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The Inner Circle
by T. C. Boyle
Sexual healing
A review by Stephen Abell
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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