For Love or Money

THE WOMAN OF ROME (433 pp.)--Albedo Moravia--Farrar, Sfraus ($3.50).

By her own admission, Adriana was "a real beauty" with "firm straight legs, curving hips, a long back, narrow waist and broad shoulders. Mother said . . . there was not a figure like mine in all Rome." Adriana liked men, all kinds and any age, with an earthy nymphomania that inevitably took her into prostitution.

Adriana is the ripe, first-person singular heroine of The Woman of Rome, a long, languorous novel by Italy's most trumpeted living writer, Alberto Moravia. U.S. readers may well ask what all the critical tizzy is about. In The Woman of Rome, Moravia has blended poverty and lust with considerable technical skill, but, given Adriana's temperament, his bid for deeper meanings, e.g., human helplessness caught in life's iron grip, was doomed from the start.

No Business Sense. Moravia dwells on only five years of Adriana's life in mid-'30s Rome. Already luscious at 16, she lived in a depressing slum with her widowed, seamstress mother. Mama had no intention of letting her daughter get tied up with hard work or tied down to marriage with a man of her class. She got her a job as a model, made it clear that she didn't mind Adriana sleeping out "as long as they paid her." After a couple of non-professional affairs, streetwalking followed fast.

Poor Adriana did not have her mother's business sense. She liked her work so much that the money was secondary, sometimes gave herself to her customers "out of physical exuberance." At times, she thought about a cute cottage, husband and kids (she had first been seduced by a chauffeur who promised her all that). But she thought just as often about "how I enjoyed love-making and money and the things money can provide."

No Clear Changes. Of Adriana's many men, three were especially destined to complicate her existence: a police official who loved her, a neurotic student whom she loved sincerely, and a murderer who got her pregnant. In a final blaze of violence all of them were wiped out of her life, but Adriana met terror, as she met all adversity, with a forthright philosophy: "I thought how [my baby] would be the child of a murderer and a prostitute; but any man in the world might happen to kill someone and any woman might sell herself for money; and what mattered most of all was that he should have an easy birth and grow up strong and healthy."

Novelist Moravia (who anomalously gives his unschooled protagonist his own clarity of thought and narration) has peppered The Woman of Rome with flashes of wisdom that seem like borrowed pearls as simple Adriana threads them: "We never get clear, definite changes in life; and those who do make hurried changes risk seeing their old habits come to the fore once again, still alive and as deep-rooted as ever." Those who want to read universal meanings into this couch-worn tale will have to do it at the level of amorality where only the Adrianas of the world can move with assurance.

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