The Inner Circle by T.C. Boyle

It was during this period--it might have been as late as 1944, now that I come to think of it--that we were finally able to induce the sexual champion I mentioned earlier to sit for an interview. Prok had been courting him for some time now, and the man had been cagey, feeding us portions of his sex diaries by mail, but expressing his reluctance to meet because of the criminal nature of so many of his sexual contacts. Certainly, what he'd sent us--photographs, penis measurements, case histories and written records of various sex acts with every sort of partner, male, female, nonhuman, preadolescents and even infants--was provocative, perhaps even offensive, but invaluable to our understanding of human sexuality. And, as Prok put it so well, we were scientists, not moralists--our duty was to observe and record, not to pass judgment.

Let me start out by saying that T.C. Boyle is clearly an excellent writer, and I have no qualms about the prose itself. That said, I really don't know if this book was a complete success or an utter failure. If Boyle set out to portray Professor Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues as heroic defenders of the sexually marginalized, I think he failed miserably. If Boyle wanted Kinsey to look like a stony, slightly demented old man who used his position of power over his colleagues to manipulate them for his own sexual gratification, then I have to applaud his successful efforts.

Before The Inner Circle, I'd never read a story where I genuinely came to detest each and every character I was introduced to. Even Iris, the narrator's wife and perhaps the only forgivable principle character, has moments where she behaves deplorably. The entire cast, it seems, is morally bankrupt. And if each and every character has fallen to turpitude, the onus falls on Prok, Professor Alfred Kinsey. I must note, this is a novel, not a memoir. Everything I say here is to be attributed to the character of Prok, as described by Boyle through John Milk's narration, not to the late Alfred Kinsey himself. That said, this fictionalization is based on factual research and one can only assume that certain aspects of Prok's character are reflections of Kinsey's actual behavior.

To me, Prok came across as a monster in a lot of ways. I've read that some of Kinsey's detractors claimed that the impetus for his research was his need to validate his own bizarre sexual appetites. That's exactly the impression I got from Prok in The Inner Circle. Prok removes any elements of love and affection from the act of sex. He coerces his colleagues into having sexual affairs with each others wives, with his own wife, with himself. He does so through subtle bullying. "You're not becoming sex shy on me, are you?" he asks a number of times throughout the story. Failing to follow his orders would have meant exclusion from the inner circle, exclusion from the groundbreaking research that was being carried out in Prok's institute.

People who know me will tell you I'm anything but prude. Yet reading this story I found myself genuinely disgusted by the attitude that Prok takes towards sex. And even more disgusted by the way he forces those around them to swallow his beliefs (among other things) and follow them blindly. And they do, they all do. I found it hard to read a book by a narrator that had no moral compass when it came to sex and sex alone. He was a moral man in just about every other facet of his life, but morality and sex had become mutually exclusive. Shortly after a row with his wife after she learned about his sexual research with Prok's wife, Milk has spontaneous sex with another woman in his apartment's hallway, with his wife sleeping only a few feet away. The Chicago Sun-Times says this book "should be read naked!" as if it's some titillating sex romp. At no point during this reading did I find myself so stimulated. If anything, I wanted to get naked after reading a handful of passages so that I could take a shower. It was that kind of book. It turned my stomach.

Specifically, the passages describing Mr. X and his sexual escapades with infants and toddlers. The way that Prok and Milk and all the rest remain scientifically objective while hearing accounts of X masturbating an infant boy. Honestly, am I supposed to find this pursuit of knowledge at all costs heroic... laudable? It's deplorable. The more I think about it, the more unlikely it seems to me that Boyle actually set out trying to make Prok and his cohorts look like good people. But then, who am I rooting for in this story? If Prok and Milk aren't the protagonists, who is?

All in all, this book was difficult to finish. The writing is excellent, really it is. The use of simple sentence structure coupled with the broad vocabulary you'd expect from an academic narrator made it very easy to read... In terms of mechanics, at least. But the subject matter was too unsettling for me. Page after page, characters manipulate each other, break each other's hearts, and make excuses for behaviors that I think can be objectively called malignant.

Professor Kinsey did a lot of great things. His work has given momentum to the sexual empowerment of women, society's acceptance of homosexuality, and review of archaic sodomy laws around the country. That can't (and shouldn't) be taken away from him. But if this fictional account of Kinsey's personal life is even half as accurate as I think it might be... Dude was kinda maladjusted.

Highlights: I like Boyle's style, lots of double entendre like when Prok is teaching Milk how to properly interview their subjects "He wound up drilling me for two hours that night."
Lowlights: It made my skin crawl about a dozen times, and who are we rooting for?

The Pilot's Wife by Anita Shreve

To be relieved of love, she thought, was to give up a terrible burden.

How much can you ever truly know another human being? Does being married for over a decade prove you know something, anything? Does having and raising a child with someone guarantee you a bond with them that will help you understand them? It’s harder to be sure of anything, of course, if the person you think you know is away traveling with work quite often, if you’ve never met any of their relatives, and they have a separate bank account that you don’t have access to.

These are the things that our main character, Kathryn, is faced with. The novel opens when a man named Robert from the pilots' union wakes Kathryn up at three in the morning to tell her that her husband Jack, a pilot, has passed away due to an explosion on his plane over the coast of Ireland. Robert has to stay with Kathryn to keep her from speaking to the press, to console her, and to provide a certain level of security for her when the press comes out with the theory that Robert might have been committing suicide and dragging over a hundred other people down with him due to what was heard on the CVR recording from the moments leading up to the explosion. When Robert starts to leak her information he isn’t suppose to and starts spending time with her after his work obligations have been fulfilled, it’s hard to tell what his motivations are and what his actions mean.

SPOILERS

The grief in the novel is very real and my heart ached for the characters. Kathryn has lost a husband, is seeing her young daughter fall apart in response to the crash, and is finding out that Jack is a completely different man than she thought he was. As a pilot with a set route, he lived back and forth between two different countries, being America and Ireland. In America, he has Katheryn and their daughter. In Ireland, he has a different wife and family, a strong connection to the Catholic community, and a highly risky and illegal involvement with the IRA that comes to be the death of him. The novel closes when the two wives meet and the details of the crash finally come together for Kathryn.

I really enjoyed this book, but I can’t see the other 50BPers reading it and being drawn in the same way. It’s a little too heavy to be “chick lit” and I think it’s fair to say that the writing is fairly literary, but The Pilot’s Wife will never be on any kind of Times must-read list.

The Pilot’s Wife was published in 1998. It was made into a movie for television. I found out from the New York Times online that it was scheduled to air right after September 11^th, 2001 but had to be pushed back out of respect due to the relevance of the story line to our nation’s tragedy.

On Beauty by Zadie Smith

This is not an easy book to summarize; I’ve been typing and erasing reviews for the past 20 minutes. On Beauty is Zadie Smith’s third novel, but it hardly shows.

The story follows an upper-class family of academics in the fictional New England college town of Wellington. It’s a lot more interesting than it sounds. Smith explores different issues of personal growth and identity that are relevant to almost anyone through each of the five family members. Howard, a white, English, art professor, slowly alienates everyone in his family with a series of stupid infidelities. Kiki, his black, Floridian wife, asks herself tough questions about what it means to fall in love, to give your life to someone, and how much love can actually overcome. Their three children all deal with growing up and forging their own identities in their respective close-knit communities. One tries to make a name for herself as a liberal intellectual at Wellington College, the oldest breaks away from his parents close-minded liberal ideologies by adopting Christian, conservative values, and the youngest awkwardly tries to come to terms with his racial identity in his upper-class, New England suburb. In dealing with each of these personal challenges, Smith manages to expand the small world of college politics and New England social life into something much more familiar to her readers. In no way is this book limited in its scope.

Her characters, while unique in their professions, racial identities and beliefs, could be anyone. On Beauty is guaranteed to touch on at least one problem that each of its readers has dealt with at some point. Smith explores problems of identity, such as what it means to be white or black, old or young, conservative or liberal.

The older we get the more our kids seem to want us to walk in a very straight line with our arms pinned to our sides, our faces cast with the neutral expression of mannequins, not looking to the left, not looking to the right, and not—please not—waiting for winter. They must find it comforting.

If you can’t relate to what it’s like to grow old or fall out of love, you can almost certainly recognize some of the personal struggles that the younger characters face as they learn more about themselves and what it means to long for someone else. And she writes it all so well that it’s easy to forget that her characters aren’t actually having affairs in a small New England town, or that Smith herself hasn’t experienced all of this. Her prose is sharp and witty, and the way she so effortlessly follows around different characters is very refreshing.

Smith has a very fluid style, and manages to slowly, and naturally, leak out more details of the plot without relying on forced dialogue, so characters aren’t saying things like “remember that time when I did that thing that relates very much to an important plot development we’ll soon face?” The only problem I had was that sometimes she didn’t seem to say much about the issues she brought up. She seemed to point excitedly to the fact that the oldest son was a conservative Christian in a family of liberal atheists, and then just lose interest. Overall, I’d imagine that this book can speak to just about anyone, even though it leaves you to draw perhaps too many of your own conclusions. Plus, the cover is very pretty.