EITHER of these books is really a novel; both are exercises. attempts a study of boredom, be a study of love, and their character instead of running out of methodological bounds and gaining thereby great individuality, are held to the of the writer's game. This does mean that they exist only as agents Moravia's or Ayme's ideas about boredom or love, for both writers have too much talent to use them so . But the treatment they do seriously limits their range and and richly and delicately scented often are, they smell flatly of the thesis.

Empty Canvas (which was organizing published under the title La Noia, , naturally, boredom) defines preoccupation as "the on of all relationship with reality". by its hero Dino, a man of with painting, war, his mother, and even his own on boredom, the novel de- a lengthy episode in his search detachment from anything that out hope or mystery. By accident the model and mistress of an painter who occupied the studio- just above his, and who has . The girl, Cecilia, offers to for Dino, but Dino no longer paints. She offers to sleep with him, but although she does so after a long conversation in which she sits next to him wearing no clothes, he returns the same answer: as with his canvas, "the only relationship there can be between myself and a woman is nothing."

But his mind changes son enough for Cecilia and her "child-woman's body" begin to interest him. How shall he be bored? Only by "possessing her completely," which in successive weeks comes to mean-in-turn-understanding her, controlling her sexually, paying her as he would a prostitute, trying to shame her, and trying to marry her. But her answers to his endless interrogations prove noncommittal, her sexual contact with him (though pleasant) strangely incomplete. She uses his money to support another lover (Luciani) and confesses the fact freely; and refuses to marry him. Entirely defeated, Dino drives his car into a tree in an effort at suicide, fails, and regains consciousness placidly supposing his problem settled because he no longer loves Cecilia.

Watching Moravia lead his hero through extraordinarily repetitious interviews (which he aptly likens three times to "police station" cross-examination) and learning nothing from them; listening to Dino's tired voice relate scene after scene of identically mechanical couplings; one begins to perceive that the writer is as bored as Dino. Moravia's women, whose scheming sensitivity formed the most brilliant stuff of his earlier novels, are here simply diffident, grasping, and apathetic. Dino's mother, whom he might "question . . . for hours and still not come to a conclusion about anything" and Cecilia herself, despite continual references to the depth of her breasts, stay singularly undimensional. Dino alone might save the novel, but Dino is not enough. Although he controls all the gifts of introspection, and perception which properly belong to all Moravian heroes, Moravia has failed to give him anything to perceive.

AYME'S novel strikes one immediately as an altogether different sort of thesis. The Empty Canvas presented a figure too weary to be consistently ironic, like a Jamesian European sick of looking at the Catskills; The Conscience of Love throws a squat, unprepossessing narrator into a preposterous muddle of satire, false pathos, and genuine evil. One senses the irony stretching nearly to parody from the first paragraph:

My name is Martin. I am twenty-eight. Returning home unexpectedly one afternoon I found my brother and my fiancee asleep together in my bed... I left the apartment without waking them and started to walk downstairs, meaning to think the matter over in the street. But on the next landing, the fifth, I encountered Chazard, a quarrelsome man who lived below us and was always complaining of the noise that went on over his head.

The page does not end until he heaves Chazard over the balcony, spends two years in prison for the impassioned murder, and on the morning he is released runs into a girl he used to know. The girl, Tatania Bouvillon, invites him to live with her; he declines, breaks his engagement, but moves in with his brother and former financee, Valeric. Shortly afterwards he goes to work for an immense corporation called S.B.H., where he learns that his patron, the S.B.H. Chairman Lormier, is a grotesquely arrogant swindler trying perpetually to outwit the Managing Director Hermelin. Loyalty and coincidence commit him to Lormier's side.

At S.B.H. he makes two important discoveries: (1) the autobiography of a young tough scrawled on the bottom of a set of desk drawers accusing Hermelin of seducing the tough's mother and sister, and (2) the information that his brother Michel not only writes critical vignettes about love but also commands the wholly inexplicable devotion and admiration of almost every young person in Paris. His disciples have never seen "Porteur", as they call him, or read his vignettes, but they perpetually invoke his name with unfathomable reverence. The plot, which is obviously enormously complicated, forms about Martin's movements between Tatania's aristocratic pretensions and Valerie's fondness for the values of former Premier Pinay; his role in the Lormier-Hermelin dispute; his attempts to find the scrawling autobiographer and the sources of his brother's .

All of these things manage to to each other through Ayme's in the narrative of Porteur's on love, which abstractly the characters behavior. It is Martin and his friends are almost completely at the mercy of the (two of them imaginative essays third a chunk of surrealist I call The Conscience of Love exercise than novel. Martin's tion would not matter much, per if the pieces were truly admirable in fact they are only extremely speculations that come to hardly conventional conclusions, love is mostly sexual, love in women social, love in the romantic .

Apparently, then, the novel more than an unusually (if for the most part extremely skeptic's view of the love and of Paris. But this description doesn't quite fit; disturbing notes cropping up. The autobiography out to be a fraud, the literary of an S.B.H. employee, but it is "applied literature", it is not fabrication, and it is besides a and powerful piece of writing. gross Lormier at one point forces Hermelin to apologize to his knees. Porteur commits when photographers release his through the press.

THE whole business, in wilders me. Are we to Ayme's (and Moravia's) hints that things do not matter, that love, , apathy, suicide and despair like echoes in E.M. Forster's Caves, all coming to nothing muffled "ou-boum"? I do not so; it is their way of dealing simple concern with which most writers are stuck whether want it or not: what can be from the century and its though wars. Moravia has escaped by Dino, who is beyond being by the problem; Ayme his trust in the squat, stolid Martin. We should have had from Ayme if he had made fabulous and more human, but after all very likely impossible. only immediate conclusion one at is that love can be a often cloying study, boredom one