Tangled up in blue

The 10th novel by T.C. Boyle, “The Inner Circle,” is the story of John Milk, a fictional cohort in the otherwise nominally real team of researchers employed by Alfred Kinsey in the 1940s. The two volumes that issued from their work, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” and “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,” transformed the way people everywhere thought about sex; in America, at least, this was not a universally welcome change.

“The Inner Circle” covers a great deal of literal and psychic geography, and its supporting cast is large. But it’s essentially a chamber piece, as the title implies; the principals operate in a vast, uncharted territory yet seem to struggle with claustrophobia. Kinsey, larger than life, has almost infinite powers of persuasion, with skills of mimicry, empathy and adaptation that bewitch the back-alley ponce and 8-year-old interviewee alike.

Milk’s account spans the entire period of Kinsey’s study. It opens and closes on the day of Kinsey’s funeral. A brief prologue strikes a rueful note: Something (probably many things) has not ended happily for the narrator. A sour foreboding is established, then we are whisked back to the campus of Indiana University where Milk, still an undergrad, signs up for Kinsey’s marriage course, a seminar restricted to engaged couples. A coed he’s briefly dated and failed to interest much comes along as his beard.

Milk does interest Kinsey for several reasons: aptitude, comeliness, a curiosity stronger than his standard, repressed upbringing. He becomes Kinsey’s first assistant. Soon, Kinsey allows him to interview his study subjects and collect their sexual and physiological data. This first involves convincing the most readily available people -- other students, faculty members, janitors, locals -- to divulge their histories and anatomical particulars. Milk gradually sheds his ingrained timidity, aided by the period’s growing faith in scientific method. As his bond with Kinsey tightens, Milk’s professional trajectory is set.

Kinsey, here, is both charismatic leader and exemplary scientist, a protean figure whose monumental work demands the rigorous sacrifice of personal boundaries. Appraising Milk’s own personal data, he notes a significant quantity of “H” behavior and, early in Milk’s apprenticeship he and Kinsey start enjoying each other often, and thoroughly. Milk’s considerable non-H urges are first quelled by Mac, Kinsey’s wife, and only later, after a marriage promise has been extracted, by Iris, Milk’s girlfriend.

The cultic milieu, as it’s sometimes called, is suggested from the outset. Milk vets every decision he makes with Kinsey, who has an answer for everything. Implicitly, sex within the Kinsey menage functions as a tool of indoctrination, loosening the conventional bonds of love and marriage. Others join the research team. Kinsey’s survey broadens to cover new and ever less conventional segments of the population.

As “The Inner Circle” moves along, the demands of Kinsey’s project acquire a messianic imperiousness. Since the work demands a clinical approach to sexuality, members of the group and their spouses, sooner or later, for the good of science, end up having sex with each other. Field trips into the worlds of working girls, pimps, convicts, hustlers and what they call “deviants” of all kinds suggest the need for direct observation. Almost instantly, Boyle’s intrepid band is holding its collective breath behind a curtain in a prostitute’s hotel room. One method leads to another: still photography, movies. Meanwhile, relations within the inner circle (Kinsey, Mac, Milk, Iris, Purvis Corcoran, his wife Violet, then Rutledge and Mrs. Rutledge, finally the photographer, Aspinall) become densely tangled. Between Milk and Iris, spells of domestic peace regularly crumble into acrimony and bursts of retaliatory infidelity -- whatever that might be in context.

Mac, surrogate mother of the group, acts as a kind of speed bump when racing emotional conflicts threaten the collective equilibrium. Milk, the quintessential acolyte and true believer, swallows his largely unacknowledged resentment of Kinsey, while Iris, who holds her own against the Great Man at several surprising moments, settles scores with Milk by making it with his colleagues.

Kinsey’s domination of Milk and Milk’s battered relationship with Iris eventually seem to shove Kinsey’s study into the margins. The novel becomes, for better or worse, the story of Milk’s haplessness, Milk’s disillusion, Milk’s ruined marriage: “I came as close to losing control then as I ever have -- there were accusations on my lips, I know it, and I wanted to throw his words right back at him, but the best I could manage was just another reflection of my own inadequacy, a kind of bleat of agony that might have come from the lips of a child.”

Where this novel’s focus appreciably narrows is where something goes seriously awry. Boyle’s singular accomplishment in this book is his portrait of Kinsey -- his erudition, his pedantries, his quirky nonsexual interests, his oversize personality and its spellbinding effect on colleagues, their wives, their families and a veritable human zoo of study subjects. His flaws and occasional failures resonate in important ways throughout the novel’s long march to what comes to be known as “The Kinsey Report,” mostly because the rest of Kinsey seems impervious to discouragement, even infallible. As Kinsey gradually dematerializes into a haze of celebrity, Milk and Iris and their depressing liaison, never a thing of compelling wonder, take over the stage.

Milk has already, by this time, recorded his spasms of envy over the sexual prodigy Corcoran, the second researcher Kinsey hired; his fear of replacement in Kinsey’s esteem; his flurries of mistrust regarding Mac, Kinsey and Violet; his jealousy and possessiveness when Iris sleeps with other people -- all manner of natural reactions that his indenture to Kinsey forces him to accept, after honorary flashes of resistance. We understand that his career as a follower has destroyed his autonomy -- his manhood, if you like.

However, the malignant explosions that occur between Milk and Iris over a decade remain miraculously unevolved and unnuanced by what either does, sexually speaking, with other people. The birth of their child is given a considerable buildup, and Milk experiences an epiphanic revelation that the Kinsey research is really all about children -- but then the child sinks into the obscurity of wet nappies and furniture. The unchanging loop of the Milks’ domestic purgatory points either to the corrosive longevity of marital bitterness or an uncanny retention of received ideas. Both are, of course, possible, though the context argues for a more subtly inflected understanding between them.

Milk himself is a peculiarly abject invention, given the opportunities for high comedy Kinsey’s research offers. Plenty of hilarious situations get set up, including an endless conga line of test subjects waiting to masturbate on camera; Milk’s redaction of such events, though, tends to stress his acquired weariness and atrophying interest -- despite his invariably documented tumescence -- even when the truly unusual might merit some unsullied surprise:

“ ‘You’re depressed?’ I loomed over the bed. Her face was small, a nugget, sidelong and averted. ‘What about me? I’m the one who had to sit in some rancid overheated room for ten days and watch a thousand men [masturbate]. You think that’s fun? You think I like it?’ A silence. The tragic underlip. ‘Yes, John,’ she said finally, her eyes fixed on mine. ‘I think you do. You do it with Prok, don’t you? And Purvis? And half the tramps and male hustlers in, in ... go ahead, hit me. Will that make you feel like a big man, huh, will it?’ ”

This not-atypical exchange between Milk and Iris, with its echoes of Fanny Hurst, indicates how much of the 1940s Boyle has absorbed -- sometimes interestingly, sometimes not. At moments like these, the prolonged orbiting of people like Milk and Iris around Alfred Kinsey seems, unavoidably, improbable. It’s far easier to imagine an actual Kinsey researcher and his partner sharing a hearty, jaded cackle over that image of a thousand men than what occurs in the above passage.

While “The Inner Circle” paints an effective picture of America’s clammy, stultifying, erotically punitive atmosphere in the early and mid-1940s, it takes no special note of the libidinal frenzy that the end of World War II released in urban America, a phenomenon that greatly facilitated Kinsey’s research and brought him in contact with artists and writers, many just out of the services, who were mining the same territory.

This may be unimportant to the story Boyle set out to tell. The one he does tell has impressive momentum and formal reach, the author’s customary descriptive finesse and a fair amount to impart about wrong turns, anger, dependency and disillusion. What it says about sex, on the other hand, is a bit recherche. By casting Kinsey’s research in a generally squalid, joyless light, “The Inner Circle” seems to affirm the repressive mores Kinsey exploded, promoting the not-altogether-original idea that sex without love makes people feel bad. This is, no doubt, often true for people disposed to think so. As Kinsey proved, it’s usually not true for people who aren’t. *