T. C. Boyle’s The Inner Circle is the story of Professor Kinsey and his obsession with all things sexual. In the book we find that Prok, as Kinsey is known to his associates, is a pansexual pervert who loves all manner of deviant behavior. Part and parcel of his personal philosophy, of course, is that there is no such thing as perversion or deviant behavior-all human animals want all manner of sexual contact.
The story is told from the perspective of John Milk, one of Prok’s many students/sex partners/researchers. Prok has sex with anything that moves, and so to, does John Milk. A fitting end to the book would have been they all died of AIDS or syphilis or some other disease that they personally brought into being. But sexual diseases are not mentioned, at least not that I recall, in this endless tail of Sex Histories, infidelity, and constant betrayals.
The Kinsey Reports, one on male and one on female, are big hits and make a lot of money-but Prok likes to spend a lot of money, so it is never enough. The whole point of the underlying story of Prok’s perversions is that he has to keep his real live hidden. In the end Prok dies before the swinging 60s and the world of today where both anything goes and Congressmen and Ministers lose their jobs because they can’t keep it in their pants.
The Inner Circle does a brilliant job of invoking the dry, clinical voice of a doctorial thesis-both in it’s pedantric language and it’s glacial plot advancements. It is a long book in which there is a lot of talk about sex, but like the documentaries on HBO, there is little to be titillated about. Sex is nothing but a bodily function, one that we share with all other animals on earth and while it is necessary for the continuation of the species, there is nothing really all that special about it. And yet, our anti-heroes are completely obsessed with sex in all it’s many forms.
It’s hard to listen to the Inner Circle without having to stop from time to time and wonder how much of this nonsense is supposed to be true. Of course, it isn’t really surprising to see an obesse chef on the cover of a cookbook, so why should it be shocking that a sex scientist wants to fuck everything that moves? Well, for one thing, the fat chef doesn’t hurt anyone but himself-and maybe anyone who uses the recipes from his cookbook-while the sex expert that constantly has sex hurts everyone he meets. Prok Kinsey never understands why people get upset when he wants them to perform sexually for him-hey, it’s just sex.
There are no heroes in The Inner Circle, they are sexual criminals of one sort or another, and emotional criminals of the worst types possible. Like all fanatics of any sort, they can easily justify all of their behaviors and refuse to see the logic of any other form of behavior. The fact that everyone in the Inner Circle is a coward who never thinks to do the logical thing of blowing Prok’s head off makes the book ultimately unsatisfying.
These were evil people, and yet they got to spread their word to the world as if they were real scientists-which Prok Kinsey very much wanted everyone to believe, but which is hard to believe after reading The Inner Circle.
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