Rome on Wry

MORE ROMAN TALES by Alberto Moravia. 254 pages. Farrar, Straus. $4.75.

The slight, polished pieces in this latest assembly of Alberto Moravia's fiction illustrate one of publishing's awkward truths--that while there is a good deal to say for the short story, the short-story collection is a bestiary that should not be. Not that the stories are bad, but that they resemble each other like so many peachpit monkeys.

Moravia's pattern is distinctive but invariable: a Roman lowlife, male, gives a fourth-drink, first-person account of some minor downfall, failing to see its subtleties and thereby allowing the reader a faint, wry smile. The only thing wrong with the formula is that it does not require much space, and the reader is given only four or five pages between wry smiles. If the book is used as night-table literature, even the weariest citizen cannot achieve unconsciousness without meeting, say, the indignant wife of Federico the upright thief, the witless teen-ager who lives to dance, and the impassioned auto-accessories dealer who smashes his car for love. If the reader is the least bit wakeful, he goes on to meet Consolina, the servant girl who admires blond men and Clara, the fortuneteller's fickle daughter. The face begins to ache from all the faint smiling, and insomnia sets in.

The flaw, clearly, is not in the product but the packaging. There should be a way to enjoy Moravia's stories a few at a time. Until some publisher has a better idea, why not bind small bouquets of them, like cinema short subjects, into the first pages of the next 500-page novel about Rome?

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