The Human Animal.

The Inner Circle

T.C. Boyle

Mes petites! I AM DONE WITH LAW SCHOOL! In 10 days I will be a full-fledged JD. HALLELUJAH! I thought this day would never come. (And so did my poor mother, who has cosigned all my student loans since 2007.)

Every year during finals I go into what I like to call Chick-Lit Hibernation. With my brain so full of laws and rules and tests and social injustices, pretty much all I have room for are books about weddings, shoes, boyfriends, sisters, etc. Fluff. I want fluff. I go to the Goodwill and buy a huge stack of pink-covered books for $3. Only this time, somehow, in my buying frenzy, I ended up with T.C. Boyle's The Inner Circle. When I got home and found this book amidst the others, I thought, "Huh." And then I read the first page.

And then I read a few more pages, every few hours or so. I couldn't stop once I'd started with this book.

My inability to put this book down was due in large part to the plot, which is compelling: As a senior at Indiana University in 1940, John Milk never dreams, when he signs up for a semester-long zoology course, that it will end up defining the rest of his life. But the class is taught by Professor Alfred Kinsey. John impresses Prok (as everyone calls Kinsey) with his diligence and soon he's a part of Kinsey's inner circle, helping him to study the way that people have sex with one another.

Prok is determined that he will interview 10,000 people about their sex lives to compile into two books that will come to be known as The Kinsey Report. John is his trusty second-in-command. But while their purpose is education of others, John gets quite an education himself. He learns about free love, and loyalty; he marries petulant Iris, who disapproves of his work and his boss; and as Prok's inner circle grows and spins out of control, he learns to hate the man he also loves.

Boyle's writing is none-too-shabby, either. This is my first Boyle, and now I think I know why so many people admire him. His characters are expertly drawn. You get a complete sense of each person's motivation, their strengths, their uncertainties. They all felt very real to me, John and Iris and Prok and his easy, willing wife, Mac. It never felt as though they were flat, playing their parts in a story--it was always their fire that was driving the engine of the plot. Boyle excels at giving a sense of a time and place with only a few images or details. He is the master of showing the twisted path from love to lust to loathing, and back again.

And he's gutsy: most fictional interpretations of Kinsey try to juxtapose the outlandishness of his life's work with his fairly ordinary life. Other pop-culture interpretations present Kinsey as a man with a mission, whose passion is to educate the masses as to their own inner workings. Boyle's work is more nuanced than that. Yes, Prok is a husband and father, a scientist, and a connoisseur of staid and traditional interests like classical music and gardening. But then: he also has this little habit of coercing his employees into wife-swapping and homosexual orgies. He is equal parts compelling and abhorrent. He is hard to love (or even like) but by the end of the book, you don't doubt that Milk truly believes he would risk everything for this man he has come to admire--just as you don't question why he can't, when he is actually asked to.

Boyle handles the sex in this book so well. As well he should: this is a book about people writing a book on sex. I expected a lot of shocking and graphic scenes of sex, but that never really happened. Because Boyle is too smart for that. He's not going for shock value; that's the lazy writer's way out. He's thinking of the story overall: At first, for John the virginal college student, sex is a mysterious and amazing rite. But as the years of John's work with Prok slip by, the descriptions of sex become cold and clinical in a way that suggests great weariness. Boyle manages to show us the whole of John's complicated and changing relationship with the man he loves with a only touch of flesh against flesh, a breath, a smell.

Boyle is a big-picture writer, but he never forgets the smaller details. The result is a truly fine, rich, and complicated story that details the ways in which people can be brought together and driven apart. And then brought together again.

When I went back to the thrift store yesterday, I found Boyle's The Women, and basically, I can't wait to read it, too. Now that my brain's my own again.

Rating: 4.5 of 5 stars