SOURCE: "Love Among the Ruins," in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. CCXV, No. 6, June, 1965, pp. 144-45.

Below, Barrett praises Moravia as a master of the short story, but finds the narrow world portrayed in The Fetish "almost stifling. "

Despite a famous excursion into the lower social strata in a novel of a woman of the streets, Alberto Moravia's favored material has always been the life of the Roman middle and lower-middle classes, with their impotence of will, dedicated selfishness, and petty eroticism. The Fetish, a collection of stories, shows that he is master of this world as well as of the short-story form, but leaves a nagging impression that his people are so brittle that they might break apart in the author's hands.

The title story is typical Moravia. Livio and Alina are a young married couple, not very much in love, who are furnishing their new flat in...