The Inner Circle

Sexual healing

In the 1940s and 50s, Dr Alfred Kinsey published the first ever American bestsellers on the subject of sex: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and its sequel Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Some fifty years later, T. C. Boyle's hugely satisfying tenth novel takes a long hard look into the process behind Kinsey's controversial investigations. And in doing so, he offers his own forensic examination -- as all novelists should -- of the behaviour of the "human animal" itself.

The novel's narrator is the imagined figure of John Milk, a whitely wholesome freshman who becomes Dr Kinsey's amanuensis and chief researcher. In their twenty years of research, Kinsey -- who is known to all as Prok -- seeks to remedy the unnatural ignorance of his pupil, and the general population, about what he considers to be their most natural activity. Milk's story is a sexual Bildungsroman, as his admission into Prok's inner circle soon leads to a practical -- as well as theoretical -- initiation into a new world of open sex. At the centre of it all is the author's compelling creation, Prok himself; we are given, in The Inner Circle, Boyle's own Kinsey Report. Through typically visual prose, we vividly see both the outward poise of the academic revolutionary (the Dickens of sex research, "that erect figure on the podium . . . the reformer, the pioneer, the preacher and spellbinder") and the inner lusts of the man himself: "that image of him, naked and erect and hanging over her like an animal . . . an image that bludgeoned my sleep and festered through the waking hours".

For, while Prok is indeed motivated by scientific rigour ("we know more about the sex life of Drosophila melanogaster -- the fruit fly -- than we know of the commonest everyday practices of our own species"), he is also animated by his own personal desire for wide-ranging sexual gratification. In fact, his philosophy ensures that the two are intimately connected; if ignorance is the cause of sexual repression, knowledge permits promiscuity: "we're enlightened and fully attuned to the enjoyment of what we were made for that is, sexual relations, of every kind and without inhibition or prohibition". Such enlightenment comes from the thousands of personal histories Prok's team take from volunteers, through which the full spectrum of human sexual behaviour can be annotated, tabulated and analysed. As a result, Milk is inculcated into the belief -- Prok-marked, as it were -- that, as all sexual activity can be recorded scientifically, all becomes acceptable morally; sex is a question of physiology not psychology.

As if apparently to reinforce Prok's thesis, Milk's narration bears witness to the power of scientific precision; his account is full of parenthetically picture-perfect renditions, bracketed into place in the prose: "(she was a redhead, or a strawberry blonde, actually, with skin so white you'd think it had never seen the sun)"; or "(About Rutledge: he was a Princeton PH.D in Cultural Anthropology, thirty-eight years old, a neat, limber man with a slight stoop and a sardonic grin who wore a wire-thin mustache in homage to his Iberian ancestry on his mother's side . . . )". Elsewhere, he is able to pin down his descriptions with lepidopterist expertise, the dashes in the text skewering his subjects just as "Prok pins his Cynipids to the mounting board": "the dean -- compact, busty, tough as a drill sergeant -- was at a loss"; "I engaged in activities -- fellatio, cunnilingus, rear entry -- I'd been too timid, and too hurried, to try"; or "her history was what you might expect from a girl in her position -- relations at puberty with both her father and an older brother, marriage at fourteen, the move north from Mississippi, abandonment, the pimp, the succession of Johns and venereal diseases -- and I remember being moved by her simple, un- nuanced recitation of the facts". This stylistic technique -- what might be termed doctoral parenthesis -- pertinently enacts the process of scientific distillation that forms the structure of Prok's project.

At the same time, however, The Inner Circle offers a compelling critique to such an aproach. Boyle -- the sentimentalist, the novelist -- wishes to show that there is also part of sex and life (emotional, psychological) that remains irreducible, cannot be simply pinned down. This is the very attitude that Prok has conditioned Milk to see as obfuscating, obstructing the research: "euphemism is the resort of the inauthentic, the timid, the sex shy. I don't deal in euphemism and believe in telling it like it is". Yet Boyle wants us to see that some feelings are so strong, and so familiar, that they can best be shared in terms of common analogy or metaphor. Milk cannot help but fall into the familiar terms of the lovelorn sonneteer ("I was on fire, aflame"), or pop singer ("the magic moment. Isn't that what they call it in the love songs?"). We come to notice how his attempt to scorn erotic cliches collapses inevitably into their iteration: "it was us against them, the forces of inquiry and science against the treacle you heard on the radio or saw on the screen. But now I didn't know. I didn't know anything. I set down my sandwich, too spent -- too confused -- to eat".

Boyle uses this celebration of imprecision to make clear that an honest account of a sexual life cannot be merely scientifically accurate. Milk's love for his wife Iris is intangible, without external show; he just has "no inner being or essence without her". For Milk, a true "inner circle" cannot not be formed amid Prok's oppressive permissiveness but is, as Robert Browning wrote to his wife, "a self-imposed circle linking the experiences of two persons only". Sex, in Boyle's winningly sentimental scheme, is ultimately an expression of something more significant than - as Prok would have it -- "animals rubbing their parts together". The two constituent parts of the "human animal" are perhaps more in opposition than apposition, after all.

Stephen Abell is a freelance writer living in London.

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