About but Not for Boys

THE CONFESSION (180 pp.)--Maria Soldati--Knopf ($3).

When shades of the prison house of maturity begin to close upon a growing boy, he has the chance, later denied him, of choosing his peculiar cell. The story of the choice is usually fascinating to the balding businessman who insists on recalling how, as a youth, he nearly ran away to sea, or to the physician who claims to have been, at 16, a poet. It takes an artist to make the story of adolescent crisis fascinating to others. Such an artist is Mario Soldati (The Capri Letters, TIME, Feb. 27, 1956), a busy, boisterous Italian movie director who occasionally cools off with a novel.

Clemente, Author Soldati's hero, is a shy, pimply, touchy, clever, nervous adolescent who finds it more difficult to chin the inflexible horizontal bar of manhood than do the dull louts whom he outshines in class but cannot outrun on the playground. At first sight, the problem seems ordinary. Should Clemente yield himself to the incitements of his wakening sexuality or keep himself a fit vessel of grace? As Soldati tells it, Clemente's sex proliferates through his veins like the roots of a tree under a marble pavement.

The Jesuit fathers of his school have seen a boy of talent and want him for their own. The boy passionately wants to accept his vocation, but the devil presents himself in female form--specifically in the guise of a steamy 35-year-old woman, a friend of the family but no friend to chastity. In relatively few lines, Soldati carpenters a cross for his hero. Should he have faith in his passion or give up his passion for the faith? Neither his mother, plagued by desires of her own, his pious grandmother, his innocent playmates, nor his latently homosexual confessor can answer that question for Clemente.

Novelist Soldati is thoroughly at home with his sensual theme. His book is a better story of the emotional conflicts of a pious and troubled boy than the classic account of the same situation in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. With Irishman Joyce, what stands out authentically is a belief in damnation; with Italian Soldati, it is temptation that is real. Whether or not readers accept the possibility of eternal damnation, Soldati is utterly convincing about the existence of eternal woman.

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