Newsweek's Brian Braiker interviews T. Coraghessan Boyle (image: AP), author of The Inner Circle. The interview is a terrific read, and I really can't wait to read the book.
Like Boyle's "The Road to Wellville," "Circle" is a fictionalized account of a historic figure. Instead of John Harvey Kellogg, Boyle this time tackles Alfred C. Kinsey, the Indiana University professor who jump-started the sexual revolution with the 1948 publication of "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male." The novel is narrated by John Milk, a naive researcher at the center of Professor Kinsey's, or "Prok's," inner circle. Kinsey — who would have abhorred the euphemism "adult film" — proposes that poets have had 2,000 years to tell us about romance and love, and now science ought to tell us about the physiology of sex, without regard to emotional content. (Kinsey is also the subject of an upcoming biopic starring Liam Neeson.)And boy, is the professor ever interested in sex. He charms his researchers into bed, encourages them all to swap wives and generally get it on as much as possible — all in the name of science, of course. Because the intent behind the sex is clinical, the steady stream of graphic episodes in the novel becomes numbing, unsexy and, well, clinical. But things get sticky when Milk, a married man with a bit of a Stockholm syndrome infatuation for his mentor, fails to disentangle his emotions. Milk is in love with Kinsey. He's in love with Kinsey's wife. And he's in love with his own wife, Iris. In the end, the novel is a meditation on family, on marriage, love and sexuality.
