A literary addict

TC Boyle has replaced his dependency on drugs with writing novels
Tina Jackson|Metro12 April 2012
The Weekender

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There are wiseguy genes in TC Boyle's DNA. The one-time failed musician turned hipster writer is a prolific author and consummate performer. His one-liners are sufficiently sardonic to drop with startling effect into conversation, even when it's on the phone with an audience of one.

'My standard joke is that I'm writing faster because you generally produce more prior to death than after,' he drawls. But not only is he productive, he also comes up with the goods.

'Why produce scrappy ones?' he deadpans with his New York twang, referring to his reputation as an excellent teller of tales.

His latest, The Inner Circle, immerses the reader in levels of sexual and emotional obsession via the story of John Milk.

This fictional, naive young man works as an assistant to sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, whose findings about human sexuality led to the publication of the first bestsellers about sex.

As with all Boyle's works, he came to it through an unanswered question which emerged while writing his last work. 'My previous novel, Drop City, was set in the 1970s and I examined the notion of free love and the sexism of the hippies. It got me thinking where that came from. '

With Bill Condon's biopic starring Liam Neeson due for release in Britain on March 4, Kinsey and his work, first published in 1948's Sexual Behavior In The Human Male, will be of renewed interest. 'Kinsey fascinates me because he's an obsessive-compulsive, just as I am,' confesses Boyle.

'He was great in that he liberated rather puritanical America, he normalized sexual behaviours such as homosexuality and masturbation. He believed that sex is good and that anything goes between consenting adults. And I believe that, too.'

But Boyle's evocation of the Kinsey era explores psychological submission and dominance as much as sexual liberation. 'I'm not interested in writing a biography,' he says. 'It's more interesting to see what it must have been like under the thumb of such an autocratic man.'

The Inner Circle is Boyle's debut first-person narrative, where 'the reader is always a step ahead and can see where Milk's being foolish'. And he doesn't shy away from presenting the sinister aspects of a man he sees mainly as a force for good.

'There's a dark side - the risk of giving yourself over to some great leader, in this case a scientific guru.

In a free and independent society I'm suspicious of the great leader, the party line.'

Boyle's depiction of sexually and socially conservative 1940s and 1950s America has contemporary resonances, but he claims it wasn't conscious. 'When I was writing this, I wasn't thinking about NeoCon: I thought Bush was going down. My life stands in opposition to him and such people. The government and religious people have no room in our bedroom.'

He walks the wrong-side-ofthe-road walk as well as talking its talk. Boyle had stints as a junkie and a musician before settling on writing as his preferred means of self-expression.

'Darwinian principles apply to art as well as life,' he says. 'I was not as good a musician as I should have been. Most rock'n'rollers come and go.'

As a writer he obviously feels like sticking around; he's written ten novels and six collections of short stories. What characterises his output is its focused, driven sense of narrative.

'In the 1970s, there was a lot of experimental writing going on but I felt that the story came first, that plot was important and that literature is entertainment.'

He describes writing in terms which make it sound like a replacement for his one-time heroin dependency. 'An addiction to producing art is like any other,' he says emotionlessly. 'You want to do it again and again.'

The Inner Circle is published by Bloomsbury, priced £16.99, next Thursday.

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