SOURCE: A review of The Fetish and Other Stories, in Studies in Short Fiction, Winter, 1966, pp. 269-70.

In the following excerpt, Fantazzi faults Moravia for reverting to the themes of his longer fiction in The Fetish and Other Stories and finds some of the stories insipid and formulaic .

True to his oft-repeated code of creative writing, Signor Moravia keeps turning out the same book with relentless monotony. Unfortunately the theme that he has chosen for his life's work cannot stand up very well to this constant repetition. Ten years before Sartre's La nausée, Moravia at the age of eighteen had already isolated the peculiar malady of modern man, especially of that species known as l'homme bourgeois, and detailed it in bold, vivid strokes in the novel Gli indifferenti (The Time of Indifference). In an impressive succession of novels he has continued to probe with a clinical fanaticism...