Books: Another Bed, Another Novel

THE EMPTY CANVAS (306 pp.)—Alberto Moravia — Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($4.50).

To write a novel about boredom is to invite literary disaster. But Italian Novelist Alberto (The Woman of Rome) Moravia has taken on such challenges before, and managed to deal with such themes as poverty, fascism and dictatorship by translating all of them into a framework of sex. In The Empty Canvas, Moravia has overreached himself. He has made sex itself a bore.

Moravia has a ready, if somewhat specious, rationale for the erotic in his books. “It is the result of our highly industrialized mechanical living. Men have been victimized by their technology … To them the sexual act is the only natural act left.” It is hard to see Dino, the dispirited hero, as a victim of technology. He is simply bored and always has been. His trouble seems to be that he feels divorced from reality. What is just as bad is the shameful fact that Dino is rich, or at least his mother is. And Dino hates money and the people who have it. Still, he accepts enough to enable him to set up as a painter in Rome’s Via Margutta.

At 35, Dino is a failed artist whose canvas is literally empty. Life is a bore, boredom equals artistic impotence. Enter Cecilia. From then on, the empty canvas scarcely matters because Dino’s bed is always full.

Amoral as a chimpanzee, as empty of brains as a gourd. Cecilia possesses at 17 the troubling sexuality that inevitably unhinges Moravia’s men. She is the mistress of a 65-year-old painter who has a studio down the hall. When the old painter dies of a heart attack (induced, say the neighbors, by too much Cecilia), it is Dino’s turn. What follows is the old sexual war that Moravia has refought too many times. In scenes so explicit as to make publishers of cheap paperbacks slaver for the reprint rights, Dino dies a thousand deaths on his cross of flesh. Characteristically, Moravia says that all this is simply a way to show that Dino is trying to achieve “reality”‘ by rediscovering the human touch. But when Cecilia takes on another lover, Dino is stuck in his Moravian hell indeed. In the end. nothing is solved or changed. After all, says Moravia, The Empty Canvas is about “my kind of boredom.”

Few living novelists can detail life’s miseries and ironies as movingly as Moravia did in Two Adolescents (1950), Conjugal Love (1957), or Two Women (1958). But in Empty Canvas, as all too often in recent works, Moravia has directed his skilled and serious attention to characters and situations that do not merit serious attention.