June 6, 2016
A Peeping Tom with delusions of grandeur takes notes on the human condition in this tawdry but revealing case study. Journalist Talese (Thy Neighbor's Wife) was contacted in 1980 by Gerald Foos, a Colorado motel owner who spied on guests from the motel attic through fake ceiling vents, meticulously recording his own observations. (Talese is releasing the book now because Foos recently released him from a confidentiality agreement.) The book's heart consists of excerpts from Foos's decades-long observations of the guests' sex acts and other interactions; these include perfunctory marital couplings, clandestine trysts, florid swinger parties, goat costumes, an ugly bout of incest, a possible murder, and other lesser crimes. (Foos sometimes tricked guests into thinking a suitcase held $1,000 cash to see if they would try to steal it; most did, including a minister.) There's a prurient charge to these vignettes, but Foos's pretense of sexological research isn't entirely misplaced; his accounts are well-observed, with telling detailsâ"they all three laid quiet on the bed and relaxed, discussing vacuum-cleaner sales"âand insights into the psychology behind the physicality. Foos's rather appalling personality is too dull to sustain Talese's enveloping biographical sketch, but the dirty laundry here has some interesting stains. Photos.
Starred review from June 15, 2016
The disturbing private world of the sleaziest motel manager since Norman Bates.The latest book by new journalism pioneer Talese (A Writer's Life, 2006, etc.) is the story of the author's decadeslong correspondence with Colorado businessman Gerald Foos, an unashamed peeping Tom who spent years spying on clients at his roadside motel. From the attic over a room structurally fitted with a fake ceiling vent, Foos watched--and recorded, in a series of journals--the private lives of his guests, writing up (and often masturbating over) graphic accounts of the couplings of horny singles, adulterous professionals, threesomes, lesbians, widows with paid escorts, incestuous siblings, and men in costumes, among many others. He also saw lots of bored married couples watching TV. Foos views himself not just as a voyeur, but as a "pioneering sex researcher," not unlike Kinsey, Masters, and Johnson--or perhaps Talese himself, whose 1980 Thy Neighbor's Wife chronicled the sexual revolution from his perspective as both observer and participant. "Someone has to be delegated the responsibility to confront these tangible existences and tell other people about them," Foos writes in one journal entry. "Herein is the intrinsic essence of the Voyeur." Foos writes a functional, unfussy prose, which Talese both ably condenses and quotes at generous length. The character that emerges from this tightly woven narrative is oddly ambivalent. At some level, he's a little like Kyle MacLachlan in Blue Velvet, indulging this purely human desire to see what has always been hidden. But spying also fed Foos' ego and allowed him to exert power over his guests, who became lab rats for both his obsessions and his power trips. Most disturbingly, he recalls how he once interceded in the life of a guest and inadvertently both caused and witnessed her murder. (The case, investigated at some length, remains shrouded in mystery.) Undoubtedly creepy and unnerving but also an entirely compelling slice of seamy American life.
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