Lost Memory of Skin

Russell Banks' latest novel is in the tradition of his other work---which is to say that it is about a completely different topic than anything he has worked on previously, and that it is focused on a particularly American narrative, yet situates it very much in place.
I've long been a fan of Banks. From the devastating Affliction to the fascinating Cloud Splitter Banks looks closely at the lives of Americans and the ways in which society shapes the individual. His writing can be wildly different from book to book and stylistically it doesn't always work. I had to put down The Reserve, for example, because I didn't believe it.
Lost Memory of Skin exposes the lives (via a single life) of convicted sex offenders and how, through the legal process, we have isolated these individuals to the extent that we have created a tiny, new, marginalized class of quasi-citizens. Banks did a great deal of research for the novel, using the actual predicaments of these men (for most are men) in shaping the situations and setting. This is a heartbreaking read, and though the some plot twists aren't always believable (and they don't have to be, do they?), it is very readable and engrossing. Banks uses lengthy descriptions of the landscape of Florida, past and present, perhaps to link the protagonist's fate to something larger--or perhaps not.
The human thought, emotional cost portrayed here is quite real. Bank's writes an indictment of an indiscriminate justice system, one that condemns as sex offenders a rapist of children along with the nineteen year-old that has sex with his underage girlfriend.
This book made me recall another novel, Stewart O'Nan's The Good Wife (2005) which is based on the author's close look at the toll the penal system takes on families. Book books give us heartbreaking tales of mistakes made and lives misspent. Both these novels skillfully illuminated a parcel of life I'd known nothing about.