I contributed a short appreciation of Gay Talese’s book Thy Neighbor’s Wife to the great literary blog The Second Pass. Here’s the opening:

Of all the mass utopian notions of the twentieth century, the Sexual Revolution was both the most spectacularly successful and, in the end, the most thwarted. Whereas most political or spiritual or cultural movements, from Communism to Esperanto to est, came and went and left the Western sensibility not too far from where it started, a time traveler direct from 1959 would stare slackjawed at the sexual landscape of today, both in its deep fundamentals (the acceptance of homosexuality, the shift in gender roles) and in its showy surfaces, the frankness with which we discuss and display carnal matters in public.

And yet measured against the dreams (certainties, even) of its principled adherents — as a contemporary reader is reminded throughout Gay Talese’s stupendous 1981 book Thy Neighbor’s Wife, recently reissued by Harper Perennial — the Sexual Revolution remains unfinished and seemingly unfinishable. Shame in sex was not vanquished. Monogamy was not proved an unnatural construct. Indeed, if sexual behavior has liberalized during the past fifty years, sexual attitudes have arguably become more conservative, with belief in a single, destined “soul mate” now the moony norm. Talese’s book was seen as unforgivably sordid in its day (for its reportorial methods as well as for its subject matter), but today Thy Neighbor’s Wife is fascinating for how tragic it all seems, how unfulfilled the expectations of so many of its protagonists ultimately remained.

Read the whole thing here.