SOURCE: "Fiction in the Dog Days," in The Nation, Vol. CLXXI, No. 6, August 5, 1950, pp. 133-34.

In the following excerpt, Jones lauds the effectiveness of Moravia's detachment from his subject while constructing complex themes in Two Adolescents.

Two Adolescents is by far the best new fiction to come my way this summer. It is also the least pretentious. Quietly and with the seeming effortlessness of the artist who knows exactly what he wants to do, Moravia re-creates traumas common enough to adolescence but realized in terms of the individuals on whom they descend. Agostino is about deracination and initiation. A thirteen-year-old boy learns that the mother he adores is capable of love quite different from that which she has shown him. In part he arrives at this knowledge and at the beginnings of self-knowledge through young hooligans who are, to his shame, unwilling to take him into their gang...