The Spaces Between

THE WAYWARD WIFE (221 pp.)--Alberto Moravia--Farrar, Straus ($3.95).

Book jackets so seldom reflect the nature of what they are jacketing that Philippe Halsman's photo for this collection of Author Moravia's short stories deserves attention. The subject is a nude girl seated on a low rock wall by a dirt road, staring at the point at which the road winds out of sight in a thin forest. She is slim and well formed, but her tense body lacks grace; whatever she waits for at the bend of the road will be painful.

As a Moravia heroine, she is certain to be vapid, gross, pettily cruel and, when she stops to think about it, unhappy. Her lover is probably an idle young aristocrat, just bright enough to be deeply and passionately bored. Naturally, they despise each other. Moravia has created these characters dozens of times, and he must have felt bewildered when he was accused of an obsession with sex. He is obsessed all right, but it is with the enormous capacity of men and women for misery and meanness; sex, promising union but bringing solitude, merely offers the most dramatic view of the human condition.

In these stories, written between 1927 and 1948, the author goes about his business with sour skill, and with one or two lapses in which symbolism becomes ludicrous. Typical of the collection is a story about a young man, neither bad nor good but bored and alone, who meets two sisters, both whores, in a bar. The older sister balks at taking the young man back to her home ("Home is a sacred place," she says) and agrees only after a promise of additional lire. But during the tram ride to their destination, the younger girl chatters bawdily about her trade. When they reach home, the older prostitute angrily accuses the younger one of shaming her in front of her neighbors on the tram. The party breaks up. A little disappointed, but not much affected by the uproar, the young man walks home. "That's another day finished," he says to himself. There is not much to distinguish the young man who is undisturbed by the whore's embarrassment from several other young men in the collection, including the indoor sport who seduces the shallow young wife of the title story. Moravia's people do not really have faces, perhaps because he is less interested in writing of people than in describing the enormous distances that separate them. But he has surveyed those spaces with great exactness. Reconciliation of a sort follows the adulterous affair in The Wayward Wife, but the terrain of indifference and ignorance that lies between the country wife and the chattering physics professor she has married is too vast to be bridged.

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