Customer Reviews

The Inner Circle

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I look forward to each new novel by T.C. Boyle with great anticipation; he's a gadfly, an iconoclast who can weave a fascinating web of words filled with twists and turns and verbal pyrotechnics. He can be impishly cynical toward social idealism of all types, as clearly expressed in *The Tortilla Curtain* and *Drop City*, but he also can show a softer, more sympathetic side, as demonstrated in what I consider his finest novel overall, *Riven Rock*.

As always, Boyle has created a novel that's at the very least, a good read. I devoured this book, cover to cover, almost without stopping, which is a testament to Boyle's ability to write lucid, entertaining prose. There is a noticeably a less manic feel to his writing this time around, however, and it's unclear to me whether this was a deliberate strategy, based on the sensitive nature of his subject matter, or whether instead Boyle found his inspiration just a bit lacking.

The fact that *The Inner Circle* deals with Alfred Kinsey and his pioneering work on sex research certainly makes the novel all the more alluring and addictive, I confess. Assuming that Boyle has taken only minor liberties with the actual historical characters of Kinsey and his wife Clara, the book illuminates in excellent fashion the motives, mindset, and methods behind Kinsey's single-minded pursuit of his research. Boyle does (apparently) a fine job of depicting the character and personality of Kinsey, albeit from the virtually uncritical perspective of his narrator, the mild-mannered fictional research assistant, John Milk.

Frankly, to me the larger-than-life, hard-charging Kinsey comes across not as a "great man of learning," but instead as something of a lunatic, almost a monster, a man with clear psychological pathologies that drive him to pursue his sexual research in a fanatical, single-minded fashion. His research programme seemed to be based on the (to me) absurd proposition that humans are, after all, just like other animals in our basic sexual drive and its various forms of expression except that "society" "interferes." To me, this perspective is based on a fundamentally flawed conception of human nature, one in which an essential animalistic human core is simply overlain with "socialization" and its attendant hangups. No; more accurately, human beings' most "animalistic" tendencies and behaviors are permeated through and through by culture, and so to try to strip away "socialization" to get at the "raw sexuality" is a project that is doomed not only to fail, but to distort badly the actual nature of human sexuality.

That Professor Kinsey ("Prok") expects his researchers (and their wives!) to drop all emotional associations with their sexuality to the point of partaking in ghastly quasi-public sexual performances reveals not a thoughtful scientific perspective tempered by empathy with his human subjects, but the fanaticism of a veritable sociopath, a bully, a proverbial control freak. If this, in fact, is Boyle's intention in his depiction of Kinsey, he succeeds brilliantly.

However, what I found disappointing is that all other characters in the book, including Milk himself, come across as flat, shallow, and unmemorable. By the end of the book the reader knows very little about the inner life and motivations of these people, even as the depths of their sexual lives are plumbed and chronicled, page after page. What struck me as particularly wanting was Boyle's portrayal of the motives and mindset behind the "low level" homosexual inclinations of Kinsey, Milk, and the other male assistants. Somehow, the way this activity (called "H-behavior") unfolds and the way that Milk, at least, experiences this doesn't ring true, and ultimately falls flat.

Furthermore, despite the often-fascinating passages dealing with the evolution of the Kinsey project, the interactions between Prok, Milk, Clara Kinsey ("Mac"), Milk's wife, Iris, and the rest of the principal characters, ultimately as a *story* the book moves along rather turgidly much of the time, and ultimately it doesn't really go very far. The climactic scene, centering around conflicts related to Kinsey's megalomaniacal demands related to coerced public sexual performances by his assistants and their wives, is largely much ado about very little. Then, shortly thereafter, the book just kind of ends. I found this a bit disappointing.

Overall, this is not Boyle's best effort, but he's such a talented writer that even a near-miss by Boyle is likely to be better than the best writing of most other contemporary novelists. If you've enjoyed his previous books or if you simply suspect that the Kinsey project makes for one heckuva fine subject for a novel, you probably will find *The Inner Circle* a satisfying read.

I bought this book the day it came out, both because I had liked "Drop City" so well, and because, hey, a book about Kinsey and sex has to be somewhat interesting. I came away a bit disappointed. This book lacked a real focus. There were moments where this book seemed to make sense and actually managed to be enjoyable, but must of the time, it was rather cold and unlikable.

The character of Kinsey himself ("Prok") was far too flat. It was not clear to me what it was about him that drew his followers so deeply into his inner circle. For the same reasons, I disliked the protagonist, John Milk. Why he followed Kinsey so blindly at the expense of his marriage and happiness is a mystery. The book followed him through his emotional turmoil in a cyclical fashion, with the plot rehashing itself repeatedly with no growth on the part of any characters, with the exception perhaps of Iris, Milk's wife. But Boyle leaves her in the background, definitely a shame.

The plot of this book had promise. Kinsey was a fascinating man, and he conducted fascinating research. But Boyle describes the research and the accompanying sexual exploits in either an illusory manner (when it is homosexual sex being discussed, or 'H-behavior') or in a way that is far too medical and sterile to be anything but uncomfortable and boring.

Overall, I didn't dislike this book, I just kind of felt like I was reading to finish, instead of for the joy of the book. It's not a bad book, it's just nota very good one. Read "Drop City" instead to see what Boyle is really capable of.

Having seen the film, "Kinsey" before I began to read T.C. Boyle's "The Inner Circle" really helped me to fill in the visual component of Boyle's always fat and juicy prose.
Using the docu-fiction form, Boyle riffs on certain known facts of Kinsey's time at IU, his groundbreaking research and uses John Milk as his vehicle into that particular world that Kinsey created during his tenure at Indiana University as a professor of Biology and more importantly as a sex researcher and author.
Boyle writes of Milk's entrance into Kinsey-land: "That was the moment it all began, though I didn't realize it at the time...how could I? How could I have foreseen that a shallow, manipulative girl I hardly knew would be the motive force that was to lead me to Prok (Kinsey) and Mac (Kinsey's wife), Corcoran, Rutledge, to the desk at which I am now sitting..."
Boyle paints Kinsey as a kind of Machiavellian, all-knowing leader of his group of researchers and their families: "What he (Kinsey) wanted above all else was to gain the sort of intimacy that yields up confidences, and he had a true genius for it---for putting people at ease and bringing them out. Absent it, the project would have never gotten off the ground."
Kinsey is a warm, loving person who, as long as you do as he advises, would do anything for you. When Milk's wife, Iris has an affair with another researcher ("I knew why she'd done what she had...she'd had one man in her life, just one and I'd had Mac and Prok...") Kinsey at first is happy that she has acted out her fantasy. But when Iris decides to leave Milk and live with her lover, John... Kinsey intercedes and the whole situation is diffused. In fact in a scene very much like one between a father and son or a King and his Page, Milk goes to Kinsey not only for consolation and advice but for action and interference: "...I love him (Kinsey)...not in the way I love Iris...but in a deeper way, in the way a patriot loves his country or a zealot his God..."
"The Inner Circle" is an intriguing read: it is beautifully written as befits a T.C. Boyle book but it is also a strongly, no-holds-barred sexual book as befits it's subject. Don't come to Kinsey-land expecting a bland re-telling of the Alfred Kinsey life story, because you won't find it. What you will find is a passionately thoughtful novel written by one of our major contemporary novelists at the top of his form.

I'm a big fan of TC Boyle but I just couldn't get into this book. His last novel, Drop City, was one of those rare books where the characters are drawn so expertly and their situation so intersting, that the book could go on forever. Unfortunately, this book, The Inner Circle, is none of those things, and only feels like it goes on forever. This is a literary novel where everything is over-described merely for descriptions sake. Take for instance the scene where the two protagonists, John Milk, an assistant to Alfred Kinsey, and Kinsey himself, are interviewing prostitutes out on a city street. The cops come and arrest the pair. Boyle writes "...and dropped two conjoined disks of metal over my wrists. In a word, handcuffs." Ten or so words to describe something everybody is already familiar with and can readily visualize, handcuffs, and then goes and uses the word anyway.

All that boring detail wouldn't be so bad if the book and the subject matter were interesting. But they aren't. The book keeps Kinsey and his research as a backdrop to what it's really about, a fictionalized character by the name of John Milk who is there from the beginning. We get to see his life in detail, from school, to marriage, to fatherhood and everything in between.

This was 400 pages of very well written verbiage with no point to it. It was something that wasn't that enjoyable and which I forced myself to finish.

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.

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 compulsive behaviors, powers as a public speaker, and near hypnotizing methods of interviewing), he remains an emotional outsider at the end of the day.

Boyle has succeeded in enlightening us, in entertaining us, in challenging us - and in achieving yet another fine novel to a career as one of our more important American writers. Grady Harp, November 2004

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.

There were several factors that ushered in the Sexual Revolution in America. One was undoubtedly the work of Dr. Alfred Kinsey from the late 1930s to the early 1950s and his groundbreaking publications SEXUAL BEHAVIOR IN THE HUMAN MALE and SEXUAL BEHAVIOR IN THE HUMAN FEMALE, also known as the Kinsey Report. Kinsey and his colleagues cataloged America's sexual habits and stunned the nation with their frank and scientific approach to a topic considered taboo in polite company. So who was the man who pioneered "sex research," and who were the men and women who helped him in his study as both researchers and subjects? T.C. Boyle, in his latest novel THE INNER CIRCLE, imagines Dr. Kinsey as a dynamic, oversexed and eccentric individual obsessed with his work.

Like THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE, Boyle's fanciful and fun fictionalized portrait of John Harvey Kellogg, THE INNER CIRCLE takes an interesting American icon and writes a novel around him. Here we are introduced to Dr. Kinsey, or "Prok" as he is called by the narrator, John Milk. Milk is a shy, small town senior at Indiana University when he takes Kinsey's class on marriage and sexuality. The class itself is controversial, and Kinsey quickly becomes known as "Dr. Sex." He asks students and faculty to give him their sexual histories for his fledgling research. Milk volunteers and is eventually offered a job with Kinsey, thus becoming the first of the inner circle.

Over the years the circle grows, and John Milk marries and starts a family. The inner circle, however, is where his loyalty really lies. From the beginning his relationship with Kinsey is complicated. Kinsey apparently hires Milk as his assistant based on physical attraction rather than on skills or experience (Milk graduates with an English degree, not a science degree). They become involved in a sexual relationship, and soon after that, Milk becomes involved with Kinsey's wife, Mac --- with Kinsey's consent and even encouragement. And thus the story goes; Kinsey directs his research and the sexual lives of his inner circle.

Kinsey, as imagined by Boyle, is a bizarre character; manipulative and often unfeeling. Sex for him is a purely physical act with little or no emotion involved. Milk is passive, which makes him a good narrator. However, despite the tantalizing subject matter (and Boyle doesn't spare the reader the sex scenes), the book starts to drag around the middle. We are privy to many intimate moments and much personal information as the circle gathers histories across the country and experiments personally, but Boyle doesn't seem to be able to move the characters much beyond that and none are particularly likeable. In fact, the novel is a bit frustrating in the emotional stagnation of John Milk and the utter control over him and the others that Kinsey seems to have. Why should we care about Milk? What about him are we to relate to? Boyle is unclear.

On the one hand, THE INNER CIRCLE is a book about sex; the sex lives of individuals and the sex life of a puritanical mid-century nation. On the other hand, it is about relationships; both power relationships and marriages. Milk's marriage is, as one might easily imagine, strained under the weight of his work and also under the demands Kinsey puts on his inner circle to participate in his lifestyle of insatiable sexual desire.

THE INNER CIRCLE is less dynamic and recommendable than THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE, but only because it is slightly repetitious and thus verging on dull. Overall though it is an interesting novel, centered on a unique personality and a moment of awakening in America.

--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman

The Inner Circle, T.C. Boyle's novel based on the life of pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, is a decent read that goes on rather longer than it needs to. The book is interesting, and not just for prurient reasons (although there is plenty in the book to satisfy the prurient), but also for the portrait of Kinsey. Boyle really captures his strangeness and the obsessive genius that drove him. However, the first half of the book is much better than the second - there's more humor, the plot is fun and a little bit racy, and the entire narrative is imbued with the innocence and idealism with which Kinsey began his project. As the story goes on, however, all that idealism evaporates and with it goes much of the energy of the book. It becomes a dark story of manipulation and monomania as Kinsey's obsessions become increasingly powerful and his need to control the lives of those around him become more overt.

All in all, I would say that it's a good book, but not a great one. It's certainly not Boyle's best work; both Drop City and World's End are better, although I suspect that his short stories are probably the best showcase for his talent. Anyone who's interested in Boyle is probably better off picking up If the River Was Whiskey (which includes the great story "Sorry Fugu"), and anyone who's interested in Kinsey or the Institute for Sex Research is better off just renting the movie Kinsey.

Boyle slyly offers a story about Kinsey through the eyes of the true protagonist, John Milk. If Milk had offered himself as an apostle to Buddha, he would be the person Buddha would answer with the famous, "When you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. His way is not yours." Instead, Milk, meets Kinsey, also known as Prok. Prok is charismatic, manipulative, and demanding. And John Milk is like playdough in his hands. It is hard to understand what exactly goes through the mind of people who sublimate themselves to someone in whom they put all trust and hope. Boyle does an excellent job with Milk. We understand Prok's initial glamour, so strong it holds Milk, even when he is not so comfortable with what is demanded.

So many readers feel that this story does not hold up to others in Boyle's lexicon. Perhaps, I have only read Drop City, which I liked a lot. This is a book anyone would be proud to have written. It is a superb character study within an important story. It is also a reminder to examine our life choices, the priorities we place on work versus love; and it is a brilliant warning to think about the leaders we choose and to watch out that we don't give up too much to these leaders.

Yes, this is a book about a member of Kinsey's inner circle reflecting on his life working for the great man and how that work has been important though it has cost much confusion and disharmony in his personal realm. The rather weak quality to Milk, is intended. He has become a man, who must now that he has told this story, start living his life with no one guiding him. For someone like Milk, that would be as awful as it would be useful. More importantly, it is a book about true believers and their enablers and how everyone needs someone who will tell them when enough is enough. Listen up America. We've got one of those in the White House, and he isn't promoting free anything, least of all love!