I think this
is my least favorite Boyle novel so far. It’s still a great read, but it’s a
different kind of novel than all the other Boyle books I’ve read.
First, let’s
mention the prose. It’s mature and sharp, but it lacks that rollicking flow
that so permeates most of Boyle’s work. And I was ready for that thrilling
ride. I had my pen in hand this time, ready to underline every precisely turned
phrase, confident that there would be more than could reasonably be counted,
and that I would be stuck picking some at random as a representative sample.
But there
weren’t that many. “I was lonely, bored to tears, masturbating twice a day in
my attic room that was like a sweatbox in a penal institution” comes on page 4,
but the next one, “Unfortunately, it was insulated about as thoroughly as an
orange crate…” doesn’t show up until page 33, and then, it’s a wait until page
76 for “…her mouth drawn down to nothing, a slash, a telltale crack in the
porcelain shell of her shining, martyred face.” Eventually, I put the pen down,
disappointed that it wasn’t getting more use.
I took me a
while to realize what the problem was. The novel is in the first person and
Boyle’s narrator, John Milk, just doesn’t have the traditional Boyle flamboyance
in him. The New York Times review of
the book called Milk as bland as his name, and that’s pretty much true. Maybe
it is something Boyle did purposely, but the lack of his traditional flair
really called my attention to Milk’s voice. The fact that he is supposedly
speaking the novel extemporaneously into a tape recorder made the occasional
flourishes not welcome but actually out of place. Add that to the fact that
Milk is a stutterer—stumbling over his words whenever he quotes himself
directly. (Who would do that, by the way? I stutter, but not when speaking into
a tape recorder, except when I am repeating words I actually said. Then I
recreate the stutter I used at the time.) The whole thing just kind of falls in
on itself.
Still, there
are moments when Boyle—and I do mean Boyle, not Milk—puts you directly in the
scene, and sends chills up and down your spine. In case you didn’t know, the
sex researcher Alfred Kinsey is a major character in this book—called Prok, as in Professor K, and he’s Milk’s employer, mentor and sometimes sex
partner—and Milk, along with several other assistants, help Kinsey collect
sexual histories from tens of thousands of people. There’s one scene where they
secretly arrange to meet a subject that falls well outside the bell curve of
normal sexual behavior. He’s called Mr. X, and he shares with Milk and the
others some evidence of his exploits.
The
photographs—there were a hundred or more—had the most immediate effect. I
remember one in particular, which showed only the hand of an adult, with its
outsized fingers, manipulating the genitalia of an infant—a boy, with a tiny,
twig-like erection—and the look on the infant’s face, its eyes unfocused, mouth
open, hands groping at nothing, and the sensation it gave me. I felt myself go
cold all over, as if I were still in the bathtub, standing rigid beneath the
icy shower. I glanced at Corcoran, whose face showed nothing, and then at Prok,
who studied the photograph a moment and pronounced it “Very interesting, very
interesting indeed.” He leaned in close to me to point out the detail, and
said, “You see, Milk, here is definite proof of infantile sexuality, and
whether it’s an anomaly or not, of course, is yet to be demonstrated
statistically—”
It is
exactly this kind of clinical detachment that subsumes the novel and attracts
Milk. I’ve written before about how most of Boyle’s work seems to focus on the
contrasts and commonalities between two primary characters—whether they are Ned
Rise and Mungo Park or Will Lightbody and Charlie Ossining. Well, in The Inner Circle, the two contrasting
characters are both Milk—Milk’s basic human nature and the aspiring ideal he
has of himself. And it is the clinical standards of detachment that Prok
introduces to him that puts these characters into conflict with one another.
I don’t suppose it
will come as a surprise if I told you I had trouble concentrating on my work
that day. As much as I tried to fight them down, I was prey to my
emotions—stupidly, I know. Falsely. Anachronistically. I kept telling myself I
was a sexologist, that I had a career and a future and a new outlook
altogether, that I was liberated from all those petty, Judeo-Christian
constraints that had done such damage over the centuries, but it was no good. I
was hurt. I was jealous. I presented my ordinary face to Prok and, through the
doorway and across the expanse of the inner room, to Corcoran, but I was
seething inside, burning, violent and deranged with the gall of my own
inadequacy and failure—my own sins—and I kept seeing the stooped demeaning
figure of the cuckold in the commedia dell’arte no matter how hard I tried to
dismiss it. I stared at Corcoran when he wasn’t looking. I studied the way he
scratched at his chin or tapped the pencil idly on the surface of the blotting
pad as if he were knocking out the drumbeat to some private rhapsody. Kill him!
a voice screamed in my head. Get up now and kill him!
Corcoran has
slept with Milk’s wife. It’s something that Prok encouraged, a freedom not
enjoyed by the tormented specimens they study. But Milk can’t accept it. There
is something immovable within him that is jealous and horrified by the idea,
even though he is welcome to sleep with any woman or man in their entourage.
The device
lends a kind of lurid fascination to the entire novel. You don’t quite know what
Prok is going to expect his henchmen to do next, and whether Milk will do it
with self-abandon or self-abuse. In the end, it is his wife Doris that stands
out as the incorruptible ideal, although it is not the hedonistic kind of which
Prok would approve. She, and not Milk, is the agent of volition within the
novel, and that makes for a strange and sometimes surreal ride.
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