SOURCE: "The Fiction's Climb," in Italo Svevo, Rutgers University Press, 1978, pp. 154-63.

In the following excerpt, Lebowitz argues that Svevo 's later fiction evolves into a more traditional and less dramatic form.

It has often been noted that the more traditional narrative modes of Svevo's shorter pieces, in relation to Confessions of Zeno, entail a loss of intimacy between the author and the hero. This is misleading, for there is a compensating intimacy between the favorite meditations of Svevo and the reflections of the last stories uninhibited by distracting fictional mediation. The conventional journey structure of "Short Sentimental Journey," a picaresque of the vacationing mind, does not lead the hero, a likable and sensitive, but by no means extraordinary man, farther from Svevo's atmosphere than Zeno. It is only because his reflections, modest though they be, bring us so comfortably close to Svevo's mind that Signor Aghios does...