Reviewed by Ronald Goldfarb

“No one is who he or she seems to be … Everybody has a secret agenda and a secret lie … We all have our little secrets … and we all tell little lies …”

Russell Banks’ 19^th book, his 17^th novel, is an entirely original, if pathetic, story which deals with the trickiest, most off-putting subject — sex offenders — in a compelling and sympathetic fashion. To find in the lives of convicted sex offenders their humanity, humor, the quandary of their existence, without brushing aside their social deviance requires a masterful novelist. Banks succeeds impressively.

The novel relates the odd and tragic companionship of two completely different social misfits. The Kid — named appropriately for reasons that become clear — is a 22-year-old naïve boy-man, who was convicted of an aborted attempt at Internet-arranged sex with an underage girl. Registered and monitored as a deviant, he lives with his pet iguana (“responsible for what little capacity the Kid possesses for loving others”) in a tent under a causeway in Miami with a sad array of strange and lonely offenders: “bad ghosts,” homeless because they must reside 2,500 feet from any school, daycare center, playground or residence of anyone under 18. That repressive requirement leaves convicts with three places of sanctuary — under the causeway, Terminal G at the airport or the eastern end of the distant Everglades swamp. Ironically, their weird society is not far from the palatial residences of entertainers, professional athletes, movie stars and wealthy drug dealers.

The pathetic denizens of this creepy netherworld have no friends or family or hope. “Everybody here is on his own. So to speak.” They exist in makeshift squalid shanties, tied to society only by the ankle bracelets that monitor their location. Their encampment is “silent and still and lies in darkness invisible to the world.” Most of them were abandoned and abused. The grim cast is incidental to the story: the Rabbit, Paco, Plato, PC, Froot Loops, Ginger, the Greek, the Shyster — a veritable social leper colony of hopeless, invisible souls, with “nowhere left to go.” The local press refers to this sad society as “Bridge People,” not only because they live under one but metaphorically, as the Kid reflects, “they are a bridge between what passes for normal human beings and animals.” They all share “the loneliness and shame of banishment and harassment …”

Into this milieu arrives the Professor, an enormous, bearded, genius-IQ sociology professor from a nearby college who is fascinated by these human research sources of homelessness. He befriends the Kid, who is ignored by his deserted mother, friendless, clueless, a product of Internet porn who lives an internal life of lonely despair. Their strange association and intriguing conversations compose the arc of this extraordinary, exploratory, provocative book.

The precocious and personally idiosyncratic Professor graduated from Kenyon College and Yale, and was recruited as a spy, causing him to compartmentalize part of his prior life. “Each of his pasts was designed at the time strictly to deny the existence of the others …” He taught at the local college, married and had two children, existing in an eccentric — but legal — life. The Kid becomes for him the personification of the false pariah, people to be despised, denied, who are beyond redemption. The Professor is repulsed yet fascinated by the squalid, pathetic existence of the Kid and the outcasts who live under the bridge, foraging from supermarket garbage bins for food. They are wasted lives who would be for the Professor “a long term project” that could provide data and enlighten attitudes about offenders and the homeless. He views them “scientifically. Like lab specimens.”

The oversized Professor — the diminutive Kid calls him Haystack — believes that humans are not “hardwired” to commit sexually deviant acts. He wonders if their criminalization has to do with the reportage of their behavior and whether “there’s something in the wide culture itself that has changed in recent years, and these men are like the canary in the mine shaft, the first among us to respond to that change as if their social and ethical immune systems, the controls over their behavior, have been somehow damaged or compromised.”

This odd couple of transient compatriots ― a fey, dark, Holden Caulfield-like wisecracking kid and his enormous, quixotic, intellectual colleague ― videotape each other. The Professor interviews the Kid about his pathetic life. Later, the Kid videos the Professor, who fears he is going to be killed by sinister forces from his past. The novel portrays their fascinating psychodrama demonstrating the ways in which disparate lives play out. “[S]ocial forces are the primary determinants of human behavior,” the Professor believes, and he is curious to understand and report about the Kid’s life. Especially since, in his view, “one’s sexual identity is shaped by one’s self-perceived social identity, that pedophilia, rightly understood, is about not sex, but power. More precisely, it’s about one’s personal perception of one’s power.” Banks’ character’s view that the “pornographic narrative is always a tale of dominance” and that “sexual malfunction [is] shaped by a malfunctioning society” brings to public attention an examination that may not be popular, but is brave.

A mark of Banks’ great skill is his ability to use a depressing, sad story to provide insights into a dark corner of American life; to make a touching plea for human autonomy:

“The Professor’s theories about pedophilia are rapidly evolving. When a society commodifies its children by making them into a consumer group, dehumanizing them by converting them into a crucial, locked-in segment of the economy, and then proceeds to eroticize its products in order to sell them, the children gradually come to be perceived by the rest of the community and by the children themselves as sexual objects. And on the ladder of power, where power is construed sexually instead of economically, the children end up at the bottom rung.”

At the same time, Banks writes about the social and geological history of south Florida, and vividly, enchantingly describes the varied colorful flora, fauna, birds, snakes and natural settings that capture the feral, subtropical beauty of the Everglades. His story about the 20,000-year evolution since the Pleistocene era, from the frigid glaciers to the blue-green Caribbean, the creation of corals and sands, the growth of tropical trees and flowering shrubs, the flow of fish and mammals into estuaries and channels, the routes of roaming animals through grasses, a “five-millennia long sequence” that resulted in climate changes and evolutionary creatures ending in us is high literature, an antidote to the stark story on his literary canvas.

The fate of the Kid and the Professor, the end of Banks’ story, is not the proper subject of a review. Banks’ creative, empathetic, thoughtful treatment of their different dilemmas composes a rare and remarkable read, one a reviewer dare not dilute.

Ronald Goldfarb is an attorney, author and literary agent based in Washington, D.C., and Miami. www.ronaldgoldfarb.com , [email protected]