Alberto Moravia is deaf to the demands of earthly and heavenly authority, at least in Conjugal Love, and deferential only to instinct. He also writes of people out of time, whose difficulties are personal.

Conjugal Love is a severely classical sketch of a man's discovery of himself after a deep humiliation, a humiliation neither political nor religious. Silvio Baldeschi, a dilettante critic and self-satisfied husband, attributes his failure to do creative work under the most ideal of conditions to the demands of love, and renounces his conjugal duties until he has finished his masterpiece. He completes the book at precisely the moment when his strongly sexed wife, Leda, is giving herself to Zeus, this time in the guise of a baldheaded barber for whom she has previously expressed the most intense revulsion. Silvio, who witnesses his wife's seduction (a wild and primitive dance on the threshing floor of a deserted mill), suffers as Gabriel Conroy suffers in Joyce's much profounder story, "The Dead." He also sees himself as "a well-meaning sentimentalist" and "a pitiable fatuous fellow," but Moravia is only partly concerned with the disintegration of an ego. Conjugal Love, like some of E. M. Forster's stories, exposes the sterility of reason and taste and implicitly asserts the vitality of vulgarity. The fact that this carnal message should be presented so elegantly accentuates the contrast between its meaning and form, but the medieval fabliau, comic and rank, cannot be refined away. The deluded cuckold and his beautiful wife is an old story. Resuscitated by Moravia and re-written with Lawrentian overtones, it speaks without pretentiousness of men's kinship with the earth and of the perils of introspection.

Conjugal Love is not a great or an extraordinary book, but it demonstrates once more how the artist can achieve a poetic reality without being topical or enmeshing himself in contemporary issues. Silvio Baldeschi's self-revelation—"the acute sense of a sudden crumbling to pieces, of a headlong plunge into absurdity and emptiness"—is presented by Moravia as a victory, without divine assistance, of the artistic consciousness over the subterfuges of the self.