Or why are people asking whom's minding the store?
The book was No. 1—in everything but prose. Thy Neighbor's Wife may appeal to the prurient, the innocent and the curious, but it dismays anyone devoted to English. It hardly corrupts the reader's morals, as some critics have charged, but it may help corrupt his language. The work, eight years in the making, publicized like a space shot, high on the charts, frequently reads as if translated from the Albanian: "This was when Jim Buckley met Al Goldstein, whose spy piece he helped to edit, and whose expressed frustrations he not only identified with but saw as the compatible essence of a viable partnership—or at least some hedge against the probability that neither of them could ever make it alone."
The book is littered with grammatical outrage and wrong usage. "After completing high school in 1949, his sister wrote that she had arranged for him an appointment to Annapolis." It is of course the brother, not the sister, who completed high school in 1949. The same type of mistake sprouts throughout the text; one must finally conclude that the author does not know what a dangling modifier is.
Talese writes that
"Bullaro would sometimes peddle alone for fifteen miles." But Bullaro is not selling something; he is a man pedaling a bicycle. The author repeats himself, achieving a sort of tautologous stammer: "What would prove to be decisive in her decision," or the "hearing would not be heard for at least another hour." Plurals and singulars confound him: "Men who noticed that their wives aroused other men became in many cases aroused by her themselves." He confuses foreboding with forbearance, uses interfaith for the opposite, intrafaith, and misapplies who, whom, which and that with abandon.
All this is particularly odd because, unlike many writers who make the talk-show circuit, Talese is an old pro. He earned his reputation with cleanly written magazine articles and The Kingdom and the Power, a bestselling dissection of the New York Times. His wife Nan Talese, a highly respected senior editor at
Simon & Schuster, went over the manuscript before it was sent to Betty Prashker, a top editor at Doubleday, which publishes Talese. Prashker says that Talese was not thin-skinned about taking editorial advice, but adds enigmatically: "Grammar is not etched in marble." Perhaps not; neither should it be polymorphously perverse.
The anything-goes school of writing is exemplified by other recent bestsellers: Judith Krantz's Princess Daisy, Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity, Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave or Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong's The Brethren. Like Talese, Woodward and Armstrong are not only verbose but fond of dangling their modifiers and splitting their infinitives. Toffler specializes in hyperbolic jargon: "Vast changes in the techno-sphere and the info-sphere have converged to change the way we make goods. We are moving rapidly beyond traditional mass production to a sophisticated mix of mass and demassified products ... made with wholistic, continuous-flow processes." Krantz goes for grand howlers: "Thank heaven they'd all be in their staterooms, intently adjusting their resort dinner clothes, caparisoned for the delectation of each other."