The Inner Circle / The Egyptologist

[September 8th, 2004]

^the inner circle

By T.C. Boyle

(Viking, 432 pages, $25.95)

Readers can be as fickle as lovers, so it's no surprise when novelists imagine that if the sex is good, the readers will stick around for the rest. Readers of T.C. Boyle's new book can feel this pleasurable self-delusion taking place.

Boyle, one of our most justifiably acclaimed authors, knows a good story when he sees one: At first blush, the legend of the famed 1940s sexologist Dr. Alfred Kinsey--that's Dr. Sex to you--could carry a novel twice the length of The Inner Circle. But somewhere in the writing, Boyle confuses sex with good storytelling. The result is a novel that, however fascinating to voyeurs, will leave the rest of us wanting more than a romp in the hay.

The novel opens with virginal undergraduate, John Milk, recalling his first encounters with Kinsey, who shocked and provoked the Indiana University community with his famously frank courses on marriage and conjugal relations. Milk, in order to attend the course and bypass the sex-shy morals of the day, fakes an engagement with a campus floozy. In the crowded lecture hall, with diagrams of female genitalia on the board before him, Milk experiences the first of many erections he will have in Kinsey's presence; before long, Kinsey takes Milk under his wing and into his bed, employing him as both a researcher and an intellectual/physical disciple. It's oh so Greek, and the story follows much as one would expect.

There's a twist, of course: The innocent narrator falls in love with a beautiful co-ed. If Boyle wanted to write a love story, he might have left all the Kinsey material aside. One suspects that Boyle realized that there's more to literature than sex--as there is to love--but he just got distracted in the process. Victoria Blake

^the egyptologist

By Arthur Phillips

(Random House, 383 pages, $24.95)

Midway into Arthur Phillips' second novel, an explorer discovers a tomb buried in the Egyptian desert. Inspired by visions of gold and treasure glistening within, the man pries open its 2,000-pound door only to discover an empty vault. On closer inspection he finds reason for hope. A neatly concealed door leads to another chamber. But this room, too, is empty. Or is it? Further inspection reveals another door, which leads to more empty chambers, which may or may not contain hidden traps.

Phillips' explorer must balance a piqued sense of skepticism with a core of optimism. The same goes for a reader proceeding into The Egyptologist. No one is quite who he or she claims to be. The main character, Ralph M. Trilipush, is an Egyptologist obsessed with finding the tomb of an Egyptian poet-king and pornographer named Atum-hadu. Other scholars doubt Atum-hadu's existence, so Trilipush secures expedition backing from a well-to-do Boston clothier whose daughter Trilipush later marries. This financial lifeline comes into jeopardy, however, when a private detective stumbles on some inconsistencies in Trilipush's life story.

Since The Egyptologist unfolds entirely in letters, a reader must constantly gauge whose word to trust and why. Is Trilipush really just after money and fame, as our private detective claims, or is he a lone genius--as Trilipush portrays himself in his journal entries? Trapped inside this maze of unreliable testimony is a thoughtful meditation on the untrustworthiness of the past. Why believe what antiquity tells us when the present is so often made of lies? It's a testament to Phillips' art that The Egyptologist keeps us reading to the very end without ever answering the question. John Freeman