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Gay Talese has interviewed, accompanied, and obtained the notes of Gerald Foos, a motel owner who equipped his Manor House property outside of Denver with viewing gratings and secretly observed the sexual behavior of his guests over many years.
Talese is a master at finding and reporting intimate matters in a clean, fine prose style so that the pages fly by. Thus the odd subject of Talese's book is transparently manifest, without a biased or judgmental eye, all the better to reveal what Foos has done. Numerous quotes allow Foos to speak for himself. At times he has an elevated opinion of himself as a “strong, vigorous thinker, some great man whose will and intellect compels [his second wife's] heart's homage” (p. 183), and at times less so: “voyeurs are cripples … whom God has not blessed” (p. 185). His accounts shift between first and third person, and he said, “I felt I was different individuals.” “When I was downstairs in the office, I was Gerald the Businessman. When I was up on the observation platform, I was Gerald the Voyeur” (pp. 215-216). Other times he is neutral: “there are bird-watchers, there are star-gazers, and there are people like me who watch people” (p. 188).
Tom Wolfe credited Talese with having created “The New Journalism”: an inventive style of nonfiction reportage that is frequently more compelling than fiction, beginning with his 1955 Esquire article, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.” This book continues the tradition with the utmost respect for truth, and a thorough airing of Foos's dance with the laws he broke and whose limits he outwaited. But Talese not only develops a portrait of his contradictory subject, he lets a portrait of the intimate life of late 20th Century America emerge, making our eyes Foos's eyes, his extensively quoted descriptions our audio guide to the exhibits, and his assessments persuasively and uncomfortably our own—well, until we catch ourselves, that is. What he sees/we see is mostly but not entirely plain vanilla, partly t