T.C. Boyle's latest controversial novel takes on the world of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey through the eyes of a naive young man, writes Anna Mundow.
The waiter in this Boston restaurant remembers T.C. Boyle, and you can see why. About six feet, three inches tall, Boyle is reed thin with wispy, candyfloss hair that appears to be gathered somehow behind his head, perhaps in a bun, one lock arranged to fall on his forehead.
He wears a discreet earring, a clunky blue bead necklace from which his mirrored sunglasses dangle, a tourniquet of black leather bracelets and on his little finger a silver death's head ring. The black Van Morrison T-shirt, black jeans and distressed fleece jacket are also just right for a guy who grew up in blue-collar Peekshill, New York, liked drugs and alcohol, could have been sent to Vietnam, played with a rock band called The Ventilators, became a writer and ended up in California.
This is how the author of Drop City, Boyle's superb portrait of the hippie era, should look. But it's not that simple.
Boyle does not slouch, mumble or pose. He is polite, almost courtly in his apology for being 12 minutes late. He orders tea and later interrupts himself when an hors d'oeuvre of carrot sticks in vinaigrette arrives. "Grab a fork, you have to try this," he insists, "And that bread, it's still hot, can you smell it? Tear off a piece." The face framed by that hair is also a surprise. Lean, with curiously miniature features, it belongs in an 18th-century portrait of a wastrel son.
The idea would probably please him - Boyle likes to confound people. "I want my readers to have no idea what to expect," he explains. "For instance, when they heard I was writing Drop City they thought: 'Boyle - hippies, crazy romp.' But every book written in the sixties was this crazy romp with the ironic, arch point of view. So I gave them my first non-comic, realistic novel. I want to defy your expectations."
Eight novels - among them The Tortilla Curtain, The Road to Wellville and World's End - and six short story collections preceded Drop City, and Boyle hopes each book was a radical departure. "The first novel, Water Music, is a huge, hilarious thing full of language, while the narrative of the second, Budding Prospects, is confined to one character in a contemporary period. If I found a formula and ran with it, I'd be a hack. You'd hate me for it."
Boyle's latest novel, The Inner Circle, may be his most controversial yet. Based on Prof Alfred Kinsey's crusade at the University of Indiana in the 1940s and early 1950s to establish sex research as a valid science and to study all forms of human sexual behaviour, The Inner Circle follows John Milk, a fictional Kinsey assistant, from his naive initiation into the Kinsey philosophy through to late disillusionment. The novel also charts the course of Milk's marriage as it mutates within the peculiar confines of Kinsey's hermetically sealed group.
There is no connection, by the way, between Boyle's novel and the film, Kinsey, directed by Bill Condon and due to be released in the US in November. Nevertheless, devoted correspondents to Boyle's website (his "message-istas", as he calls them) keep him informed. He has learned, for instance, about one woman's right-wing campaign against the film and of her warnings to Liam Neeson not to play Kinsey, whom some still view as a pervert, even a paedophile.
After three months of research, which included reading the Kinsey biographies and visiting the Kinsey Institute at the University of Indiana, Boyle found no evidence to support the accusations. Not that they bother him. "One reviewer wrote that my Kinsey character is 'the most consummately creepy character since Edgar Allen Poe', and I love that take on it." Not only did Kinsey collect 18,000 personal sexual histories and film 1,000 men masturbating, he also experimented widely with male and female partners.
In The Inner Circle, Boyle graphically describes Kinsey's own sexual activities, along with those of his researchers and subjects. Once again, however, he rejected the obvious.
"The juvenile way we deal with sex, it is so tired," Boyle sighs. "What was exciting for me was to describe all this through the eyes of a naive young man - sexuality, fidelity, Kinsey's belief that all sex between consenting adults is normal, that there is nothing inherently disgusting."
THAT SOUNDS LIKE a scientist's view. And there is something of the scientist in Boyle's composed demeanour, in the measured way he answers one question then waits for the next. Never impatient, never interrupting, always watching, making connections. He describes himself as "an obsessive compulsive" who does not like to travel and who feels good only when he is writing.
"I spent three months in Baltimore, west Cork in 1987," he recalls. "I stayed in one place and wrote half of the stories for If There Ever Was Whiskey. I don't like to be the kind of American who goes from town to town saying, 'Are there Kellys here? Well, I'm a Kelly.'" A similar focus is detectable in his two most recent novels.
"The road from Drop City to The Inner Circle is clear," he agrees. "In Drop City I'm exploring the hippie culture when we took all the barriers down. Now I'm going back to see how this evolved, because before Kinsey there was no discussion of sex.
"After Kinsey there was still reticence, but people could joke about Kinsey over dinner and they did." The Inner Circle, Boyle's "fastest ever" book, took him just six months to write and he is already 110 pages into his next novel, provisionally titled Talk Talk. A story of identity theft that revolves around a deaf heroine, Talk Talk is also a contemplation of language and of identity.
"I was at the dentist," Boyle recalls, "and he said to me: 'You know, there was this gorgeous young woman in the chair before you and she's deaf.' Bingo, that was it." Boyle is now learning sign language, reading Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct and asking: "How do you know who you are if you can't speak? How do language and thought develop, and how do they relate to your identity?" A professor of English at the University of Southern California since 1978, Boyle could easily turn the rest of the conversation into a tutorial.
Instead, he laughs at his pedagogic tone and recalls his accidental entry into the academic world when he graduated with a BA in English and history in 1968 from the State University of New York. "I was 21.
The Vietnam War was still going on. But you could avoid the draft if you taught school, particularly in a slum area such as the one in which I grew up.
"I'd never taken a teaching course, never seen a child, but it taught me how to perform. I don't have to do it any more, but I want to."
Boyle earned a PhD in 19th century British literature at the University of Iowa, where he attended the prestigious writer's workshop, and for all his experimentation, he is dismissive of literary fashion and of critical theorists who label his work subversive or transgressive.
"Transgressive," he rolls the word around. "I love it. It's so ridiculous. As if every novelist who ever walked wasn't transgressive from birth."
IN THE EYES of such critics, Boyle's cardinal sin is not so much his irreverence as his insistence that literature - all literature - is entertainment. "We open a book for the same reason that we go to a movie or to a concert - to be entertained," he smiles, wagging a bread crust. "Art is entertainment. My first page must get you to read on, otherwise my book doesn't exist."
Unlike most writers who are either coy or superstitious about discussing works in progress, Boyle becomes even more animated when he describes Talk Talk. This is part of his working method. At the end of each writing day, he reads what he has written to his wife, Karen Kvashay, in order to hear the rhythm of the words and to make himself wonder where the novel might go the following day. "On the other hand," he deadpans, "this could be it.
"We could be killing that novel right now by talking about it. This could be a famous moment in literary history. You talk to me two weeks before I hang myself with the shower curtain in the hotel." When I point out that this would still give him time to finish the novel and maybe write a few short stories, he spears the last carrot and laughs.
"That's true. By the way, have you ever seen me and Thomas Pynchon in the same room? Think about it."
The Inner Circle, by T.C. Boyle, will be published by Bloomsbury next year. The film, Kinsey, starring Liam Neeson, will be released in November