. As Banks has said, this is a novel that explores what it means to turn our children over to the wolves of this contemporary culture. "This is a story of how a good man losses his goodness."

(go to: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/15/books/russell-banks-talks-about-lost-memory-of-skin.html?pagewanted=all)

What's more, it is a story about how we are sacrificing our humanity in a world disconnected from "skin."  It is tragic that this man/child learns about love only through pornography; it is heart-breaking that he "doesn't feel real" until he sees his story being told on a computer screen. And there is the all too real indictment of the scriptures about the sins of the mothers and father being visited upon their children unto the third and fourth generation when the Kid discovers that there is more community to be found in the homeless camp for other sex offenders under the highway than any place else in our so-called healthy society.

This is an important novel - both for its critique of the still unknown consequences of our increasingly cyber-obsessed culture as well as its challenge to our all-or-nothing social norms - and I hope church groups choose to study and discuss it.  I am going to find a way in 2012 to do just that - hard stuff for some "Kleenex Christians" who are scandalized by the harshness of real life.  But God's grace doesn't stop at the suburbs... or polite society... or with the innocent.  God's grace was born in the filth of the stable - was raised up on a Cross at the intersection of religion and politics - and comes to us at the margins of our humanity. (It made me think of the workd Radiohead has been working in a similar vein...)

We'll be reading Jaco Hamman's A Play-Full Life first... but there has to be space this year for Lost Memory of Skin, too.