Bedroom Odyssey

A GHOST AT NOON (247 pp.)--Alberto Moravia--Farrar, Straus (3.50).

When a man who is desperately in love with his wife discovers that she despises him, he naturally tries to do something about it. Riccardo did something about it: he talked and talked. Why, he asked Emilia, do you despise me? What have I done? Can't we talk it over? Riccardo also thought and thought. Is it my character She hates? Does she think I'm using her to get on in my work? Have I fallen from grace because I go on being a scriptwriter when I really want to be a playwright? Shall I give up my job? Riccardo thought and then talked some more.

Poor, tortured Riccardo is the Hamlet-like hero-victim of Italian Novelist Alberto (Conjugal Love) Moravia's latest novel, A Ghost at Noon. To give his lovely but simple wife the comfortable life she wants, Riccardo has put aside his ambition to become a dramatist and taken on a movie job. He has even bought a car and is in debt. But his first script is a success, Producer Battista has given him a new and more important one to do, and the drab days in a furnished room in Rome seem well behind. It is typical of Author Moravia that conjugal hell lies just a step away from marital contentment. For at about this point Emilia takes to sleeping alone, begins to be less indifferent to the vulgar producer, and makes it plain that Riccardo bores her. The rest of A Ghost is a battle between the sexes fought out on the battlegrounds of character and personality, areas in which Moravia is one of the world's living masters.

Working on the script of a supercolossal production of Homer's Odyssey, Riccardo compares Emilia with Penelope, himself with Ulysses, resorts to nagging his wife and to endless intellectual soliloquies instead of being the forceful man Emilia wants him to be. In the end he takes to daydreaming that Emilia has come back to him, loses her in a concluding scene that is almost as agonizing for the reader as for Riccardo.

A Ghost at Noon is far from being Moravia's best book. It is all too spelled-out, and Riccardo is so uninteresting that Emilia's contempt is inevitable. A fine short-story writer, Moravia could have improved A Ghost vastly by scrapping half of it. But even as it stands, this is a penetrating look at embattled personalities, a marital case history that the great Stendhal would have savored with pleasure.

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