Alberto Moravia (1907–1990)

A dull little book about which I struggle to find anything to say, perhaps because I am a woman and this book depicts a stunted, masculine coming-of-age. Unfair to call it ‘stunted’—better to say that it depicts the stunted, confused period before a coming-of-age. Some passages concerning the mother were deeply unpleasant from my perspective; although, I’m sure that they ring with reality to certain male readers. I don’t like to see myself making summary statements that hinge upon a gender binary, but this is the only way I find myself forming thoughts about the book.… (more)

Some novelists are better off writing novellas.

It is rare, anymore, to encounter, in the context of the 'psychological novel,' an uninsightful character who is not, at least implicitly, presented as such. If we can find this anywhere, it is perhaps in the product of the older, typically male, author who cannot sustain an --- idea.

Moravia is capable of writing. The characters and situation are adequately sketched, often humorously, and with an emotional clarity which is the mark of mastery; and perhaps the early expository section remains worthwhile for these reasons. However, the narrator's fixation on the single explanation, incapable of considering the additional possibility or playing one off of the other, never considering a subsequent movement, occasionally acting with cleverness but only by instinct, and the unshakable - to the last pages - belief/conceit that he could "prove [his] case" against the charge of contempt if given the opportunity, is bizarre. Not to mention the high-school-level Freudian interpretation of Ulysses presented as fracturing deep-brain-insight by one of Wager's operatic eponyms.… (more)