{"id":20000,"date":"2016-12-02T13:39:32","date_gmt":"2016-12-02T17:39:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=20000"},"modified":"2017-05-25T17:44:26","modified_gmt":"2017-05-25T21:44:26","slug":"gay-talese-the-voyeurs-motel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2016\/12\/02\/gay-talese-the-voyeurs-motel\/","title":{"rendered":"Gay Talese: The Voyeur’s Motel<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”no” equal_height_columns=”no” menu_anchor=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”center center” background_repeat=”no-repeat” fade=”no” background_parallax=”none” parallax_speed=”0.3″ video_mp4=”” video_webm=”” video_ogv=”” video_url=”” video_aspect_ratio=”16:9″ video_loop=”yes” video_mute=”yes” overlay_color=”” video_preview_image=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” padding_top=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” padding_right=””][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ layout=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” center_content=”no” last=”no” min_height=”” hover_type=”none” link=””][fusion_imageframe image_id=”20947″ style_type=”none” stylecolor=”” hover_type=”none” bordersize=”” bordercolor=”” borderradius=”” align=”none” lightbox=”no” gallery_id=”” lightbox_image=”” alt=”” link=”http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews” linktarget=”_self” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”left” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_offset=””]http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/Header-2-1-e1493098728843.jpg[\/fusion_imageframe][fusion_title margin_top=”” margin_bottom=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” size=”3″ content_align=”left” style_type=”underline solid” sep_color=””]<\/p>\n

The Voyeur’s Motel<\/strong><\/em> <\/span>
\nby Gay Talese (2016)<\/span>
\nGrove Press (2016)<\/span>
\n 240 pp<\/span><\/p>\n

[\/fusion_title][fusion_text]<\/p>\n

\"the-voyeurs-motel\"“I wonder if it\u2019s ethical,” asks James Jeffries, played by Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock\u2019s Rear Window<\/em>, \u201cto watch a man with binoculars and a long-focus lens?\u201d\u00a0Gerald Foos overcame such moral difficulties without hesitation.\u00a0He wanted to watch lots and lots of people have sex without them knowing, so he bought a motel near Denver, constructed an “observation platform” above eight of the rooms, to which he would assign any guests whose sexual habits he wanted to observe via slats in the ceiling made up to look like air vents, but through which he could be neither seen nor heard. Then he watched them —\u00a0for three decades. He recorded\u00a0everything, both by means of statistics and diary entries.\u00a0In 1980, approximately halfway through this deluge of voyeurism, he wrote anonymously to famous “New Journalist” Gay Talese, who was in the process of writing about American sexual behavior between the end of World War Two and the AIDS epidemic, and invited him to learn all about it.\u00a0Fully thirty-five years later<\/span>, The Voyeur\u2019s Motel<\/em> is the decidedly odd result.<\/p>\n

On an initial visit to the motel, Talese quite amusingly almost gives the whole thing away by inadvertently allowing his tie to dangle through the slats.\u00a0It would have brushed against a woman\u2019s head were it not — decency forbids more illuminating detail —\u00a0bobbing up and down at the time.\u00a0Foos\u2019 demand for anonymity prevented Talese from taking the story further, though for the ensuing years he was sent Foos\u2019 journal in installments.\u00a0The Voyeur\u2019s Motel<\/em>, then, is split more or less equally between extracts from the journal presented in italics, interspersed with Talese\u2019s personal input.\u00a0The first two thirds or so focus almost wholly on Foos’ descriptions of his guests having sex.\u00a0If you like that sort of thing, well, you will like this sort of thing, but the trouble is that few of them do anything interesting.\u00a0There are no descriptions of wild sex positions or bizarre practices.\u00a0Most of the sex is wholly routine and often rather perfunctory.\u00a0Anyone below the age of about thirty won\u2019t see what the fuss is all about given what is available in just a few clicks nowadays.\u00a0In June the BBC reported that the tremendous ease with which pornography can be accessed now means that many of the young encompass what were previously seen as crazed and exotic acts, requiring real imagination, into their sex lives as a matter of routine.\u00a0Foos barely describes anything exotic at all.\u00a0It turns out, then, that Americans were having pretty tedious sex from the late 1960s on.\u00a0This means that for the purposes of the book, the sex is of inadequate interest to be able to sustain it. So the story, therefore, must turn to Gerald Foos, which it sort of does, but here we have problems.<\/p>\n

Firstly, however, Foos does look to draw conclusions from what he sees and makes at least rudimentary attempts at analysis.\u00a0He says things such as:<\/p>\n

Conclusion: They are not a happy couple.\u00a0He is too concerned about his position and doesn\u2019t have time for her.\u00a0He is very ignorant of sexual procedure and foreplay despite his college education.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And more optimistically:<\/p>\n

Conclusion: Educated, upper-middle class older couples who enjoy a tremendous sex life.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Years later we get comment about the increased number of mixed race couples and something approaching quite tender admiration of lesbians (\u201cof whom I made a particular study\u201d — I bet he did, I bet he did, thinks the cynical male reader), whom Foos finds to be the only category of guest who can reliably be expected to have sex for the pleasure it gives to the other, rather than the self.\u00a0During the 1980s he observes that women have shaken off the passivity of the earlier era.\u00a0He also sees a number of injured Vietnam veterans whose sex lives are obstructed by their disabilities.\u00a0He speaks about them with an empathy which is evidently quite genuine and borne partly out of his own military service in the 1950s, which peaked, in fact, with selection for the precursor to the Navy SEALs.<\/p>\n

Talese’s role in this is fairly rudimentary, occasionally popping up to describe the intermittent contact he had with Foos, including the odd meeting.\u00a0He provides links from one extract of italics to the next and occasionally mediates on the ethics of the thing, or some background on Foos\u2019 childhood, all in perfectly serviceable prose.\u00a0But the feeling is that if the reader doesn\u2019t really know what to make of it all, don\u2019t worry, because neither does Talese.\u00a0He gives the impression that he is content to get it all on paper, then puff his cheeks out with a relieved exhalation of air and furtively place it at arm\u2019s length in front of the reader with an apologetic shrug of the shoulders, leaving him the task of trying to make anything substantial out of it.\u00a0Once the shock of the existence of the observation platform is overcome and it becomes plain that not everything Foos recorded may have happened, it might just be that we are left with something somewhat tame.<\/p>\n

The question of what is genuine about Foos is where we encounter quite serious problems, to the extent that Talese temporarily disavowed the book in June.\u00a0If one accepts the diagnosis that much of the sex is of rather a quotidian nature unable to sustain the book for very long, then the divergence away from that onto other matters must be successful.\u00a0Here, however, the book is at its weakest; indeed, the whole enterprise comes under question.\u00a0Most glaringly, Foos claims to have witnessed a murder.\u00a0The most rudimentary inquiries\u00a0on Talese\u2019s part demonstrate that it could not possibly have occurred at all, never mind in the way Foos describes.\u00a0Also since proven to be fabricated is the entire period of 1980 to 1988, when Foos was elsewhere.\u00a0An account of the Foos family’s son, Mark, living in an apartment previously occupied by James Eagan Holmes, who murdered twelve inside a cinema in Aurora, Colorado, in 2012, has also since been proved false.\u00a0The impact of this brouhaha on what is reportedly to be a Spielberg documentary is yet to be seen.<\/p>\n

Overall, it can be said with confidence that Foos was a voyeur of epic proportions, but the extent to which that justifies The Voyeur\u2019s Motel<\/em> as a book-length piece of work is rather a separate question.\u00a0Some have said that Talese should have contacted the police and had nothing to do with it, further accusing him of being complicit in a colossal violation of the guests\u2019 rights.\u00a0Others think that the greater ethical imperative was not to break the confidentiality agreement he made with Foos.\u00a0The question is what value the book has as a piece of journalism once Foos’ deceits are considered.\u00a0There is a sound argument for the answer being a simple “none.”\u00a0There may be some trivial appeal left, perhaps, in inconsequential vignettes about a nun who is said to have arrived for an evening of wild onanism carrying a brimming cornucopia of sex toys in her suitcase, or Foos\u2019 musings on the question of which racial category of gentleman tends to project semen the furthest.<\/p>\n

Most of the praise for The Voyeur\u2019s Motel<\/em>, which by implication included the publication of a lengthy extract in The New Yorker<\/em>, coalesces around the view that quite apart from watching his guests have sex, Gerald Foos saw much, much more.\u00a0The extent to which readers agree is probably significantly informative as to whether or not they find this endeavor worthwhile.\u00a0The trouble, as evidenced by the book spluttering to just 230 pages of rather large and narrowly set text, is that it is not obvious that Talese himself thought there was all that much to it either.\u00a0The impression is rather given that the project, maintained by sporadic correspondence after the motel had been sold to developers in 1995, sat gathering dust in a bottom drawer until Talese was either bored enough to write it up or, as he claims, Foos eventually waived a demand for anonymity which Talese was not previously prepared to grant.\u00a0Voyeurism, even on such a grandiose scale, hardly being a subject uncharted\u00a0by popular culture (The Conversation<\/em>, Rear Window<\/em>, American Beauty<\/em>, The Truman Show<\/em>), it is quite tricky to think of a reason anyone will take a serious liking to this work on the basis of anything other than mundane rib-tickling ribaldry.\u00a0Had Talese taken the view that there was some historical or anthropological value to this instead of it being the sordid record of one man\u2019s obsession and his extraordinary endeavors to fulfill\u00a0it, he would surely have said so.<\/p>\n

[\/fusion_text][fusion_text]<\/p>\n\"\"\"\"\"\"\n \n