The Inner Circle is a work of historical fiction written
by T.C. Boyle. Boyle has written 14 novels, and he published this one in 2004.
This is about Alfred Kinsey, the zoology professor at Indiana University who
became the first great human sex researcher, his wife, and his immediate group of
colleagues who followed him into this area of research where no one had dared
to go before. To say Kinsey was controversial in his own time would be a vast
understatement. While his intellectual achievement was not the equivalent of
Freud, certainly the disputes and turmoil that he created among his colleagues was equal to
the stir that Freud created in 19th and 20th century
Vienna. Boyle writes from the perspective of John Milk who lied to get into
Kinsey’s undergraduate class on human sexuality and then became his first and
most trusted assistant.
The story starts
in the late 1930s and continues until three years after Kinsey’s death in 1956.
Only the characters of Kinsey, his wife Mac, and the President of Indiana
University Herman Wells were real. Wells was a great defender of Kinsey’s
research, or it never could have happened in that setting. There could be few
more Christian, conservative and redneck settings than Southern Indiana in that
era. Kinsey was a lightning rod who became an international sensation with the
publication of his research. Kinsey wrote Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948)
and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). The Inner Circle was a well-written novel, titillating at
the minimum. If Mary Roach can write a best selling novel called Bonk, which is a non-fiction work about
the sex life of sex researches (previously reviewed in the blog), why shouldn’t
Boyle take on Kinsey and fictionalize his inner circle. You can feel the
struggle of his most intimate associates to try to understand and keep pace
with the first pioneer into the research of human sexual activity, and you’ll
appreciate Kinsey’s maniacal drive to finish his work. If the subject matter
interests you, this novel is worth your time. Thanks to my sister Pam for
sending me the book.
For anyone who's spent time on the Indiana University campus this book tells of Bloomington in the 50s. But it also describes walking the campus crunching leaves in the fall, sweating in the summer humidity and freezing in the winter snows. Street names, campus architecture remain he same no matter the decade.
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