THY NEIGHBOR'S WIFE

by Gay Talese ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 2, 1980

After all the pre-publication hype--a disaster. Talese (Honor Thy Father) may have indeed spent nine years researching and pondering ""the social and sexual trends of the entire nation""; but what he has gotten down on paper is a flat, unfocused mishmash, chunks of oversimplified socio-legal history (censorship cases up through the Burger Court's ""community standards"" rulings) alternating with close-ups of sex heroes/merchants (mostly a fawning portrait of Playboy's Hugh Hefner) and converts to the new sexual freedom (mostly the habituÉs of an anything-goes retreat called Sandstone). Isn't this steamy stuff, you ask? Well, some of it--sort of. But nothing is alive here, let alone erotic, because Talese uses virtually no quotations, instead paraphrasing everything in a leaden, fatuously serious monotone that ranges from unintentionally comic (""Each day the penis is prey to sexual sights in the street"") to anatomically unlikely (""He felt his penis stalking within his shorts. . . . If there was a way to her heart, it was possibly through virtuouso performances upon her vulva"") to just plain embarrassing (""the smooth, soothing, glistening lovemaking on the satin sheets aroused him to peaks of passionate pleasure""). Moreover, one quickly gets the idea that the content of this book has been largely determined by which of Talese's subjects were willing to Tell All, thus putting disproportionate emphasis on just a few, hardly representative, sexual case-histories: a dull, selfish couple who got seduced into wife-swapping and then into orgiastic Sandstone; the insatiable Sandstone leader and his wife; Betty Dodson, ""a self-proclaimed Phallic Woman."" Likewise, self-promoter Hefner gets the most space here--not just for his magazine but for his soap-operatically detailed, multi-bunnied, voyeuristic lifestyle. And there's also room for sketchier profiles of Wilhelm Reich, Al Goldstein (Screw magazine), Alex Comfort, JFK as a ""phallic President,"" massage parlors, and the 19th-century Oneida settlement. Throughout, the psychology is superficial, the reporting accepts far too much at face value (what Talese may think of as objectivity reads as gullibility), and there's no real illumination of how or why U.S. morality has changed (and it certainly hasn't changed as much as this spotty, lopsided potpourri would imply). Finally, Talese records--in pompous third-person--his own mild experiences in a massage parlor, and he confesses: ""He did not even know how to begin the book. Nor how to organize the material. Nor what he hoped to say about sex that had not already been said in dozens of other recent published works. . . ."" No, he did not know--and apparently he never found out. So this fat, bland book just flails about; and its only strong appeal will be, ironically, to just the sort of not-so-liberated souls whom Talese ignores here--those eager for titillation but too old-fashioned to swap their spouses. . . or be seen reading pornography.

Pub Date: May 2, 1980

ISBN: 0345472705

Page Count: -

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1980

Categories: NONFICTION