Moravia and Middle-Class Survival:
KEENE, FRANCES
Moravia and Middle-Class Survival A Ghost at Noon. By Alberto Moravia. Farrar, Straus & Young. 247 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by Frances Keene Free-lance editor and critic; specialist in contemporary...
...The wives want their own homes, do not like to live with in-laws, expect to share confidences not only of the flesh but of the mind with their husbands...
...The novel of mood, of satiric understatement (take Marcel Ayme or Jean Dutourd or Pallazzeschi), is elusive for less charitable reasons...
...His mind demands an explanation...
...His protagonists (there is no question of a hero in a Moravia book) are prey to the same ambitions, the same thrust of the economic goad, the same desire to achieve a viable and, at times, even a relatively happy adult relationship as our eminently middle-class reader...
...Moravia's protagonists wage this fight in book after book, and the insight he brings is applicable wherever the social structure leaves the intellectual grappling with his solitary and unresolv-able problem...
...He knows, at the start, that there is no rival...
...The producer, Battista, who eventually seduces Emilia, is in no melodramatic sense a villain, but a type: the tycoon swollen with his own efficiency and the need to direct others...
...Though less of a work than The Conformist...
...I have hazarded the guess elsewhere that this is due to Moravia's almost exclusive preoccupation with the middle class, the one class in the Continental social structure that has a comprehensible frame of reference for the U.S...
...which I feel is Moravia's masterpiece to date, A Ghost at Soon is a fine book which has much to say to the American reader...
...He must have the reason why she has ceased to love him...
...reader...
...There are a score more Italian and French writers of stature who have not achieved this linking quality and whose works, though they attract passing interest and even occasional merited respect, do not ring a bell with the literate American public...
...specialist in contemporary literature MORAVIA has become a literary phenomenon in the post-World War II generation...
...He flounders desperately in an attempt to restore some semblance of dignity and integrity to his and Emilia's married life, but in vain...
...Screen-writing is Molteni's solution to the economic problem...
...Above all, though, the Moravia characters, and pre-eminently the men, seek integrity compatible with survival in middle-class society...
...It is a novel of unbearable, inexorable honesty, very disturbing in its fatalistic intent, and profoundly true...
...A Ghost at Noon is the story of a writer for the films, Riccardo Mol-teni, who is convinced he has it in him to write true and meaningful works for the legitimate theater...
...The frustration, the meaningless sacrifice, the poor returns for the investment of talent, energy and heart, are painted with flat, convincing, documentary strokes...
...he occupies a unique place as the "typically" European writer of fiction who is, nevertheless, widely read and commented on in this country...
...That, of course, is the nexus, for how can you make a "fast buck" on either side of the Atlantic and remain the chronicler of truth you feel in your heart you must be...
...The proletarian novels of Pratolini, for example, will always remain somewhat unreal to the American reader, for our proletarian novelists work from a different milieu, an entirely different set of values and goals...
...Molteni's crisis with his wife comes when he makes the appalling discovery that Emilia no longer loves him...
...Molteni becomes the man who has sold himself short...
...The specialist may prize the delicacy and sharpness of methods, but interest for the general public depends on other than subtlety of means and the author's grounding in philosophy...
...She gives it to him in an appalling, short scene where her scorn of him reduces any ethical or intellectual sacrifice he may have made to ashes...
...He has married, however, a house-hungry young woman, less educated than he, with whom he is very much in love...
...So Moravia speaks of a world we recognize with slight variations as our own...
...Frustration, whether on Madison Avenue or the Via Veneto, sits much the same on the loins of the victim...
Vol. 38 • April 1955 • No. 17
