Growing Pains

Two ADOLESCENTS (268 pp.)--Alberto Moravia--Farrar, Straus ($2.75).

In the postwar U.S. boom in Italian fiction, 42-year-old Alberto Moravia has already won a bright place for himself with The Woman of Rome (TIME, Nov. 21). The two long stories in Two Adolescents add to his shine. In each of them Author Moravia tackles one of writing's trickiest problems, telling what happens to a boy in the transition between childhood and manhood. Writers describing this haunting, tragicomic change of life too often bog down in self-pity and autobiography. But Moravia has pared away all egocentric mush from these two hardheaded stories. They have the clarity and bite of a good, dry Orvieto wine.

In the first story, life lays a sudden crass hand on the innocence of 13-year-old Agostino. He is staying at a seaside resort with his lovely widowed mother. She has made up to him for his father's death by being even more to him than most mothers. But when she falls in love with a young man, she has little time for Agostino. Idling about the beach, he gets in with a bunch of young toughs, sons of the waiters and fishermen. They know a world which well-to-do Agostino has never even glimpsed, a world of hardship and cynicism just beneath poverty-stricken Italy's thin skin of luxury and pleasure.

They take sinister pleasure in initiating this soft young bourgeois. For a few days, still a child, but no longer innocent, Agostino treads a razor edge between ugly aberration and normal growing up, until innate decency brings him through.

Fifteen-year-old Luca, hero of the second story, runs into another kind of adolescent trouble. Gangling, oversensitive, growing ahead of his mental and physical strength, he is not strong enough to take the shocks life has to offer. The girl of his first grown-up affair almost seduces him back to a love of life. But when he goes to keep their first rendezvous he finds her ill, and within a few days she is dead. He takes refuge in psychosomatic illness, until a gentle, understanding nurse helps him to manhood and to a courageous acceptance of the human lot. One false step with this story would have taken Author Moravia deep into the treacle pit, but he handles it with unerring skill.

Many a parent with a homebred Agostino or Luca agonizing about the house may find Moravia's insights more useful than pounds of professional psychological jabberwocky.

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