SOURCE: A review of The Fetish, in Commonweal, October 22, 1965, pp. 100-02.

In the following negative review, Mayhew faults Moravia for abandoning passion in favor of philosophical ponderings .

Most of the forty-one contrived and mechanical short stories in this Moravia collection [The Fetish] are nothing more than anecdotes six or seven pages long—inconclusive, ineffectual, unvaried. The hard-nosed, rough and tortured characters of Moravia's early books and stories are gone; so is any pretension to narrative. These stories resemble his last novel, The Empty Canvas (La Noia, or Boredom), which was a plotless and laconic treatise on alienation, nothingness and the absurd. It was later made into an appalling movie with Bette Davis playing the mother of the existentialist ghoul, which isn't worth discussing, except that it pointed up not only the thinness of the content, but also the constant factor in Moravia's work—that his prose can distract...