Behind Kinsey's sex studies, a compelling fiction
The Inner Circle
By T.C. Boyle
Viking, 418 pp., $25.95
"Looking back on it now, I don't think I was ever actually 'sex shy,' " explains John Milk, the studious and sometimes tedious narrator of T. C. Boyle's 10th novel, "The Inner Circle." "But I'll admit I was pretty naive when I first came to him, not to mention hopelessly dull and conventional." It is the morning of Alfred Kinsey's funeral, in 1956, and Milk, one of the famed sex researcher's assistants, has locked him himself in his study with a tape recorder and a head full of memories about his old employer. In Boyle's richly imagined historical re-creation, Kinsey casts a looming shadow on the lives around him, the members of his "inner circle" of sex researchers.
It takes Milk the better part of his recording session, which forms the bulk of this often fine and subtly humorous book, to reckon with the experience he has gained, and the innocence he has lost, working for the monomaniacal, manipulative Kinsey.
What is clear is that Milk was completely in Kinsey's thrall from the start. When the strapping young undergraduate volunteers to submit his rather limited personal sex history for the bene.t of the research, Kinsey (or Prok, as he is called by his closest associates) takes a shine to him that is not wholly innocent. Soon, Milk is working in Kinsey's garden, conducting interviews for Kinsey's sex survey, and submitting to the good professor's own sexual demands.
A satyr of academe, and deploring the "sex shy" mores of his age, Prok has a priapic influence that is felt everywhere. Kinsey also offers up his wife, Mac, to Milk. Milk accepts.
If in the beginning of the novel Milk is an empty, undetermined vessel, "unsure of myself and just about as uninformed as anyone you could imagine," he is readily shaped under Kinsey's tutelage. In so doing, he must hand over a good portion of his own sense of self to belong. That he does so gladly, willingly, owes to the young man's sense of drift, the childhood loss of his father, the emotional detachment of his mother. Predictably, Milk's other relationships suffer. Though he courts and marries a young coed named Iris, the marriage is strained to breaking by his devotion to Kinsey. It becomes clear to the reader, if not to the narrator, that Iris is only the second most important person in his life. Milk seems only dimly aware that he is a member of a quasi-cult, with Kinsey its head.
The collective enterprise to which Milk gives himself is Kinsey's research, the all-important work of collecting and analyzing sex data from thousands of people based on sex history interviews.
Conducting these intensely personal sessions confers a kind of psychological domination. As Milk observes: "To give up your history was to give up your soul, and to possess it was the ultimate aggrandizement, like the cannibal growing ever greater with the subsumed spirit of each of his successive victims." The charming, charismatic Kinsey is expert at convincing people to share their darkest sexual secrets with him.
All for the good of the research, of course, but the researcher is also addicted to the power of possessing such intimate knowledge.
Over time, Kinsey's inner circle expands to include a lothario psychologist, a Princeton-trained cultural anthropologist, a Greenwich Village hipster filmmaker, and their various wives. They are all sworn to Prok's mission of sex research, which means maintaining a public image of absolute propriety as they travel around the country conducting their sex interviews, while, at Kinsey's urging, engaging in a dizzying array of private dalliances.
Surprisingly for a story so much to do with sex, there is little sensuousness in Milk's telling. Instead, he speaks in the language of clinical discretion, using words like "coitus" and "copulation." In talking about his wife, Milk confesses that he "didn't want anything to interfere with the unalloyed pleasure of seeing her again and the prospect of sex, marital relations."
Hot stuff, indeed. Milk, and Boyle as well, will not have the story waylaid by too many sticky details. Which is a pity, really, but also an impressive feat of self-control; one can only imagine this material in other, more prurient hands. (Paging Nicholson Baker.) In his storytelling, Boyle resists one of the Kinsey circle's greatest mistakes (aside from worshipping Kinsey): taking sex for granted, especially through ceaseless, loveless repetition, and robbing it of its magic and mystery. Unfortunately, Milk's dispassionate, lightly brainwashed voice sometimes lends the tale a flatness more thorough than probably intended.
When finally published, Kinsey's studies on human sexual response are phenomenally popular.
They are also accused of, in one critic's words, "championing a mechanistic view of human relations over the spiritual and emotional."
If only they knew. The milieu that produced the studies proves fertile ground for Boyle's biting satire of emotional manipulation, sexual indiscretion, and scientific hubris. The reader's hopes that Milk will see through the demagoguery and assert himself are constantly dashed. Instead, blind to what is so painfully obvious to us, he can do nothing but praise the man. After a while, the airless atmosphere of belief in Milk's retrospection grows slightly tiresome, and regrettably, Boyle doesn't care to lead us beyond it.
Even when Milk does make his break, it is no surprise that the divorce is incomplete -- such is the power of this fictive Kinsey, the man whose work primed the charge for the sexual revolution, whose name, for many years, was synonymous with sex.
Nick Poppy is a writer and filmmaker living in Brooklyn, N.Y.
