Not too suave a sentence

"If there had been a bachelor in this place, in the intervening decades, he seemed not to have been too suave of one."

If there were a contest for the Worst Prose to Appear in the New Yorker, the sentence above would surely be a contender. It appeared in a short Talk piece by Nick Paumgarten, who packs a mess of infelicities into a mere 23 words. The first comma is intrusive and the phrase "seemed not to have been" is wimpy and wordy, and then that "too suave of one" at the end sounds as graceful as a Tonka truck falling down a flight of stairs.

Who would say "too suave of one"? Begin with the sentence "He is not too suave a bachelor" and then replace "bachelor" with "one" and you get "He is not too suave a one," which sounds perfectly wretched, making me wonder why Paumgarten or his editor didn't simply recast the sentence in one of a number of ways:

Any bachelor who might have inhabited this place in the intervening decades was not too suave.
If a bachelor had inhabited this place in the intervening decades, he was not too suave.
If, in the intervening decades, someone had inhabited this place, he was not too suave a bachelor.

These sentences don't exactly thrill me but at least they don't fizzle out at the end. The next time one of my students insists on ending a sentence with the least significant word, I'll accuse him of pulling a Paumgarten.