[In the following mixed review, Dunlea finds the tales contained in The Wayward Wife and Other Stories absorbing, but not as impressive as Moravia's earlier works of short fiction.]

It is not perhaps by accident that Alberto Moravia has become Italy's most internationally acclaimed contemporary novelist and that he should at the same time be a maverick in Italian letters. For one thing, Italian writing had so long stood shy of the main literary currents to the north, whereas Moravia has channeled these into his work with a will; for another, he has allowed himself to become obsessed with sex to a degree which can only be viewed as eccentric in a country where a sense of measure survives in the general approach to the problems of sex. Moreover, the esthetic conservatism of Benedetto Croce still lies heavily on the arbiters of literary taste in Italy, and in stringently literary terms. Moravia is not a writer of major note.

But of course his reception abroad has not primarily been, as in fact it could hardly be, a literary appreciation; rather has it been, with inevitable irony, a recognition of a distinctly contemporary yet signally Italian temperament and sensibility. This is the same type of irony by which the uniquely American characteristics of many of our writers have been translated back to us from France, and these are the qualities, together with his highly dramatic conception of character, which underlie Moravia's extraordinary narrative powers.

Lust and passion, operating on a destructive principle, and their irreversible depredatory patterns, form the substance and economy of Moravia's art; but the artist is indifferent to the spiritual mystery of evil in itself. In his world it is merely the most dramatic expression of a universe where chaos reigns and futility rules. And if there are ideas in his novels they are ideas in scrawl, shifting with the emphasis of the times.

Moravia is a moralist without an ideal. What is more irreconcilable artistically, he is a psychologist without much subtlety; so it is even when he is treating such delicate sexual themes as those of Agostino and Luca—two of his most moving narratives—where complexity is too often indistinguishable from contrivance. (One need simply recall the part played in Luca by the child's discovery of the family safe concealed behind the picture of the Madonna.) Moravia's tendency is to resolve everything in terms of story over and above characterization, with the result that there is more simplifying than resolving. . . .

The tales in The Wayward Wife—they are tales more than stories—are all absorbing, though none may be so impressive as such earlier ones as The Unfortunate Lover. Not the fluent regional colors of Roman Tales but duller tones prevail. The story of the title, nearly novel length, is so top-heavy with old-fashioned plotting that one must despair of making the slightest dent in its intricacies by relating that it concerns a young lady whose dream of marrying into a wealthy family is dashed by the revelation that she is the illegitimate offspring of the father of the young man who had been rejoicing her with his attentions.

Although here somewhat tenderized, the author is an unsentimental dissector of womankind, and by this quality, as by a certain melancholy charm, the thing is sustained decently above bathos. In the balancing vignettes the Moravian slice of life comes off as a side of beef with love profane and/or professional, and the author having raffish satisfaction of the carnal automaton in the male, while sending his harpoon at young beauties so statuesque they even make love like statues.

As a story writer, Moravia is not constrained by the fact that we expect, as we do of a novelist, something more than a good story; and his imagination, always as formidable as it is facile, is free to follow its native propensities and to construct a completely tactile world. Here he is a species of cynical genius, an etcher of sadistic intensity.