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He Wants Your Sex

Sex without love is an empty experience, but as empty experiences go it's one of the best.
— Woody Allen

Professor Alfred Kinsey, or Prok as he was better known, would have loved the Internet, after all, he and his researchers attempted to create the first true survey of American sexual behavior, cataloging the mundane and the deviant without a thought as to what was right or wrong. And on the Internet, it's just about anything goes. Prok would have dug his teeth into this, savoring every fetish and intimate confession imaginable, all in the name of science. Still, he would have been decidedly vexed at the dialogue of sexual manners in this country. Have we learned nothing in the last half-century since he broadsided the euphoric and weary post-war United Sates with his male and female editions of his "Sexual Behavior" studies?

In his last novel, Drop City, T.C. Boyle skewered the simplistic romanticism of the 1960s with its sexual-liberation ethos and free-love solipsism, taking aim at communards of the early 70s and their impending personal implosions. Readjusting his authorial eye just a bit to an earlier and more sensationally influential period of American history, Boyle's sublime tenth novel, The Inner Circle, tackles still another fragment of Americana that has fallen through the cracks of historical ignorance.

With Kinsey, it was always about the sex, and only about the sex. An uncorrupted focus on the human as sexual animal attempting to detach the carnal from love and the innate emotional bonds that accompany. Those unwilling or unable to handle this were "sex shy" and were of no use to the project or the betterment of mankind. Prok is a sexual guru, a man whose own sexual appetite, mostly for men, was equally matched by a thirst for scientific prudery. Prok was no hypocrite, as the narrator is to reveal, the professor did indeed practice what he taught.

For the 38-year-old John Milk, the divisions were a little more blurred, affecting an avalanche that he never entirely pulls himself up from. Book-ended by Kinsey's death, The Inner Circle unfolds as a defense of the narrator's life. Milk pours forth his being, from its naive beginnings as a quiet undergraduate at Indiana University through his deteriorating marriage and ultimately the mortality of his mentor. This apologia pro vita sua of Milk's is sublimely crafted by Boyle, whose energetic second novel Budding Prospects was his only other lengthy foray into first-person narrative. That Boyle lends the tale a singular voice of reflection gives it an earnestness and immediacy that is captivating, letting history unfurl at the edge while Milk is ensnared in an emotional trial that undermines everything he is working toward.

In 1939, the young and bashful Milk is asked to fake an engagement with a young lady in dire want of enrolling in Kinsey's newly initiated marriage course, which promises to unravel the entanglements of preached moralities and little discussed realities for faculty, upperclassmen and engaged students. The rest, as it were, is history. Milk, who long ago lost his father, is swept into the charismatic ocean that is Prok, Kinsey's perfunctorily shortened nickname. Prok at once becomes a teacher, father, employer and sexual outlet for the virgin. Under the tutelage of Prok, Milk becomes the initial member of "the inner circle" and takes up relations with the professor's wife, Mac, in deference to the project. Most of the novel spans a ten-year period from that fateful enrollment of Milk's to the aftermath of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, and throughout, Milk is the eager progeny, bent with feelings of inferiority and confusion.

Filtered through the narration of John Milk, Prok is both a daring-pioneer and barbarous-fascist who demands devotion to the project at all costs, including the intertwining of "the inner circle" which threatens to unravel the entire endeavor. The first extension of this is Iris, who as Milk's wife assumes the de facto moral center of the novel. She is the one who suffers the day-to-day brutalities that such clinical views of sex and allegiance to its cause command. Kinsey casts a pall over the relationship between John and his wife from the start, commandeering their wedding and vaguely threatening to withhold his help in obtaining a deferment from the war for John unless Iris relents and gives her sexual history to the project. The Milks are emotional fodder for Prok, who loves them, but projects his own stoic rationalization for the separation of love and sex. John has sex with a stranger in the shadows of his apartment while his wife sleeps nearby. After Iris commences an affair with the newest member of the circle and is not able to make the dissection of sentiment from body, she is put back in her place. This is a game whose movements are already mapped out.

The complexities of people were never part of the equation with Kinsey, and as Milk guides the story, the sexologist remains an enigmatic figure, one of Boyle's numerous gurus that his fiction has distrusted so readily over the last several decades. When presented with a chance to interview their Holy Grail, the high-rater Mr. X, Prok is flush with boyish enthusiasm, never considering the wake of injury the man may have left on the numerous children, but only of the statistics and records he dutifully noted. For Prok, this is genius. There are no judgments in The Inner Circle, the tone is nearly unsentimental, even us John Milk's life seems to become unhinged, he remains loyal, even after Kinsey's death.

Boyle is that rare breed of American literary fiction writer, an alluring wordsmith and evocative storyteller who can waltz the belles-lettres and swing with the masses. What he has accomplished yet again with this novel is to capture a snapshot of American history, a fictional retelling that hits the heart with more accuracy than a dozen biographies could ever hope to realize.