In his third book to be published in America the Italian novelist Alberto Moravia makes use of a tricky literary device which calls to mind the famed Quaker Oats trademark: a mother holding up temptingly before her child a box of Quaker Oats upon which is imprinted a mother holding up temptingly before her child a box of Quaker Oats upon which. . . . And so forth until the eye fails. In short, Conjugal Love is a novel about a novelist writing a novel under a title none other than—Conjugal Love.

The analogy ends in the fact that Signor Moravia, as demonstrated by his previous books, The Woman of Rome and Two Adolescents, and by most of the present work as well, is a writer of outstanding skill, perception, and distinction, whereas his fictitious counterpart, Silvio Baldeschi, is presented as a poor, uncreative, sterile dilettante. Not until a rather horrifying and spectacular experience at the very end of Signor Moravia's novel is Signor Baldeschi so awakened finally as to see life with keen eyes and be enabled presumably to go on and produce a novel as good as this one.

Whatever satisfactions this convoluted device may have given Moravia personally it is the novel's least notable aspect. Where Conjugal Love shines and where it most fascinates is in its Proust-like ability at times to evoke profound significances from seemingly trivial happenings in the relation of a man and his wife.

Baldeschi's wife, Leda, was a beautiful but not overly cultivated woman with a calm bordering on dulness, not to his displeasure. The one danger signal perhaps was the odd stance she sometimes struck in which she appeared to be "thrusting away some imaginary danger and at the same time indicating . .. that the danger of assault was not unwelcome." Entirely absorbed in the chef d'oeuvre which would lift him from mediocrity, Baldeschi basked in Leda's "good will," though sensing it to be a little patronizing. Matters came to a head over Baldeschi's barber, who Leda complained had pressed against her insolently while dressing her hair. But Baldeschi, for the moment totally occupied with writing about their marriage as he fancied it to be, laughed the matter off as an accident.

It was weeks later after giving himself up as a novelist and returning full force as a husband that he began to see the deeper implications of the incident. By then he was reaping the whirlwind, a failure as husband and novelist both. In Leda stood revealed hellish new aspects he could never have imagined. And some gentler ones, too.

The climax of the story and Baldeschi's oddly masochistic acceptance of it are not likely to strike every reader as plausible, including this one. But along the way and in the closing pages Moravia offers rich and subtle fare. His newest work, despite its almost novelette shortness, leaves far more sticking to the ribs than many a seven hundredpage "giant" of recent memory.