SOURCE: "A Husband, a Wife, and a Book," in The Saturday Review of Literature, Vol. XXXIV, No. 13, March 31, 1951, p. 19.

Below, Davidson lauds Moravia's "Proust-like ability" to evoke profound significances from seemingly trivial happenings in the relationship between a man and his wife in Conjugal Love.

In his third book to be published in America the Italian novelist Alberto Moravia makes use of a tricky literary device which calls to mind the famed Quaker Oats trademark: a mother holding up temptingly before her child a box of Quaker Oats upon which is imprinted a mother holding up temptingly before her child a box of Quaker Oats upon which. . . . And so forth until the eye fails. In short, Conjugal Love is a novel about a novelist writing a novel under a title none other than—Conjugal Love.

The analogy ends in the fact that Signor Moravia, as demonstrated by his...