Tag: youthful innocence

Lost Memory of Skin, by Russell Banks

This 2011 work  is an excellent, provocative novel, with sociological and philosophical depth. After a while, however, it becomes difficult for the reader to get his footing, because it has two major characters, and it is unclear which one is more sympathetic and which one we are to be oncerned about. Not that these are ordinary characters, for the Kid is a virgin and yet a convicted sex offender and the Professor is a garguantian fat man, a genius who claims to have once spent years commiting illegal acts undercover for the government.

At first, it seems to be the Kid we are to identify with, not least because we are curious about how he is both a virgin and a sex offender. Then the Professor arrives, claiming that one of his undercover agencies is out to kill him before he betrays its secrets. He is, conveniently perhaps, researching a study of homelessness among sex offenders, and offers to help the Kid adapt to society. This reader’s focus was thus confused, because after being committed to the Kid, along comes the Professor as a much more interesting person, and one confronting a much more dramatic situation.

The novel is so interesting not because of any confrontation between these two characters, but because of the confounding situation each one is in and the mutual support they give each other. It is also interesting because Banks both draws a portrait of the underside of society through the Kid and suggests an underground society through a man who may or may not be what he appears to be. This is why the reader identifies off and on with each character. Until death intervenes, and we realize who the main character is.

All of this takes place in a vividly described southern state, much of it where a mangrove swamp meets the Caribbean. But while it is a specific, concrete world, it is not identifiable on a real map. Which does not matter. Because what matters is that it brings alive the reality of an underside of life hidden beneath a causway, hidden from society.

Yet on another level, reality is a key element that gives philosophical depth to this novel. For Banks continually juxtaposes the fake world of reality, represented by internet pornography, to the real world the Kid confronts. Indeed, Janet Maslin in her exellent New York Times review explains that the title refers to how “real flesh has been supplanted by the virtual kind.” She also notes Banks description of an internet culture “lost in the misty zone between reality and imagery, no longer able to tell the difference.”

Beyond this difference, Banks gets the reader to probe different realities by wondering how the Kid is a sexual offender without having had sex. And whether the Professor really was a secret government agent. Indeed, Banks even introduces a metafictional element. So, just as the Professor has created a story about his former life, Banks has created the Kid’s story within this novel. With the implication being if we agree to the reality of the Professor’s story, we should agree to the reality of the Kid’s story. More, that is, than its reality in this novel, but also its reality in the reader’s world.

This parsing of reality also evolves at the end as Banks through the Kid explores the difference between shame and guilt. Throughout the novel, the Kid’s fascination with pornography has been a part of his character. Indeed, this is what had led him into being arrested for a sexual offense. And for this he has always felt the guilt of being a bad person. But at the end, he discovers a difference between guilt and sheme. And realizes that what he has felt is shame for what he has done, which is the reaction of a good person. Which is what he is. Whereas guilt is what a bad person feels. Which he is not. And so he now faces his future as a convicted sex offender without guilt.

Banks also builds a fascinating discussion around the truth of the Professor’s past. Should the Kid believe him or not? Banks introduces a Writer at the end who prompts this discussion, for he believes the Professor’s story, while the Kid does not. For a while, I thought this Writer might play a role in the novel’s outcome, but eventually it is clear he is there to serve a certain function for the author. The discussion revolves around the difference between knowing something is true, having proof, and simply believing it is true. And the same question, of course, is being asked of the reader. Does he believe the Professor’s story or not? The Writer urges the Kid to “believe.” Which is to imply not spiritual belief, but a belief in mankind.

I had thought that Banks was going to leave that question unanswered at the end. But for the most part he answers it. He does, however, unnecessarily complicate the issue at the end. For he suddenly introduces emails from another character that opens up a possibility of a different secret life of the Professor, one that convinces the Kid that his friend’s backrground story is not true. Then the outcome of this pulls the rug from under the Kid’s belief. However, while I was not convinced by this sudden complication, Banks might have felt it necessay to make believable the Kid’s final decision.

One should note here Maslin’s perceptive comment: “the Kid’s growing capacity for self-knowledge becomes a driving force [as Banks] coaxes the Kid from helpless innocence to enlightened dignity, from all-consuming shame to glimmering self-knowledge.”

Helen Schulman’s Times review then broadens our view: “Banks remains our premier chronicler of the doomed and forgotten American male, the desperate and the weak, men whos afflictions and antagonists may change over the years but whose fundamental struggle never does.”

This is an unusually successful novel in its blend of drama, human characters from the underside of life, and an indepth probe of both human psychology and philosophical meaning. It is less an exploration of American society, even with the changes wrought by the computer, than an exploration of the internal lives we all live. A life of survival and hope. A life of guilt and shame. A life of reality and lies. A life of human contact and human denial. It is a marvelous achievment, one of the author’s finest works. (January, 2016)

The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger

This 1951 novel is the story of a teenager and New York City. Plus his family and his friends. And a few strangers. Holden Caulfield is a precocious kid, a smart-aleck, and if he is also pretentious it is because he is insecure. Here is a brilliant portrait of adolescence, and one can understand why this work is a favorite of anyone under, say, thirty. When one’s own memories of adolescence are so recent.

But as a novel, this work resembles a one-trick pony. It is the story of Holden and his encounter after encounter with fellow students, professors, distant girl friends, two nuns, three tourist women, a prostitute, and finally his young sister Phoebe. And each meeting underscores Holden’s braggadocio, his immaturity, his false modesty, and his desperation to seek out and connect with someone. That is, each meeting with a different person is a variation on a common theme.

Where is this narrative going, I kept asking myself.

Finally, in the very last scene, with sister Phoebe riding the carousel in Central Park, we realize the sense of family that has been the context of all his interactions. He has been contacting all these people in lieu of his family. And each time, as he rationalizes his failure to connect with someone, he desperately seeks out someone else. He continues to make these attempts because he also seeks a connection that he cannot find with the adult world at home.

Holden has been talking about his parents throughout his narrative, as well as about his brothers, one of whom has died of leukemia, and about Phoebe. But he has been afraid to reach out to his family after being expelled from school for not passing his courses. For being thought as stupid. Which he obviously is not.

So why does he encounter failure when he reaches out to others? Perhaps because it is an adult relationship he seeks, but he is afraid of adulthood. One might add that he is afraid of adulthood because he is afraid of death, which has struck one older brother. But he is also afraid of the sex that represents adulthood and that motivates many of his adventures. And so he puts up a wall of cynicism to protect him from that adulthood.

But did Salinger need almost 300 pages to draw this portrait? Yes, these are brilliant pages. Yes, they perfectly capture a smart but troubled youth. Yes, the adolescent tone is remarkably consistent. But technical virtuosity for me goes only so far. Until the very end, this narrative remains on the surface. Once Holden’s shallowness is established, even with all the variations, the portrait goes no deeper.

The title is symbolic of the pleasures of youth, and of saving youth from entering the false world of adulthood. Holden misinterprets the Robert Burns poem, and dreams of children playing in a rye field at the edge of a cliff; and his job is to save these kids from falling off the cliff, meaning into adulthood. He is the catcher in the rye. One critic even suggests that at the end, Phoebe, although she is just a kid, becomes the catcher, because she has persuaded Holden to give up his naive plan to escape the adult world by fleeing out west and living as a deaf mute (so he doesn’t have to talk to anyone).

At one point, incidentally, Holden defends writing that goes off tangent, and introduces a new, disconnected subject. This to me is an indirect defense of his own narrative here, in which Holden not only seeks different characters to relate to but also introduces new subjects in his conversations with them when the talk is not going in the direction he wishes. Skipping about is also, presumably, the way a restless adolescent mind works.

In passing, I would also note that spiritual references hover over this narrative, as it does in many of Salinger’s works. The events here occur in the days leading up to Christmas, and he comments on Jesus and the Radio City Christmas show. Holden also encounters two nuns, who are portrayed sympathetically. And even the frequent “goddam” remarks remind us of the world of religion, along with a youth pretending to be an adult.

The vernacular, indeed, is characteristic of this book’s style. This work, for example, popularized the word “phony,” representing, according to Holden, anything in the adult world. Another pretense of that adult world is using “old” in front of the names of people he meets. Other choice phrases include “shoot the bull,” “chew the fat,” and “get a kick out of that.” All both reverberate with the times, and re-enforce the adolescence of Holden.

To sum up, the more I think about this novel, and the more critics I read, the more I accept that this is a deeper novel than what I thought it was while reading it. More thought went into Holden’s character than I realized, such as his self-protective alienation to avoid what he called being a phony adult. And I can even see this work’s comparison to The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn, because it is narrated by an adolescent and is in the vernacular of the boyhood of its era. But Huckleberry Finn offers us glimpses of the world outside Huck, the social setting in which he lives, while Catcher in the Rye exists entirely within Holden Caulfield himself. It is a portrait of him rather than its era, and it also creates its own style rather than satirizes an earlier literary style.

This work does not prompt me to go back and reread other Salinger work. He is an author for younger readers. Indeed, he seems to have inspired some authors to write similarly about their own youth. But he was writing for another era. His was an era of innocence, an innocence that is captured here, but an innocence that no longer exists, an innocence, indeed, that his book has helped us move beyond. For, in its literature, that innocent world proscribed sex, proscribed profanity, and proscribed rebellion, all of which are abundant here. Yes, those aspects are understated, but Salinger in this work helped to open the literary door to this previously unacknowledged reality. He himself was no phony. (February, 2015)