The Voyeur's Motel
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The controversial chronicle of a motel owner who secretly studied the sex lives of his guests by the renowned journalist and author of Thy Neighbor's Wife.
On January 7, 1980, in the run-up to the publication of his landmark bestseller Thy Neighbor's Wife, Gay Talese received an anonymous letter from a man in Colorado. "Since learning of your long-awaited study of coast-to-coast sex in America," the letter began, "I feel I have important information that I could contribute to its contents or to contents of a future book." The man—Gerald Foos—hen divulged an astonishing secret: he had bought a motel outside Denver for the express purpose of satisfying his voyeuristic desires. Underneath its peaked roof, he had built an "observation platform" through which he could peer down on his unwitting guests.
Over the years, Foos sent Talese hundreds of pages of notes on his guests, work that Foos believed made him a pioneering researcher into American society and sexuality. Through his Voyeur's motel, he witnessed and recorded the harsh effects of the war in Vietnam, the upheaval in gender roles, the decline of segregation, and much more. In The Voyeur's Motel. "the reader observes Talese observing Foos observing his guests." An extraordinary work of narrative journalism, it is at once an examination of one unsettling man and a portrait of the secret life of the American heartland over the latter half of the twentieth century (Daily Mail, UK).
"This is a weird book about weird people doing weird things, and I wouldn't have put it down if the house were on fire." —John Greenya, Washington Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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 details "they all three laid quiet on the bed and relaxed, discussing vacuum-cleaner sales" and 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. (Jul.)
