The first thing that will strike the reader contemplating Command, and I Will Obey You by Italy's most fertile storyteller is that all of the items in the collection are of the same length—none shorter than six pages, none longer than eight. This suggests that they were originally written for the "third page" (always dedicated to matters of literature and art) of an Italian newspaper; Moravia among his other distinctions is a terzapaginista without rivals. Only a uniquely competent craftsman could go on week after week meeting the strict requirements of this kind of literary Houdinism. There is no more skilled technician than Moravia active today in the world of letters, with the possible exception of some writers of detective stories, with whom he has, as a matter of fact, a certain affinity.

But is this kind of expertise enough? Ever since Moravia's first glittering success forty years ago critics have been watching his progress with a combination of admiration and suspicion. Is there anything more to his art than scintillant competence? Can we chart any development in his work, any broadening of range or deepening of perception over these four decades of inexhaustible output? Assessing his work as a whole, Donald Heiney has remarked with justice that to some at least the Moravian pattern "may seem . . . monotonous, the mechanical repetitiousness of a writer who has succeeded in popularizing certain psychological and philosophical ideas latent in the atmosphere of his time." To which we may answer that "the mixture as before" is not necessarily a bad prescription for a writer if the mixture itself commands our respect. We may admire in Moravia, as in Somerset Maugham, the coiner of that wry phrase "autocriticism," the persistent vitality of inspiration, the enduring sharpness of observation and the consistent skill in depicting what the eye takes in.

The present collection, however, may have some surprises for those who are familiar with Moravia only as a kind of dispassionate, half-cynical chronicler of the sordid with an eye to realistic and quasi-pornographic detail. Such is the Moravia of Woman of Rome, The Conformist and indeed most of the novels which have made him famous; it is also the Moravia of the Roman Tales. But the stories of Command, and I Will Obey You are for the most part the product of the "surrealistic" Moravia, already operative in The Lazy Man's Dreams of thirty years ago.

Most of them, although given a precisely placed Roman background, might be called mini-fables. A realistic setting is used as a springboard for commentary on human values; the commonplace and banal substance is warped and caricatured to make a point that is essentially moralistic. "A Middling Type" points up a sad kind of determinism in the trajectory of unimaginative humanity, "All-seeing" is an allegory of complacent passivity, "You Know Me, Carlo" tells us something about the tentative nature of human associations; there are other titles the "lessons" of which are less obvious, but in all cases there is something behind the story. Perhaps the most malicious and in its ironic way the saddest tale of all is "Don't Let's Be Dramatic," wherein a recently bereaved husband hastens to replace his wife with a casual stranger. Most of the stories are told about—and by, for Moravia's intent calls for the use of the first person—middle-class or lower-middle-class Romans; but, to cite the two extremes of the spectrum, one recounts the love affair of a computer and in another a brindled boxer tells of his discovery that "the world is a bone."

Command, and I Will Obey You is a good mixture; it is not likely to add to Moravia's stature but it will not detract from it either. And the reading will be pleasant, amusing and perhaps educational.