Books: 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...