The Inner Circle

Rating:
Summary: Zombie Cocktail Anyone?
Review: A most enjoyable read, but not on par with Boyle's best (IMHO, Drop City, Riven Rock, Water Music). As always with Boyle, the pleasure is in the little details and characters that are fully realized. However, unlike Drop City, the gripping story is missing here. Perhaps that's the point, because Prok is the story, and nothing else. And because I found Prok to be preying, indulgent and mostly just plain mean, I guess my feelings towards this book will always be at arms length.

Rating:
Summary: Just animal instincts in humans or swingers?
Review: As a recent appreciator of TC Boyle's genius I saw the movie Road to Wellville, read the novel and then read Boyle's latest offering, The Inner Circle.
Reading The Inner Circle felt like a block of cement was firmly clutched in my hands weighing me down, down, down. I didn't say mill stone around my neck...I meant I voluntarily held onto that armload of cement and allowed it to lower me into that pit of dark, deep, weirdness that is the human animal, Boylestyle.
Not only am I a recent Boylie...I am in awe of the way this author fits his work into the appropriate time period and pulls it off...believably.
Okay, so the work is about a controversial giant who contributed to society's study of sexual matters. Boyle's fictional character--a made up assistant-- takes the reader into the world or the "inner circle" and maybe into much more than even the renowned researcher Kinsey would allow us to view;the experimentation and practicing of what was being studied; sex. Similar to the inside of a tornado, the circle spins into itself... stirs things up... and what is discovered isn't always pleasant, but a whirlwind of disturbing possibilities.
I am currently reading another Boyle book, Drop City. How does he do it? Don't know, just hope he continues to do, and to be.

Rating:
Summary: Good writing, but dislikable characters
Review: Boyle does a great job painting the 1940s and explaining the characters, but in the end I do not like either of them. Where is the protagonist?

Kinsey is shown as uncompromising, and yet weirdly inconsistent. He is obsessed with maintaining professionalism yet he parades around in a loincloth! AND he convinces Milk to do the same -- yet the dialogue in which he does that is strangely absent. That revealing bit was something I wanted to read, but, alas, it didn't make the cut. And there are numerous other juicy and "human" developments that are glaringly skirted over. Yet other more mundane bits are thoroughly covered, making the book less interesting.

Is it the scientist in Prok that believes he knows all about the "human animal" when in fact he is clueless to the human side of those around him? In the end, I cannot understand how Milk was so bewitched by Prok when his narration effectively shows me what a jerk he is. I wish Boyle was able to let me see what Milk sees and why he loves him so.

Rating:
Summary: Boyle does it again
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Circle is Unbroken?
Review: How does one pronounce Coraghessan anyway? When I spotted "T.C.Boyle" on the cover of this novel, I thought perhaps here was the same writer whose stories I have enjoyed in the pages of The New Yorker. Evidently the long Irish middle name is cumbersome for a book jacket, but yes, this is the very same writer, with the evocative prose and interesting subject matter that make for compelling reading. His ability to transport readers directly into the moment is remarkable. Herewith, a few lines toward the end of INNER CIRCLE, little to do directly with the storyline, but replete with meaningful metaphor. It's a quick flashback of protaganist/narrator John Milk as beneath the bleachers at UC Berkeley he awaits the seminal speech of Kinsey's career.

"The smell - of the adjoining locker room, of the distilled and rancid sweat of the generations -- brought me back to high school and a reverie I'd had after my concussion on the football field. They'd brought me into the locker room on a stretcher, my mother's voice floating round the door like a bird battering its wings against a pane of glass, my consciousness fading and then looping back on itself till the world opened up on me like a woman's smile, though there was no woman there, only the grim bald-headed team physician, administering smelling salts."

Of course, Milk is no heroic masculine jock. He's the initial and youngest member of Dr. Alfred Kinsey's research team of the nineteen forties and fifties, a group of young would-be scientists who are cleverly juxtaposed in this scene amid athletic equipment and sports trophies. No, these young men have stepped aside from the norms of their generation, have missed the war and devoted themselves entirely to Kinsey's over-arching "project." A data collection effort that culminates in the two momentous tomes that have come to be known collectively as the Kinsey Report.

These Inner Circle members are sex researchers and employed to collect hundreds upon thousands of sex histories from Americans of all walks. In fictional style, Boyle describes in clinical tones the process of their work. Yet, the most vivid prurience only emerges as we step behind the curtain walling off the inner circle, and become voyeurs into their secretive, exploratory personal lives. Kinsey, his three chief researchers and the spouses of all four push the envelope of sexual mores, in the name of research of course. The highly sex-charged, ever-inquisitive and insatiable Kinsey leads his young charges and their wives down a destructive path. It's predictably sad, but fascinating as we watch through the eyes of John Milk the deleterious effects of Kinsey's quest on the relationships and marriages of this inner circle. Needless to say, physiology does not conquer all. Tremendous writing that makes me next want to go find Boyle's "Drop City" straight away.


Rating:
Summary: Sex, Lies and Videotape?
Review: T. C. Boyle in his latest novel writes about the famous or infamous-- depending on your point of view-- Alfred Kinsey of Indiana University and those people closest to him: his wife Mac and his three male assistants, their wives, and a movie photographer who joins the group late in Mr. Kinsey's career. Everyone has an opinion about Kinsey and his research and we all bring our own emotional and sexual baggage to this book. I suspect that many reviewers probably reveal more about themselves than they illuminate about Mr. Kinsey.

We see Kinsey through the eyes of the narrator Milk, who initially takes Kinsey's class (Kinsey is known as "Prok" be his associates) in Marriage and the Family at Indiana University where in order to take said class, one had to be married or engaged. Milk became "engaged" and signed up with a coed with whom he had no relationship in order to get into the course. (The class sounded nothing like the marriage and the family course so popular on the Baptist campus where I attended collage more than 20 years later.)

Boyle tells the reader in the "Author's Note" that "all characters and situations have been invented, with the exception of the historical figures of Alfred C. Kinsey and his wife, Clara Bracken (McMillen) Kinsey." He also lists Kinsey's various biographers for his factual material about the Kinseys. What Boyle has created is a totally believable portrait of the controversial, bowtied Kinsey who becomes flesh and blood as seen through the eyes of his disciple Milk. We know that he eats trail mix, loves to lecture on classical music, is frugal to the point of being stingy, is an atheist, is totally nonjudgmental about any kind of sexual activity, regardless of what kind or variety, and sees all of mankind as "human animals." The writer also has recreated the 40's and 50's in the U. S. with total accuracy: from references to Martha Raye, Billy Holiday and Billy Graham, to Pearl Harbor and the U. S. getting into World War II.

What makes this novel a terrific read is Milk's conflict between his literal hero worship of Prok and his devotion to the work that Kinsey, along with Milk, who becomes his assistant, is obssessed with, as well as the certainly unconventional sex at the time that the "inner circle" engages in and Milk's love for his wife Iris, a naive, lapsed Catholic, who is just as independent in her own way as Prok, and is constantly at odds with him about what she sees as his interfering with her marriage, both from the inordinate amount of time he expects his followers to spend taking sexual histories, often travelling away from Bloomington for long stretches of time to obtain them, to his belief that everyone in his inner circle can have sex with each other.

This novel is not your typical candidate for the NEW YORK TIMES best list of the year although it certainly deserves its place there.

Rating:
Summary: Love's Knowledge
Review: TC Boyle has made a specialty of chronicling American dreamers and iconoclasts. In his new book, he gives us a fictional take on the inner circle of the pioneering sexologist Alfred Kinsey, whose reports on human sexual behavior in the nineteen forties and early fifties generated immense attention and controversy. Kinsey's goal was an objective account of human sexuality. His method was to take thousands of sexual case histories, observe hundreds of sexual acts, and then draw conclusions from the data. Calumny followed quickly on fame's heels because the people who saw sex as signifying something larger in the human spirit objected to their ruttings being lumped in with those of porcupines and rhesus monkeys.

Kinsey's rise and demise are narrated by John Milk, an unworldly undergrad at the University of Indiana who becomes Kinsey's first paid assistant and first member of his inner circle of sex researchers. Telling a Great Man's story through the eyes of a disciple can be a risky narrative strategy. The character who tells us the story is the character we want to bond with. By his own account, Milk isn't very clever in conversation, and most of his dialog in the novel is stammering and inarticulate. He has unwavering loyalty and a strong Midwestern work ethic to recommend him, scarcely titillating personality traits. What carries the reader along are Milk's roller coaster attempts to be objective about his highly subjective participation with Kinsey and others in first person sexual research.

Boyle sets up a nice tension between Milk's corn-fed conventionality and his forays out on the frontiers of sexual behavior. The tension ratchets when Milk marries Iris, who has an even more conventional Catholic upbringing and none of Milk's Kinsey hero-worship. Iris becomes a very ambivalent participant in Kinsey's program to eradicate "sex shyness" in the husbands and wives of the inner circle. To his credit, Milk never disavows the potential of romantic love with Iris, even as he plunges deeper into the sexual underbrush.

Milk's refusal to abandon his faith in the perfectible bond between two people while spending his days monitoring the mechanics of friction and emission for the man he worships is in a small but real way heroic. Watching Milk struggle between his belief in love and his faith in scientific objectivity becomes compelling enough to justify Boyle's choice of him as the teller of the Kinsey tale. Since the pull between faith and science forms the background for much of our current political dialog, Boyle's Truman-era docudrama is also timely to our own dilemma.








Rating:
Summary: A Magnificent Obsession
Review: 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





Rating:
Summary: A Fine Companion Piece To The Feature
Review: The first thing that struck me while reading this was the remarkable similarities between it and Bill Condon's screenplay for the movie "Kinsey". Kinsey's naive and idealistic assistant John Milk follows so much of the same path as Peter Sarsgaard's character in the movie,it was almost as if I was reading a novelization of the film. The major difference is Sarsgaard is single, while Boyle's protagonist is grappling with being a husband and a father all the while continuing his work for Kinsey with a near brainwashed zeal.
I think the fact that I had already seen the movie added to my enjoyment of the book. It certainly peaked my interest in reading it to begin with, although I loved "Drop City". What I found a tad disappointing is I can't say I really liked John Milk. Even with a first person narrative I found him weak, an attribute he points out in himself. Consequently I found a falseness to where he ends up, and by the time I had finished was left a bit numb. As a companion piece to the movie I think it's an interesting compliment. By itself, I don't know that I would've enjoyed it quite as much.

Rating:
Summary: "The reformer, the pioneer, the preacher, the spellbinder"
Review: Those readers who have recently seen the Liam Neeson film Kinsey will find a lot of familiar material in T.C. Boyle's The Inner circle. But whereas the movie pretty much focused on Alfred Kinsey, this novel centers on his young research assistant John Milk. In The Inner Circle, Kinsey is presented though the prism of John's life, and to a lesser extent, his wife Iris, who had a somewhat troubled and ambiguous relationship with the famous sex researcher.

Big, bold and ambitious The Inner Circle gives us a sweeping portrait of Alfred Kinsey and his band of cohorts as they traversed the country, recording sex histories while trying to understand the makeup of human sexuality from an incontrovertibly "scientific" point of view. Told in the first person, and in clipped, clean prose, Milk portrays a world of academia where above all, they wanted to be regarded as scientists, to legitimize the field of sex research, and elevate it to its proper place among the behavioral sciences.

Most of the action in The Inner Circle takes place during the 10 years between 1939 and the landmark publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948. The 38-year-old Milk tape-records his memories in 1956; the year of Kinsey's death, with an affable and intense voice, and the reader is inevitably lulled into liking this hesitant young scientist. We soon learn he is married to Iris, that there seems to have been some sort of trouble between them, and that they now have a young son.

In 1939, the virginal, naive young Milk, then an English major at Indiana University, joined Professor Kinsey as his first assistant. Milk attended a lecture by Kinsey and was soon mesmerized. Alfred "had a particular gift for delivery that never resorted to tricks or theatrical gestures, his voice clear and distinct, every inch a man of science expatiating on a subject of deep interest to all humanity." John wants to help advance science, to be part of the charismatic visionary's effort to reveal the truths about our erotic lives, and thus free us from the chains of social propriety.

The strength of the novel is Milk's (and Boyle's) formidable portrait of Kinsey. At first he is the eager, bow-tied scientist, an idealistic clinician who will crouch over a copulating couple to point out the fleshly details of their orgasms, or objectively listen to the ramblings of one of the most notorious child molester's on record. At other times, he could be a kind of psuedo hippie, who loved classical music, lunched every day on trail mix, encouraged bi-sexual freedom, and gardened virtually in the nude. He was witty, generous and loyal - a total gentleman. But he could also be controlling, manipulative, and exploitative. Milk reveres him as a genius, but Iris regards him as a monster.

Boyle is a gifted writer and his essential message in The Inner Circle is disarmingly clear: Where does one draw the line between science and spiritual love? And does promiscuity really bring liberation, fulfillment and happiness? Milk is encouraged by Kinsey to experiment sexually, but this comes at great cost to his marriage. The story is full of accounts from students, married couples, prostitutes, gays, and various fetishists about their sexual practices. This is a complex, multi-faceted book that effectively portrays an era where battles raged between the puritanical forces of society and the objectivity of science, and where a group of people tried to dispel the myths of sex as dirty, shameful, private, obscene and totally unfit for public examination. Mike Leonard January 05.