The Inner Circle

TC Boyle is one of the finest storytellers around and his consistent output of never less than fascinating books ('Riven Rock', 'Drop City', 'A Friend of the Earth', 'The Road to Wellville', etc - 10 in all) establishes him as an appropriate novelistic biographer of the life work of Dr Alfred Kinsey. Kinsey's enormously important contribution - THE KINSEY REPORT - to the edification of knowledge of human sexual behavior is well known, well documented, and now even 'playing in a theater near you'. So we have a running start in reading this book. TC Boyle capitalizes on our knowledge of the Sex Doctor to provide the matrix of this elegantly written, attention-consuming novel. Yet in his typical style, Boyle uses fact to create fiction, and in doing so he focuses on the Inner Circle of those dedicated people who spent countless hours touring the country taking individual sexual histories from students, prostitutes, male hustlers, prisoners, known perverts, as well as 'respectable' upper and middle class men and women. Chief among these investigators is the young, naive, intrinsically wholesome, innocent John Milk. By using Milk as the Kinsey-devoted and obsessed narrator Boyle allows us to understand the impact of Kinsey's revolutionary findings on the 'regular citizen'. Opening with a Prologue dated August 25, 1956 and closing with an Epilogue dated August 27, 1956 (creating the time in which Milk is writing memoirs after Kinsey's death), John Milk takes us through the period from 1939 to 1953 when he grew to be Kinsey's first and primary assistant. Milk describes not only the unraveling of Kinsey's work, but also the consequences of working with the obsessed biologist. Milk, his new wife Iris, and his coworkers Corcoran and Ruttledge (with their wives) become increasingly involved in the secrets Kinsey uncovers to the point of participating in voyeurism, homosexual affairs with Kinsey, group sex, filmed sex, and wife swapping - including sleeping in a planned manner with Kinsey's wife, Mac. It is this inner circle dynamic that makes THE INNER CIRCLE a fine novel fed by reality, woven by reportage and observation, and written in a flowing graceful manner that defies putting the book down. The book is wisely divided into two parts - 'Biology Hall' (the beginnings of the controversial investigative stage of Kinsey's studies) and 'Wylie Hall' (the headquarters for the burgeoning success of Kinsey's first book on the male and the continued work on his second volume on the female). And that takes care of the scientific side of the story. The overriding theme of the book is a love story - primarily that between John Milk and his bright wife Iris, who struggles with the strains of her husband's obsession with his 'god' Kinsey and always attempts to keep her life with John grounded in love rather than solely in animal behavior. We care about this couple and while we learn a lot about Kinsey (his physiognomy and infamous anatomy, obsessive co

Boyle is hands down one of the best storytellers writing today; his sense of pacing is unrivalled in modern fiction. I loved this book as I have loved everything he has written (biased?). This time out he has chosen to tell the story of a young student, John Milk, at Indiana University who comes under the thrall of Dr. Kinsey (or Prok or the Sex Doctor of the now famous Kinsey Reports). Boyle builds on rumours of Kinsey's private life including a rather uninhibited sex life. Kinsey will have no one work for him who is sex shy. To prove that they are not, his inner circle, including their spouses, are asked to engage in increasingly uninhibited sexual acts. Though Boyle describes these acts in sometimes explicit terms, they are quite boring. He describes these acts in deliberately dry and mechanistic terms. I read a review that said they were hoping for a more exciting (?) book given the subject. It seems that is exactly Boyle's intent. Much like he lampooned the free love ideal in _Drop City_ and the Doctor who took the ladies into the woods in _The Road to Wellville_, (which seems to have been the seed of this book), Boyle's story seems to challenge Kinsey's base assumption that we are no more than human animals and sex is mechanics and nothing else. Though the scene in which Milk's wife finally rebels against Prok seems late in coming, I did enjoy this book. Granted there are few sympathetic characters here (yet again), yet the book is fantastic.

What a great concept for a novel. Here we have a young man, John Milk inexperienced in life. He goes to work for an entomologist who has been studying the gall wasp. But with the gall wasp fairly well understood, the entomologist has decided to change his field of study. He's decided to study sex, and his name is Kinsey. When you combine a good concept with a good writer you get a good story. And T.C. Boyle is a good writer. Without telling you too much of the story, the Inner Circle is composed of those researchers who worked close to Kinsey. While this is a novel, it appears that the character of Kinsey is portrayed rather accurately. The book is chiefly concerned with Kinsey's obsessive pursuit of sexual knowledge, but it also comments on the nature of marriage, family and the compromises we make in the hopes of earning love, acceptance, and a living. I shall be surprised if this book doesn't head to the top of the best seller lists.

When I started reading Boyle back in 2001, I sensed right away that I'd put myself in the presence of an author at the height of his prowess. After the Plague, Riven Rock and his collected Stories all prompted this notion. Drop City confirmed it. Now comes The Inner Circle, as if I needed more proof. Written in the style of a memoir, or a confession novel, the Inner Circle is a story of obsession. (Other critics and reader have said "love" in place of obsession, but I think they are only partly right.) Through the book's 418 pages, protagonist and narrator John Mile falls under tow spells simultaneously, that of the persuasive sexologist Alfred Kinsey, and that of his girlfriend and then wife, Iris McAuliffe. Milk is nearly ripped apart by these two lines of devotion, and the effect is a tension that makes The Inner Circle among the most quickly readable novels of its scope. As if Milk's story isn't gripping enough, Boyle gives us a Kinsey that provokes powerful and ambivalent reactions on almost every page. He's a man of towering academic ambition, admirable in his zeal to inform mid-century America's ideas about its most sacred and animal act. At the same time, he's a sexually manipulative taskmaster, someone who lives in that Nietzschean realm beyond good and evil. This book is scandalous, affecting, funny, tragic and above all entertaining. What you'll learn about Kinsey and wartime America is worth the cover price alone. What you'll learn about the conflicting impulses that make us the "human animals" we are can't begin to be estimated.