Even the most doggedly prurient won't be disappointed with [Moravia's] two adolescents. Both of them, Agostino and Luca, have their problems—and, as anyone who has ever been one knows, the deepest concerns of adolescents are rarely bound up with solid geometry or endruns, pious literature to the contrary notwithstanding.

But there is more to Moravia's work than meets the leering eye. There is power and delicacy in these two stories and a certain subtle moralism. Each of them in its way is a bitter comment on modern society. Each of them gives witness to the modern malaise, the self-loathing that marks the age.

Agostino tells of a young innocent, thirteen, the sheltered son of a spoiled, beautiful widow. One day the boy is thrown in with a gang of young toughs. From them he gets his first abrupt, crude lesson in the facts of life. Young Agostino, hardly ready to bear the burden of sex, is nearly crushed by it. He finds himself at a point where to move one way leads to incest, to move the other, to homosexualism. And as so often happens with adolescents—in life as in novels—he is alone, with no one to turn to, at the most crucial moment.

The boy, neither a child nor yet a man, learns that he is not ready to meet the world on its own savage terms, and the world is not ready to accept him. There is no place for innocence that like his has ceased to be ignorance.

[In the second novella Disobedience] Luca, Moravia's second adolescent, is no innocent but the knowing, sophisticated son of money-grubbing rich parents. In his disgust for the world he is about to enter, the boy, consciously and deliberately, rejects everything that seems to give its ultimate shabby meaning to the life he sees around him. He gets rid of his piggy-bank savings, burying the lire rather than following his first generous impulse to give it away, in order to show his contempt. He disposes of his football, his books, a beloved stamp collection. He refuses to eat as he should and neglects his studies, which he has been taught should lead to the kind of success his father found. He convinces himself that he is rejecting life itself.

After a long illness, marked by a purging Freudian delirium, and a peaceful (it is the only word) sex experience with a kindly, maternal nurse, Luca welcomes life again. Living, he realizes then, is not the monstrous distortion his parents and teachers have made of it. It was not he in his rebellion but his elders themselves who had rejected life. Life should be: "not sky and earth and sea, not human beings and their organizations, but rather a dark, moist cavern of loving, maternal flesh into which he could enter confidently sure that he would be protected there as he had been protected by his mother all the time she was carrying him in her womb." The good motherly woman who came to his bed stood for nature. And for him to know their placid union—docile boy and experienced, undemanding woman—was finally to live.

So run these two stories of adolescents. Agostino comes to the brink of manhood knowing only that the life the modern world offers is ugly and will surely bring him lonely anguish. Luca, the exceptional, learns that only by rejecting the modern travesty of life can a man finally know what it is to live.

It was Saint Augustine who said that flesh is not life. But Augustine knew a life that finds no recognition in Alberto Moravia. Without recognition of it, living will always be a bitter riddle. In Two Adolescents Moravia has framed that riddle with precision and art.