THE INNER CIRCLE - T.C. Boyle - Fiction

There are two ways to write about this incisive, trenchant, detachedly anti-humanist book. In one, we contemplate the importance of sex research, and the sex education and greater levels of community and personal acceptance to which it led--in the 40s, when Alfred Kinsey was publishing his watershed works, homosexual behavior was strongly condemned, and many were unaware that women had active and sometimes "deviant" sexual desires--while contrasting these beneficial outcomes with the always-slippery slope of research into areas of strongly conflicting moral opinion, noting that Kinsey sometimes used himself as a research subject, and that many accounts point to his widely varying sexual appetites as impetus for his research. Yet down this path lies no real conclusion: T.C. Boyle masterfully mixes fiction and fact in his portrayal of Kinsey as part man, part monster, and of the fictional John Milk as his docile right-hand yes-man. We are shown both Kinsey the great biologist and dynamic proponent of scientific research and work ethic, as well as Kinsey the coercer of men and women, who rides roughshod over his team and his wife, and decries differing moral opinions as "sex-shyness." The very term, first brought up by our narrator, Milk, and later echoed many times over in Kinsey's conversations, goes from a quaint piece of researcher dialect to a threatening and two-faced accusation: the sex-shy are inhibiting Kinsey's work, and the sex-shy are those he defines as people unwilling to share their sexual lives with him. Quite the conundrum.

The other way to discuss the impact of this novel is to ask how, and to what extent, we will encourage or tolerate fiction about the lives of real people. Fan fiction on the internet has gone from being a cult activity (Star Trek fans wanting to write about Kirk and Spock) to a mainstream pursuit that has recently drawn legal attention (Harry Potter fans writing stories involving their favorite magical wizards are frequently recipients of cease-and-desist letters warning against stealing the intellectual property of the hottest entertainment conglomerate in town.) It's hard to say that THE INNER CIRCLE, accomplished and literary and beautifully written as it is, isn't another piece of fan fiction. Alfred Kinsey and his wife (whose nickname is Mac) were real people, and Kinsey's work is as much the stuff of record as of legend. Sure, Milk isn't real, and Boyle has largely invented the individual interactions between Kinsey's staff and their varied interview subjects. But, the portrait painted here is at times intensely unflattering, and it's hard to imagine another author who could get away with describing another subject's painful "urethral insertions" with such aplomb.

How much respect do we owe the dead? And how much can we get away with by attaching a disclaimer saying "this is a work of fiction?" These are as much legal questions as artistic ones, but they also carry a degree of artistic responsibility. One would have to go back to source material and biographies in order to determine how much of Kinsey's work as depicted in THE INNER CIRCLE is real, and one's first reaction, coupled with the suspension of disbelief inherent in fiction, is to assume it is all real, to the probable detriment of the reader's perception of Kinsey's work. In the fan fiction community, writing stories about real people--for example, writing about the actors who play Kirk and Spock, rather than Kirk and Spock themselves--is seen as somehow more morally questionable than writing about fictional characters, even though legally a charge of libel is harder to prosecute in these circumstances than a charge of copyright violation. The idea here, as I see it, is that inventing sexual relationships for real people is an invasion of privacy--and although libel requires the person being libelled to be alive, I would argue that the rule is perhaps even more important if the person in question is dead, because he then can't answer to the charges.

The ethics of fiction primarily concern fabrication of non-fiction, or plagiarism, as many recent high-profile cases can attest. In general, celebrities can make name-dropping appearances in fiction without much cause for concern. But I almost wish that Kinsey could write a rebuttal to this novel, not solely for the joy of his prose, but because he would have been apoplectic at such a challenge to the validity of his work.