[In the following excerpt, Jones lauds the effectiveness of Moravia's detachment from his subject while constructing complex themes in Two Adolescents.]

[Also known as Disobedience] Luca, a terrifying study in neurotic nausea, presents the more intricate case of a boy of fifteen who, "at an age when sensitiveness is awake and consciousness still sleeping," revolts against the imposition upon his own will of the will of others. It takes the form of systematic and willing self-destruction, a pursuit of death which leads him to reject in turn school, family, possessions, food, and sex. Without ever being explicit, Moravia is attacking those upper-class mores which sometimes seem specially designed to foster such collapse: "Why did he move his legs, why did he avoid being run over by a bus, why did he stop and rearrange the pack of books under his arm, why did he pull his hat down on to his forehead?" At the height of dissociation his body betrays him into delirium; he is brought back to a desire to live by a "final initiation not merely into physical love but also into that more general love for all things."

On those complex themes Moravia plays with an astonishing delicacy. He is detached from his subject, sometimes even clinical. But these are not simply studies in adolescent breakdown. He takes a neurosis as James took a situation; he records its every shift in pulse and its entire context, although there is a minimum of furnishing in these stories, which depend, most of all, on symbols at once dense and spare. They are inconspicuously constructed. The logic with which Luca sets about compassing his own end, the duel between his will to death and the instinct which saves him, is completely engrossing. (It is also reminiscent of the tortured reasonings of the heroes of Italo Svevo.) Moravia's power lies in the detachment which makes his writing so clear—nothing is redundant—and in the unobtrusive compassion which envelops it. He conveys no explicit message save that cited above from the end of Luca. This is what adolescence can be like, he is saying, and having said it perfectly he stops.