For his diagnosis Moravia has taken for typical instance Ardengo’s family that possess a great house in the center of Rome, whose building site has an inestimable value. Leo Merumeci, daring playboy of the Roman society of the fascist years, has lent money to the widow Mariagrazia, owner of the house and also his lover. But at this point he is annoyed of this relationship, also because, having mortgaged the house, he thinks himself already virtualy the legitimate owner. Michele, Mariagrazia’s son, is disgusted by this relationship of Leo with his mother, also because he despises Leo for his nature of profiteer and playboy, for his ambiguous nature where sex and money seem to cooperate to the purpose of an ashamed profit. But, despite his healthy and traditional ideas, he is too unfit to take a radical decision and to throw Leo out of his house, and really at the end he accepts the situation of fact. Meanwhile, his sister Carla, despite she knows the loving relationship of Leo with her mother, she accepts, also without enthusiasm, the court of him, giving him an appointment in a garage of the house; here the rape can’t happen because the girl, having been intoxicated by Leo, she felt very bad. But Leo doesn't disarm; he looks for Lisa, his old lover, but now enamored of Michele. Rejected by her, he charges with Carla, inviting her to his house and, finally, possessing her. Only Lisa knows the loving relationship between Leo with Carla, and she reveals it to Michele, trying to wake him from his moral numbness and from his indifference, and, in the same time, showing him her love. Influenced by Lisa, Michele takes the decision to face Leo, he buys a gun and he goes to his house surprising also the loving intrigue with his sister. He presses the trigger, but the gun is unloaded, because he has forgotten to load it. Failed this supreme attempt of Michele’s action, this foolish ambition of moral retaliation, the life of that family falls again in the moral corruption. Leo, worried to lose the house, decides to marry Carla, who accepts; Michele himself accepts the accomplished fact, becoming partner in the sinister business of Leo.
The novel ends with a masquerade. Mariagrazia has disguises as a Spanish, his daughter Carla as a white Pierrot to go to a fancy-dress ball, guested and accompanied by Leo, reciting by now,, without end, the role of their false parts, as after all also Michele and Lisa do. The conclusion of the novel points out the full defeat of the honest and traditional ideal of the family and the triumph of Leo, of the false individual who is expression of a society in crises, but still hypocritically tied up to his prejudices. In fact Leo mends to his guilt marrying Carla, but of the family’ moral really the only appearance remains:
Carla would have married Leo... life in common, to sleep together, to eat together, to go out together, trips, sufferings, joys... they would have had a beautiful house, a good flat in an elegant district of the city... somebody enters in the living room furnished with luxury and good taste, is a lady her friend, she meets her... they havo a tea together, then they go out; her car waits for them at the door; they depart... She would be called lady , lady Merumeci.
This is the hypocritical ethic of the bourgeois society described by Moravia: and all the people accept it with indifference, also Michael who had also debated in all the sequences of the novel between the desire to rebel and the necessity to accept that hypocritical situation; it has always missed him, however, the faith in the action. A little more of faith, and he would have killed Leo and would have become pure and clear in his conscience as a drop of water.
The truth is that the corrupt society ends with contaminate the pures, with pollute also the honest consciences, that wouldn’t accept the corruption and the hypocrisy. In a society, like that described by Moravia, the success is important, the authentic feelings haven’t any places; and Leo is perfectly the symbol of the middle class man in line with the corruption of a society that has raised to idols money and sex. Everything in this society becomes comedian and false, because there isn’t sincerity and authenticity of feelings; and Michele isn’t made for this life, but his incommunicability makes him unfit.
The incapability of the novel to rise the tragic tone, despite the dramatic subject and the virtual theatrical structure, is conditioned to the vital alienation and to the constitutional indifference of Michele, to whom has always missed the faith to reach the catharsis killing Leo. This incapability of adaptation and of action makes grotesque not only Michele, but also all the tone of the novel, that has lost every tragedy tone, although it tells a tragedy.