Books: Plumbing the Shallows

THY NEIGHBOR'S WIFE by Gay Talese; Doubleday; 568pages; $14.95

With bestsellers on the New York Times (The Kingdom and the Power) and the Mafia (Honor Thy Father) to his credit, Author Gay Talese felt ready to tackle a really big subject for his next book. In 1971 he noticed a massage parlor near one of his favorite bars on Manhattan's East Side. Instead of saying "There goes the neighborhood," he decided that something was up, perhaps nothing less than "the redefinition of morality in America." An indefatigable reporter, Talese plunged into the world of commercial sex, not just patronizing massage parlors but also managing two of them. He saw "numerous" X-rated films, did research at topless bars, crisscrossed the country in search of nude encounter groups. His work attracted snickering publicity, strained his marriage and caused him to miss his deadline by five years.

At long last Talese has got his story into print, and it certainly answers thousands of questions. How, for instance, did Nude Model Diane Webber's great-great-grandmother die? (An Indian shot her in the back.) Did General Custer carry life insurance into the battle of Little Big Horn? (Yes, a $5,000 policy with New York Life.) What covered the circular bed in Hugh Hefner's private DC-9? (A coverlet made of Tasmanian opossum fur.)

No book that somberly enshrines such trivia can be all bad; fun is fun, whether intended or not. But well over 500 pages of details should probably, finally, add up to something more than polymorphism, and Thy Neighbor's Wife does not. Talese's subject is not "sex in America," as he claims, but rather a narrow band of U.S. citizens: married middle-class males now in middle age who want more sex with more women than society and, usually, their wives condone. Talese identifies with all the neatly dressed clients of massage parlors; "He was them," the author writes of himself, "in many ways." Fair enough. Men afflicted to the point of distraction with adolescent fantasies have their rights as well as their problems, along with everyone else. But Talese does not let it go at that. He paints his male characters as victims, healthy ids thwarted by church, state, censors and, most devastatingly, uncooperative women.

This largely buried argument is all that connects the book's welter of anecdotes. A Chicago teen-ager named Harold Rubin is limned practicing self-abuse over photographs of nude women. He is joined in the narrative by the newly married Hugh Hefner, who wanders the streets and gazes at apartment windows where women might appear. Hefner makes room later for John Bullaro, a married Los Angeles insurance executive who bicycles to Venice Beach on Sundays to ogle sunbathers.