Each of Moravia's stories of Italian schoolboys [in Two Adolescents] deserves the higher compliment of being called a story that you can put down. One pursues a clumsy and faked narrative as one gets through a crowd on a sidewalk, in haste to be rid of it—a point often overlooked by those who sit up all night over mystery stories. Moravia fits normal life: one can drop his Agostino or Luca anywhere with a coherent structure already in one's mind, secure in the writer's ability to continue it properly. Nothing happens to Agostino except that boredom, bad company and ambiguous feelings toward his widowed mother fill him with a typically adolescent misery. Nothing happens to Luca except that he gets sick and recovers, his nurse climbing into his bed during his convalescence. The virtuosity of the born story-teller then goes to work. The story of Luca takes us deep into the death-wish that caused his illness, and shows how acts that outwardly seem only perverse or petulant really belong to an inner sacrificial drama. And as Luca recovers, the archetypal significance of what he has done takes shape. His story is a humble but genuine example of what the great religions are talking about: of losing one's life to find it, of gaining charity through renunciation, of becoming free by cutting oneself loose from everything that attaches and motivates. Symbols, ordinarily as hard to make convincing in fiction as jokes, drop into the right places, from the very adroit use of the Purgatorio to the final sentence about a train coming out of a tunnel into daylight. It is characteristic of such a story that a quiet word like "nausea" or "absurdity" (neither likely to be the invention of the unobtrusive translator), simply because it is the right word for its context, can bring more of what Sartre and Camus respectively are trying to say into focus than a good many pages of Sartre's metaphysics.

In the background of Moravia's stories is a solid sense of bourgeois Italian society, its values, its folklore and its class conflicts. There is something oddly old-fashioned about this solidity: it is like finding good carpentry and seasoned lumber in a flossy new bungalow, and one feels that the swaying Venetian backdrops of Hemingway or the dissolving pan shots of Schulberg are unfortunately more up to date. Moravia still clings in technique to the old traditions of novel writing in which those who had a sense of established society, like Austen and Dickens and Trollope, wrote with authority in the centre of the tradition, while those who lacked it, like Scott and Lytton and Wilkie Collins, had to depend on plot formulas for support. This kind of novel is disappearing with the society that produced it, and a new approach has become necessary. Society is not a containing unit for characters any more: it is too nomadic and too much an open arena of clashing personalities and ideologies.