[From] Italy comes Alberto Moravia's Two Adolescents a pair of novelettes, Agostino and Disobedience, which deal with the emotional turmoil of adolescence. . . .

Moravia is well endowed with two qualities which do not often come together in equal proportions: he is both an extremely vigorous, sharply realistic storyteller and a shrewd, searching psychologist. Though written in colloquial and rather graceless prose, his work has a strongly distinctive individuality—harsh, energetic, and supercharged with sexuality; and more often than not it achieves a pretty powerful impact.

It certainly does in Agostino, a brilliantly realized portrayal of the sexual awakening of a thirteen-year-old boy, a sheltered member of the wealthy bourgeoisie. Agostino, vacationing at the seaside with his mother—a widow, still youthful and splendidly beautiful—is bitterly resentful when she allows a young man to come boating and swimming with them, and he hates the "strange" way she behaves toward the intruder. To punish her, Agostino goes off on his own and falls in with a gang of low-class adolescent toughs, who, among other things, jeeringly instruct him in the facts of life. Now he discovers in himself horrifying feelings about his mother's beauty, and, desperate to dispel them, he plucks up enough courage to visit a brothel, where he is laughingly patted on the head and told to run back home.

Disobedience, a rather disagreeable story, perceptively explores a different crisis of adolescence, a sudden leaden inertia and consuming hatred of life itself. Moravia's fifteen-year-old Luca masochistically sets out to deprive himself of everything he likes, of everything which still attaches him to living. Eventually he works up to a total physical breakdown, and, while convalescing, is seduced by his nurse, which more or less dispels his neurasthenia.