The Inner Circle

Book Description 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 his life'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."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly Released in the late 1940s and early '50s, the Kinsey Reports, the compilations of a scientific study that attempted to quantify male and female sexual behavior, shocked Americans with revelations about their sexuality. Indiana University professor Alfred Kinsey's obsessive belief that the human need for sex is little different from animal instinct, and his iconoclastic research methods (including voyeurism and personal interactions), make Kinsey (called "Prok" by students and intimates) a fitting subject for Boyle's (Drop City) irrepressible imagination. In this provocative fictional reconstruction of Kinsey's influence on sexual and societal mores, Boyle's narrator is John Milk, a naïve undergraduate at IU when he becomes Prok' s assistant, the first of the eventual "inner circle" of dedicated disciples. The irony and the drama of this mesmerizing novel lie in Milk's unquestioning acceptance of his idol's demands, and the gradual moral corruption that ensues from such occupational obligations as serving as Kinsey's partner in homosexual sex while also bedding Prok's compliant wife and eventually offering his own wife in group sex activities. Boyle's narrative brio accelerates as other members of the inner circle and their wives respond to Kinsey's manipulative charisma, while the professor's increasingly uninhibited and egotistical demands test the bonds of marital fidelity. If Milk's unwavering idealism begins to seem unlikely and his recognition of the spiritual emptiness of mechanistic sex and the damage to his marriage is a little late in coming, Boyle nonetheless maintains his mix of irony and emotional fidelity with buoyant wit. In the end, the novel can be read as a case study of the price paid by ordinary human beings when they become the apostles to men of genius. Copyright ® Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist Following his spirited counterculture drama Drop City (2003), Boyle fictionalizes a historical figure as he did in The Road to Wellville (1994), an unforgettable portrait of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, this time presenting an intrepid and astute interpretation of the revolutionary work and fanatic personality of sex researcher Dr. Alfred Kinsey. A zoologist at Indiana University called Prok by his intimates, he is seen through the worshipful eyes of John Milk, a handsome, obedient, and clueless English major who becomes Prok's first disciple. Milk joins Prok in his prodigious effort to interview thousands of men and women about their sexual experiences as World War II rages, and Milk is both dedicated to the project and conflicted over Prok's attempt to control every aspect of his life, not to mention his insistence on their having sex. Milk is a meticulous and moody narrator, and Boyle has never written more ravishing and poignant descriptions than those depicting Milk's inner turmoil as reflected in Indiana's extreme weather and the tawdry settings in which they conduct their tricky research, which, as Prok becomes famous, grows increasingly voyeuristic and exhibitionistic. Adamantly clinical, Prok dismisses all sexually related emotions as products of uptight social conventions, but as Milk and his wife, Iris, the novel's moral compass, discover, there's no divorcing feelings from sexuality. Boyle's vision of Kinsey as both genius and cult leader is mesmerizing and chilling as he discerningly explores the consequences of a mechanistic view of humanity, and of signing one's life, and conscience, over to a zealot. Strong medicine from a phenomenally artistic, morally inquisitive, and unfailingly compassionate writer. Donna Seaman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved