The America of Russell Banks’s fiction has always been a bleak, punitive place, but in Lost Memory of Skin, its harshness has attained near-mythological proportions. What this book reminds me of most is J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K., which recounts the travails of a supposedly simple-minded black gardener in South Africa during apartheid. The civilization that Michael K. tries to flee feels fairy-tale-like in its feudal horror. The Kid’s seamlessly networked America has the same Kafkaesque quality.