Synopses & Reviews
Fresh on the heels of his New York Times bestselling and National Book Award-nominated novel, Drop City, T.C. Boyle has spun an even more dazzling tale that will delight both his longtime devotees and a legion of new fans. Boyle’s tenth novel, The Inner Circle has it all: fabulous characters, a rollicking plot, and more sex than pioneering researcher Dr. Alfred Kinsey ever dreamed of documenting . . . well, almost.
A love story, The Inner Circle is narrated by John Milk, a virginal young man who in 1940 accepts a job as an assistant to Dr. Alfred Kinsey, an extraordinarily charming professor of zoology at Indiana University who has just discovered hislife’s true calling: sex. As a member of Kinsey’s “inner circle” of researchers, Milk (and his beautiful new wife) is called on to participate in sexual experiments that become increasingly uninhibited—and problematic for his marriage. For in his later years Kinsey (who behind closed doors is a sexual enthusiast of the first order) ever more recklessly pushed the boundaries both personally and professionally.
While Boyle doesn’t resist making the most of this delicious material, The Inner Circle is at heart a very moving and very loving look at sex, marriage, and jealousy that will have readers everywhere reassessing their own relationships—because, in the end, “love is all there is.”
Review
"This robust, impassioned novel, Boyle's tenth, opens with two epigraphs. One is from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra; the other is from Alfred C. Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. The contrast is clear this is a book about two kinds of sex: the amorous and the clinical. For Kinsey, the real-life biologist dubbed Dr. Sex, coitus has nothing to do with love; it's an act to be enjoyed by everyone, with everyone. John Milk, the original member of Kinsey's fictional research team, tries doggedly to follow his guru's doctrine, but love keeps getting in the way love for his feisty and unyielding wife, Iris; for Kinsey's wife, Mac, to whom Milk loses his virginity; and for Kinsey himself, whose appetite for sex becomes disturbingly indiscriminate. This dynamic, ripe with the requisite seductions, betrayals, and bruised egos, is an engrossing one, and although the book only occasionally indulges in the graphic, the experience of reading it is inevitably voyeuristic. For all of the novel's scandals and threats, however, the stakes don't change much, and they don't run very high. Sex and love remain symbiotic for Milk and separate for Kinsey, and somehow the dispute never endangers the pair's friendship, or the research. This forced sense of accord is closely bound to the novel's first-person point of view. Milk has the unwieldy job of narrating seventeen years of history from the perspective of 1956, after Kinsey has died; his stance becomes one of both homage to his beloved mentor and a timid record of his own objections. Compared to the rich panorama of voices in Boyle's last novel, Drop City (Viking, 2003), Milk's overblown outlook and naïve buoyancy are nothing less than exasperating. But readers who have fallen in the past for Boyle's boisterous language, his animated characters, his absurd and impeccably crafted scenes, will not be disappointed. At one point in the Inner Circle's travels, the group observes the engagements of a prostitute from behind the precarious secrecy of a hanging sheet, and readers will end up in the same position, absorbed despite themselves." Reviewed by Eleanor Henderson, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Review
"Kinsey is in some ways a perfect subject for this sly and intrepid novelist...while Boyle is fascinated by the zealous energy of perfectionists like Kinsey, he is at bottom a defender of romance against the tyranny of reason."
The New York Times Book Review
Review
"The Inner Circle may draw readers because of its sexy subject matter, but they will stay for the emotional punch of Boyles meditations on love, marriage, and jealousy." The San Francisco Chronicle
Review
"Terrific...Circles hero is smart, commonsensical Iris, who understands that Kinseys mechanistic views of sex fails to account for love, jealousy, and human nature." Entertainment Weekly
Review
"The Inner Circle is a harrowing depiction of how questionable are some of the consequences of sexual liberation
that the novel is a page-turner, with lots of sex in it, only serves Boyles purpose all the better." The Washington Post
Review
"T.C. Boyle has taken a subject that remains on the cutting edge, and out of it created an old-fashioned engrossing novel." San Antonio Express-News
Review
"[Boyle's] talents for structure and pacing make the book eminently readable as does his glorious sense of bawdy humor, which provides many laugh-out-loud moments." Dallas-Ft. Worth Star Telegram
Review
"A vastly entertaining tale that balances the exuberance and the excesses...perhaps better than any other work of American fiction." Los Angeles Book Review
Review
"A vastly entertaining tale that balances the exuberance and the excesses...perhaps better than any other work of American fiction." Los Angeles Book Review
Review
"Compelling and subtly humorous...a biting satire of emotional manipulation, sexual indiscretion, and scientific hubris." The Boston Globe
Review
"Strong writing on emotional entanglements, good and bad, abounds in The Inner Circle" Chicago Tribune
Review
"It's an occasionally erotic, but mostly sordid, tale, one that suits this author perfectly, as no writer charts the madness of brilliant minds better....[The Inner Circle] has an emotional core that this novelist has never before achieved." Charlotte Observer
Review
"The Inner Circle is a stunning tour-de-force by one of our most gifted novelists. Readers will be alternatively intrigued, shocked and put off by the book, but few will put it down." Denver Post
Review
"We read on, with quickened breaths, feeling increasingly excited and soiled. Boyle turns his readers into voyeurs....I couldn't stop reading The Inner Circle, for it possesses, to adopt an old phrase, 'the fascination of the abomination.'" Washington Post
Synopsis
Fresh on the heels of his bestselling Drop City, Boyle's tenth novel features fabulous characters, a rollicking plot, and more sex than pioneering researcher Dr. Alfred Kinsey ever dreamed of documenting or almost.
Synopsis
Fresh on the heels of his
New York Times bestselling and National Book Award-nominated novel,
Drop City, T.C. Boyle has spun an even more dazzling tale that will delight both his longtime devotees and a legion of new fans. Boyles tenth novel,
The Inner Circle has it all: fabulous characters, a rollicking plot, and more sex than pioneering researcher Dr. Alfred Kinsey ever dreamed of documenting...well, almost.
A love story, The Inner Circle is narrated by John Milk, a virginal young man who in 1940 accepts a job as an assistant to Dr. Alfred Kinsey, an extraordinarily charming professor of zoology at Indiana University who has just discovered his lifes true calling: sex. As a member of Kinseys "inner circle" of researchers, Milk (and his beautiful new wife) is called on to participate in sexual experiments that become increasingly uninhibited and problematic for his marriage. For in his later years Kinsey (who behind closed doors is a sexual enthusiast of the first order) ever more recklessly pushed the boundaries both personally and professionally.
While Boyle doesnt resist making the most of this delicious material, The Inner Circle is at heart a very moving and very loving look at sex, marriage, and jealousy that will have readers everywhere reassessing their own relationships because, in the end, "love is all there is."
Synopsis
Fresh on the heels of his New York Times bestselling and National Book Award-nominated novel, Drop City, T.C. Boyle has spun an even more dazzling tale that will delight both his longtime devotees and a legion of new fans. Boyle’s tenth novel, The Inner Circle has it all: fabulous characters, a rollicking plot, and more sex than pioneering researcher Dr. Alfred Kinsey ever dreamed of documenting . . . well, almost.
A love story, The Inner Circle is narrated by John Milk, a virginal young man who in 1940 accepts a job as an assistant to Dr. Alfred Kinsey, an extraordinarily charming professor of zoology at Indiana University who has just discovered hislife’s true calling: sex. As a member of Kinsey’s “inner circle” of researchers, Milk (and his beautiful new wife) is called on to participate in sexual experiments that become increasingly uninhibited—and problematic for his marriage. For in his later years Kinsey (who behind closed doors is a sexual enthusiast of the first order) ever more recklessly pushed the boundaries both personally and professionally.
While Boyle doesn’t resist making the most of this delicious material, The Inner Circle is at heart a very moving and very loving look at sex, marriage, and jealousy that will have readers everywhere reassessing their own relationships—because, in the end, “love is all there is.”
About the Author
T.C. Boyle has written nine novels and has published six collections of short fiction. He received the PEN/Faulkner Award for his novel Worlds End and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. His stories appear regularly in The New Yorker, GQ, Esquire, and Playboy.