Memorial Day Links

May 25, 2008 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

* Mark Sarvas appeared in Seattle, as announced, and… no one showed up except yours truly. Way to go. The good news, however, is that the Seattle Times interviewed him. Alas, the interview leads with a reference to a hatchet job in the New York Times, which I won’t deign to link to here. A snippet of the interview:

Q: I worry that the kind of reading, that trancelike state you achieve when you get deep into a book, is going away in favor of a different kind of reading on the Internet. And what do you think is going to happen with book reviews? Will they eventually migrate to the Net, and how will that affect them?

A: There are different kinds of reading. The kind you do on a couch with a book is different from what you do with your blog.

I share your troubled view of the future — but I think it has absolutely nothing to do with the Internet. This is not just about book reviews; it’s about classical music, architecture, movie reviews.

It’s not a crisis in book reviewing; it’s the fact that we live in an age that I find distressingly incurious — interested in material pursuits, unreflective, narcissistic, shallow. An age when the thing that’s on everyone’s mind is … “Did you see ‘American Idol’ last night?”

It’s nothing to do with the Internet or the loss of newspapers. It’s a much wider critical moment, one that I leave to the cultural anthropologists to figure out.

* James Wood further illuminates what he values and what he doesn’t in fiction while simultaneously (and justifiably!) criticizing bloggers for their too-frequent rush to judgment. If you leave this blog to read it and don’t come back because you’ve spent too much time meditating on what he’s said, I won’t blame you. I’ve got a response rumbling in me, but it’s not ready for publication.

(Hat tip TEV.)

* From Anecdotal Evidence, more preaching to the choir. Granted, I agree with the post, but I’m guessing that the people who should most read it won’t, much like the protests at the NBCC and elsewhere regarding the cutbacks in book reviewing, or those endless damning reports about how we don’t, as a society, read much.

(Hat tip Books, Inq.)

* This video isn’t book-related, but watch it anyway.

Henderson the Rain King

May 23, 2008 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Henderson the Rain King is not my favorite Bellow novel: Henderson’s sojourn in Africa is unconvincing and borders on Orientalism, the novel’s symbolism is heavy, and some disjointed sections feel superfluous, as when Henderson writes letters to his wife, Lily, in Chapter 19, or when he discusses the lion hunts with King Dahfu. Still, even Bellow batting below average scores more hits than most writers at their best, and in rereading Henderson I remember why I like Bellow so much—he’s so alive, and his characters ceaselessly try to expand their own lives and learn to encompass this big thing we call life. Granted, they’re always unsuccessful at the latter, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it’s an impossible quest just to understand life—especially humanity in all its varieties—let alone encompassing it, is probably impossible.

This might feed into what Bellow, like some other great novelists, so disliked about academic research and writing, as academics by definition try to define and elucidate, while so much of Bellow’s writing shows why some major factors of life simply can’t be elucidated. Therefore, academics and critics like me are ourselves going on a futile quest in our attempts to comprehend Bellow, who wrote novels like Henderson that show why the explaining isn’t possible; as Sam Tanenhaus wrote regarding the Library of America edition of Bellow, “It may be heretical, or just foolish, for a book review editor to admit it, but there are times when criticism is beside the point.” Indeed, and it makes me wary in writing this. No wonder Bellow liked Blake’s poetry, as I see some of the same defiance of full explanation in Blake, especially his later work. Henderson is a particularly strong example of this tendency, with the protagonist’s constant drive toward something he can’t seem to articulate beyond “I want, I want,” forming a base for the unnameable: what does Henderson want? Life? Experience? Knowledge? Something else?

Much of Henderson is, I think, intended as comic, given its outlandish events. Still, those events, like the lion hunt or the moving of the statue, are too symbolically endowed for my taste. They seem more like a statement of Henderson’s character than necessary events to the novel. Such scenes also parallel to too great a degree Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces. That book came out in 1949 and Henderson in 1959, and during the period between them Bellow might have read or at least heard about Hero. Many of its elements show in farcical ways: the call to adventure is through narcissistic desire that leads to departure from the United States for Africa; failure in the blown-up water cistern; initiation in the form of moving a statute; and eventual success, after a fashion. Henderson is more concerned with himself than anyone or thing else, however, and rather than reconciling himself with his society he thinks that, “this is the payoff of a lifetime of action without thought” when he’s forced to imitate a jungle beast. As he says elsewhere, noting the ridiculousness of his own situation, “If I had to shoot at that cat, if I had to blow up frogs, if I had to pick up Mummah without realizing what I was getting myself into, it was not out of line to crouch on all fours and roar and act the lion.”

Yet in Henderson those comic aspects are also a critique of the quest narrative, as Henderson can’t find wholeness or completion. He searches for an abstraction layer not available through travel, even when elements of home—the United States—follow him: “It was just my luck to think I had found the conditions of life simplified so I could deal with them—finally!—and then to end up in a ramshackle palace reading these advanced medical texts.” The issues keep coming: “And though I’m no expert I guess he’s [King Dahfu] thinking of mankind as a whole, which is tired of itself and needs a short in the arm from animal nature.” If that weren’t enough, he continues: “Anyway, I begin to ask (or perhaps it was more a plea than a question), why is it always near me—why! Why can’t I get away from it awhile? Why, why!” Why indeed: it’s a question religion doesn’t answer, or at least not satisfactorily anymore, and that philosophy seems to have failed at answering despite its numerous and increasingly verbose attempts, and that novels pose and don’t seem to answer. In the mythology Campbell discusses, you come back from your quest whole and ready to take your place in the adult community or you die and uphold the standards of that community or you transcend life; in Henderson and later, ironic texts, your quest is forever incomplete, because like Henderson, you can’t answer that pivotal question that becomes an exclamation: “Why, why!”

Why, why! indeed, and Bellow keeps setting up the questions through exploration without giving answers. The closest he comes, I think, is in Ravelstein, where Chick marvels at the “creature” that is Ravelstein while also being resigned to accept his fate. Whether this is an improvement on the manic energy of earlier Bellow novels or a depressing acceptance of the end is a matter of perspective on which I have no opinion. But, like the master, I will try to frame the issue, even if the issue has a habit of being larger than that frame. And so the critic struggles with Bellow like Itelo wrestling with Henderson, and even champion critics don’t seem able to win. But this preoccupation with trying to explain Bellow stays with me, and this is not, I suspect, my last word on the subject, even if my attempts are as futile as Henderson’s.

I'm going to Kansas…

May 15, 2008 By in Uncategorized Leave a comment

… to my sister’s graduation from the University of. Expect normal posting to resume next week. As my Dad and 20,000 screaming fans like to reiterate, Rock, Chalk, Jayhawk.

I’m going to Kansas…

May 15, 2008 By in Uncategorized Leave a comment

… to my sister’s graduation from the University of. Expect normal posting to resume next week. As my Dad and 20,000 screaming fans like to reiterate, Rock, Chalk, Jayhawk.

Charlie Wilson's War

May 14, 2008 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Charlie Wilson’s war—the one in which Afghan guerillas fought against the Soviet Union in the 1980s—was filled with bizarre alliances, unusual people, and extraordinary circumstances. Perhaps the biggest of those in terms of height, influence, and unusual bearing was Wilson himself, a Congressman from Texas of no particular repute at the time who directed billions of dollars to Afghan fighters during the 1980s. I learned something about the specifics of Wilson through the eponymous movie, which is based on George Crile’s Charlie Wilson’s War, and I’m pleased to say that book and movie stand up well to scrutiny and time.

At first, Charlie Wilson’s War (the book) is gung ho to the point that I kept writing angry notes in the margins saying that much of what Wilson did—arm and train the mujahideen* fighters in Afghanistan and Pakistan to wage what they perceived as holy war against the Soviet Union—would backfire on us, as it has. For example, page five says, “It was his [Frank Anderson’s] great good fortune to have been in charge of the South Asian task force in the final years when his men, funneling billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to the mujahideen, had chased the Red Army, tail between its legs, out of Afghanistan.” It’s a bit triumphalist given what would come after 9/11, especially since there’s a non-zero chance of the same thing happening to the United States. The quote also demonstrates another persistent weakness of the book in the form of endless cliches, as here when we hear the original phrasing of something running with its “tail between its legs.” Nonetheless, Crile drops hints of this impending disaster throughout Charlie Wilson’s War but saves the bulk of the reverberation for the epilogue, which is perhaps too short but well-played and an important reminder of the law of unintended consequences.

At the time the proxy war in Afghanistan seemed to be normal business, since we—meaning the CIA, mostly—consorted with numerous rulers or groups who weren’t very nice or acting in our best long term interest, whether the Afghans in the 1980s, the Greek military junta, or the Shah of Iran. Charlie Wilson’s War tends to excuse this realpolitik somewhat, and the odd part is how, despite the book’s frequent notes about how what happened then would echo our current efforts in Afghanistan, it still implies that arming and training the Afghan guerillas to ultimately sow chaos in Afghanistan was fundamentally a good idea. Now we’re still fighting in Afghanistan, chiefly because, as Charlie Wilson’s War states explicitly, it’s not really a country in the way Westerners think of countries—it’s more like a time warp back to a tribal era that hasn’t existed in most of Europe since at least the 19th century and not in the United States since European colonizers showed up.

Still, in making this criticism I have the unfair benefit of hindsight: in the 1980s, a lot of contemporaneous accounts show that the fall of the Soviet Union was far from obvious. Plenty of people who lived then have said that the Soviet Union’s impending demise wasn’t obvious, and so to Wilson and others, the theoretical problem of the United States one day fighting against various ideological and other foes gathered under the cover of militant Islam probably wouldn’t have appeared nearly as compelling as the Soviet Union itself. Nonetheless, Wilson showed questionable judgment and a basic disregard for consequences in other foreign policy areas, as when he supported the Israeli Lavi fighter, even though the technology used in that fighter might have been exported to China since. Oops. But even if the geopolitical situation doesn’t always support Charlie Wilson’s War’s aw-shucks arguments, Wilson was still a hell of a guy to follow, even if he’s another example of a politician who disobeys the idiotic laws relating to drugs that his legislative body created and upholds till today.

What might be most notable about this book is what Crile doesn’t, and can’t, really know: why Wilson did what he did. It was so out-of-character that in a novel it would be almost unbelievable for a boozy, playboy Congressman to get fired up with such ideological and moral fervor, and only a satire could make it work, as in Christopher Buckley’s hilarious and apt Little Green Men or Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. This is nonfiction, however, and for years Wilson passed millions and then hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons to Afghan fighters without anyone in the press noticing. To my eyes, at least, it’s not obvious what moved him beyond the surface reasons given. In addition, I have to ask: why Afghanistan? Why in 1983? The unknowable daunts us and Crile’s ability to explain. This is no slander on him, but rather a meditation on the vagaries of historical causation and what moves people to act in all the strange ways we do.

The book is not without fault. James Fallows wrote:

Here is something that is common knowledge in the publishing business but that few “normal” readers know: that the average article in a good magazine is much, much more carefully edited than almost any book. Yes, books can last forever while magazines go away after a week or month. But in a high-end magazine – like, well, the Atlantic, or the New Yorker, or the New York Review of Books, or one of a dozen others that invest in good copy editors and fact checkers – you’re far less likely to find typos, grammar errors, careless repetitions and contradictions, or simple made-up facts than you’ll find in books.

Those issues are a small but persistent problem in Charlie Wilson’s War. The same lines of Kipling are quoted twice; Gust Avrakotos, Wilson’s CIA insider, is constantly being referred to as a Greek from Aliquippa ; we learn on page 33 that “[Charlie Wilson] now served on a committee that doled out the nation’s money: fifty men appropriating $500 billion a year.” On page 77, Wilson joins the House Appropriations Committee: “That move had made Wilson a player—one of fifty House members with a vote on how the government’s $500 billion annual budget would be spent.” Really? I had no idea. Crile says, “Diplomats are good at sensing which way the political winds are blowing […]” and that if Wilson had pursued traditional legislative means he, “would have been told in no uncertain terms to back off.” Later, we find out that “For all practical purposes, the Mi-24 Hind flying gunship […]” The depressing thing about these cliches is that they could’ve been easily avoided through better editing, and they detract from an otherwise good and worthwhile book that’s about politics and history, as well as the specific life and times of Charlie Wilson.

The narrative drive and sense of play keep one reading through minor problems, and quotes quotes from Charlie and his CIA henchmen Avrakotos liven the narrative with scatological and sexual metaphors. Charlie gets numerous perks and describes himself as getting one because “I’m the only one of the committee who likes women and whiskey, and we need to be represented.” Amen. And that Amen is for honesty over hypocrisy if nothing else. And Wilson had what appears to be honest conviction, something that most politicians, perhaps like their constituents, lack.

*This spelling follows the form of the book.

Charlie Wilson’s War

May 14, 2008 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Charlie Wilson’s war—the one in which Afghan guerillas fought against the Soviet Union in the 1980s—was filled with bizarre alliances, unusual people, and extraordinary circumstances. Perhaps the biggest of those in terms of height, influence, and unusual bearing was Wilson himself, a Congressman from Texas of no particular repute at the time who directed billions of dollars to Afghan fighters during the 1980s. I learned something about the specifics of Wilson through the eponymous movie, which is based on George Crile’s Charlie Wilson’s War, and I’m pleased to say that book and movie stand up well to scrutiny and time.

At first, Charlie Wilson’s War (the book) is gung ho to the point that I kept writing angry notes in the margins saying that much of what Wilson did—arm and train the mujahideen* fighters in Afghanistan and Pakistan to wage what they perceived as holy war against the Soviet Union—would backfire on us, as it has. For example, page five says, “It was his [Frank Anderson’s] great good fortune to have been in charge of the South Asian task force in the final years when his men, funneling billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to the mujahideen, had chased the Red Army, tail between its legs, out of Afghanistan.” It’s a bit triumphalist given what would come after 9/11, especially since there’s a non-zero chance of the same thing happening to the United States. The quote also demonstrates another persistent weakness of the book in the form of endless cliches, as here when we hear the original phrasing of something running with its “tail between its legs.” Nonetheless, Crile drops hints of this impending disaster throughout Charlie Wilson’s War but saves the bulk of the reverberation for the epilogue, which is perhaps too short but well-played and an important reminder of the law of unintended consequences.

At the time the proxy war in Afghanistan seemed to be normal business, since we—meaning the CIA, mostly—consorted with numerous rulers or groups who weren’t very nice or acting in our best long term interest, whether the Afghans in the 1980s, the Greek military junta, or the Shah of Iran. Charlie Wilson’s War tends to excuse this realpolitik somewhat, and the odd part is how, despite the book’s frequent notes about how what happened then would echo our current efforts in Afghanistan, it still implies that arming and training the Afghan guerillas to ultimately sow chaos in Afghanistan was fundamentally a good idea. Now we’re still fighting in Afghanistan, chiefly because, as Charlie Wilson’s War states explicitly, it’s not really a country in the way Westerners think of countries—it’s more like a time warp back to a tribal era that hasn’t existed in most of Europe since at least the 19th century and not in the United States since European colonizers showed up.

Still, in making this criticism I have the unfair benefit of hindsight: in the 1980s, a lot of contemporaneous accounts show that the fall of the Soviet Union was far from obvious. Plenty of people who lived then have said that the Soviet Union’s impending demise wasn’t obvious, and so to Wilson and others, the theoretical problem of the United States one day fighting against various ideological and other foes gathered under the cover of militant Islam probably wouldn’t have appeared nearly as compelling as the Soviet Union itself. Nonetheless, Wilson showed questionable judgment and a basic disregard for consequences in other foreign policy areas, as when he supported the Israeli Lavi fighter, even though the technology used in that fighter might have been exported to China since. Oops. But even if the geopolitical situation doesn’t always support Charlie Wilson’s War’s aw-shucks arguments, Wilson was still a hell of a guy to follow, even if he’s another example of a politician who disobeys the idiotic laws relating to drugs that his legislative body created and upholds till today.

What might be most notable about this book is what Crile doesn’t, and can’t, really know: why Wilson did what he did. It was so out-of-character that in a novel it would be almost unbelievable for a boozy, playboy Congressman to get fired up with such ideological and moral fervor, and only a satire could make it work, as in Christopher Buckley’s hilarious and apt Little Green Men or Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. This is nonfiction, however, and for years Wilson passed millions and then hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons to Afghan fighters without anyone in the press noticing. To my eyes, at least, it’s not obvious what moved him beyond the surface reasons given. In addition, I have to ask: why Afghanistan? Why in 1983? The unknowable daunts us and Crile’s ability to explain. This is no slander on him, but rather a meditation on the vagaries of historical causation and what moves people to act in all the strange ways we do.

The book is not without fault. James Fallows wrote:

Here is something that is common knowledge in the publishing business but that few “normal” readers know: that the average article in a good magazine is much, much more carefully edited than almost any book. Yes, books can last forever while magazines go away after a week or month. But in a high-end magazine – like, well, the Atlantic, or the New Yorker, or the New York Review of Books, or one of a dozen others that invest in good copy editors and fact checkers – you’re far less likely to find typos, grammar errors, careless repetitions and contradictions, or simple made-up facts than you’ll find in books.

Those issues are a small but persistent problem in Charlie Wilson’s War. The same lines of Kipling are quoted twice; Gust Avrakotos, Wilson’s CIA insider, is constantly being referred to as a Greek from Aliquippa ; we learn on page 33 that “[Charlie Wilson] now served on a committee that doled out the nation’s money: fifty men appropriating $500 billion a year.” On page 77, Wilson joins the House Appropriations Committee: “That move had made Wilson a player—one of fifty House members with a vote on how the government’s $500 billion annual budget would be spent.” Really? I had no idea. Crile says, “Diplomats are good at sensing which way the political winds are blowing […]” and that if Wilson had pursued traditional legislative means he, “would have been told in no uncertain terms to back off.” Later, we find out that “For all practical purposes, the Mi-24 Hind flying gunship […]” The depressing thing about these cliches is that they could’ve been easily avoided through better editing, and they detract from an otherwise good and worthwhile book that’s about politics and history, as well as the specific life and times of Charlie Wilson.

The narrative drive and sense of play keep one reading through minor problems, and quotes quotes from Charlie and his CIA henchmen Avrakotos liven the narrative with scatological and sexual metaphors. Charlie gets numerous perks and describes himself as getting one because “I’m the only one of the committee who likes women and whiskey, and we need to be represented.” Amen. And that Amen is for honesty over hypocrisy if nothing else. And Wilson had what appears to be honest conviction, something that most politicians, perhaps like their constituents, lack.

*This spelling follows the form of the book.

Life: Flight edition

May 13, 2008 By in Life Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

“And at a height of three miles, sitting above the clouds, I felt like an airborne seed. From the cracks in the earth the rivers pinched back at the sun. They shone out like smelters’ puddles, and then they took a crust and were covered over. As for the vegetable kingdom, it hardly existed from the air; it looked to me no more than an inch in height. And I dreamed down at the clouds, and thought that when I was a kid I had dreamed up at them, and having dreamed at the clouds from both sides as no other generation of men has done, one should be able to accept his death very easily.”

—Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King

(Notice James Wood’s remark in How Fiction Works: “Bellow had a habit of writing repeatedly about flying partly, I guess, because it was the great obvious advantage he had over his dead competitors, those writers who had never seen the world from above the clouds: Melville, Tolstoy, Proust.”)

Links for May 12

May 12, 2008 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment
  • Simon Lipskar, a literary agent whose assistant sent perhaps the nicest and most encouraging rejection letter I’ve ever received, recently gave an excellent interview, in which he most notably said, “Writers should write the books they love. That way, no matter what the market says, their time wasn’t wasted.” I agree, but it would also be nice if the market were interested. The theme of love and market is one you’ll hear more about shortly.

“The New Confessions” is my favorite of Mr. Boyd’s many fine novels, but I recommend all of them. His most recent, “Restless,” a historical spy story published last year, is intelligent and thrilling; its heroine is an old woman. “Any Human Heart,” perhaps Mr. Boyd’s most critically acclaimed novel, is also a fictional autobiography of an English adventurer not so different from John James Todd.

I’ve often wondered why Mr. Boyd hasn’t become a British literary star in America, the way Nick Hornby, Martin Amis and John Mortimer have. He’s as good a writer as any of them. Maybe there’s no rational explanation for why some great writers don’t win the commercial sweepstakes. Maybe it’s just luck.

As if that weren’t enough, she also says:

In my last column I asked for recommendations of chewy modern novels. One reader mentioned “The Echo Maker” by Richard Powers, which I agree is one of those rare books with a plot that races and a thoughtfulness that slows you down. Two other modern novels I found equally provocative were “Cloud Atlas” by David Mitchell and “Seven Types of Ambiguity” by Elliot Perlman. I have a friend who recently reread “Cloud Atlas.” She said it was even better the second time.

Hmmm, among that, Hugh MacLennan’s The Watch That Ends the Night, and rereading some Saul Bellow, I’m not sure where I’m going to find time in the next few weeks.

  • “The Watch That Ends the Night?” you ask. Terry Teachout says:

At any rate I finally got around to reading The Watch That Ends the Night last week, and I was knocked flat by it, so much so that I had to ration the number of pages I allowed myself each day so that I wouldn’t be distracted from my deadlines. I intend at some point in the next couple of weeks to discuss it in the weekly book column that I write for Commentary’s Web site, so I won’t jump the gun here. Suffice it for the moment to say that I feel inclined to rank it alongside Peter de Vries’ The Blood of the Lamb, an equally ill-remembered novel of similar vintage and subject matter (both books have at their center a woman who is suffering from a fatal illness and are narrated by a man who loves her).

  • Razim questions why modern literature doesn’t appeal to him so much as the past and comes up with a lot of answers that sound, to my ears, vaguely sexist. A more probable answer is this: modern literature—meaning anything published after World War II—is still being sorted out as to what’s worth reading and what’s not, and the cacophony of popular literature has probably drowned out some of the avant garde that will one day be acknowledged as great.

In addition, I think tastes have also shifted and become more dispersed, meaning that multiple kinds of canons are being created, rather than the more singular, dominant kind of past. Finally, I’m not sure the demand shift Razim argues is enough to explain the changes in literature; even if women read most fiction, an absolute number of men read it sufficiently to create their own market. This goes back to the dispersion argument.

(Hat tip Tyler Cowen).

Life

May 9, 2008 By in Books, Life Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

“What happened was this: I got an image in my head that never got out. We see a great many things and can remember a great many things, but this is different. We get very few of the true images in our heads of the kind I am talking about, the kind which become more and more vivid for us as if the passage of the years did not obscure their reality but, year by year, drew off another veil to expose a meaning which we had only dimly surmised at first. Very probably the last veil will not be removed, for there are not enough years, but the brightness of the image increases and our conviction increases that the brightness is meaning, or the legend of meaning, and without the image our lives would be nothing except an old piece of film rolled on a spool and thrown into a desk drawer among the unanswered letters.”

—Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

The Inner Circle

May 8, 2008 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

T.C. Boyle’s The Inner Circle is the infrequent novel that improves substantially the second time around to the point of making me reevaluate it altogether. It features Boyle’s mischievous, whimsical prose:

[…] Laura Feeney smiled and before I knew it I was on my way to becoming an initiate in the science of sex, abandoning the ideal for the actual, the dream of Stella (“True, that true beauty if virtue indeed”) for anatomy, physiology and an intimate knowledge of the Bartholin’s glands and labia minora. All of it—all the years of research, the thousands of miles traveled, the histories taken, the delving and rooting and pioneering—spun out like thread from an infinite spool held in the milk-white palm of Laura Feeney on an otherwise ordinary morning in the autumn of 1939.

That’s John Milk speaking, the narrator who is as bland as his name, and an assistant to sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. Notice, however, the cleverness of the long, almost run-on sentences in that quote, with Milk on his way “before I knew it,” and us readers past that idea before we knew, drawn along by the rambling, Bellow-like tide of the sentence. Then, Boyle almost wanders into the cliché of comparing life to a weaver’s loom, which goes all the way back to the Greeks and, more recently, Shakespeare, but he pulls back from it by using Laura’s palm as the focus and playing with the idea of the milk-white of her palm and “Milk” as his name. And he is often played with by others, whether by women or by Kinsey. His central narrative gift is to simultaneously describe his interaction with Kinsey, the great man, while deluding himself concerning the extent of his self-involvement and dependence on Kinsey. After a spurt of initial interest brings Milk to Kinsey, Milk is ruled by the older man, and it’s not Laura’s palm but Kinsey’s that controls Milk.

The Inner Circle has wonderful resonances, with phrases, descriptions, ideas rolling into and referring to one another in a subtle harmony that is difficult to untangle even on a second reading. The philosophical tension between the mind’s creation of love and the body’s needs is always present, along with the push and pull of Kinsey on Milk and whether Milk is his own person. The obvious and probably correct answer is “no,” despite Milk’s protestation to the contrary. He’s self-delusional throughout, and says of a comment made by Mac, Kinsey’s wife, that “I saw the truth of it,” as he thinks he does numerous times. Elsewhere, Milk says that “rumormongers”—note the deliberately anachronistic word—say that Kinsey chooses “the members of his team based on his ability to control and dominate them […]” He does, and the reader sees that even if Milk doesn’t. When Kinsey lightly rebukes Milk for holding up the work because Milk comes in late, our narrator says “Normally I would have been mortified—I hated for anyone to question my devotion and loyalty, especially [Kinsey], to whom I owed everything […]” Does that sound like the voice of an independent man? I thought not.

How much of this description of Kinsey is accurate and how much the artist’s creative prerogative is unclear; outside of what I know from Bonk and popular culture, I’ve never learned anything of Kinsey. Boyle conveniently thanks Kinsey’s various biographers, so one looking for more can find more, but I’m rather content with his story, which is perhaps the truth rather than the facts. And if it isn’t, it doesn’t matter; the device of using Milk as a narrator works: except for his major blindspot regarding his own independence, he serves as a strong vessel for Boyle’s usual panache with words.

To be sure, the novel is not flawless: Iris, who is supposed to act as the counterbalance to Kinsey and a voice encouraging Milk to resist, is never forceful enough, and the major clashes between Iris and Milk are too curt and claustrophobic. Kinsey himself never gets more than the touch of Ahabian madness he really needs; until his own strength is giving out near the end, he doesn’t show how he considers himself the singular figure we suspect he thinks he is. Nonetheless, these flaws are paltry next to The Inner Circle’s verve, and now it surprises me that I didn’t better appreciate it the first time around.