Rome, Italy, during the Interbellum.  Mariagrazia and her two children Carla and Michele, both in their early twenties, live in a better part of town, in a nice villa in a big park.  They seem to do well, but behind that facade a bankrupcy is imminent.  Loans and a mortguage all pile up, and the only solution Mariagrazia has is to ask for an extension to the debtor, her lover Leo.

But Leo doesn't want to extend the loans or postpone the paybacks, for two reasons.  First of all he wants to get the ownership of the house, and then either sell it for the value Mariagrazia isn't aware of, or split the garden up and sell several pieces available for building.  And second: he's tired of Mariagrazia, he wants to have her daughter in stead.  And he succeeds with that, not so much because there is love from either side, but both use each other for their own purposes.  The old man is simply physically attracted to the young girl, and the girl is bored with her life and wants a drastic change, from one day to another.

Michele, Carla's brother, isn't so much bored but indifferent.  He can't bring himself to be interested in anything, he can't bring himself to feel anything.  He sees through Leo's pose, he understands what he's doing to them financially, he just doesn't care.  He has tried to bring himself to start an affair with Lisa, a friend of his mother and Leo's previous lover, who wants him just for her own pleasure.  But the absence of feelings for her, and for what that affair could bring him, lets him decide to just drop it.  Only when Lisa reveals the affair between Carla and Leo to him he almost feels something like rebellion, and he decides to try to act...

The book tells about only three days out of the lives of these people.  Three pivotal days for all of them though.  Moravia paints the extremely selfish and possession-oriented society of the early fascist days he so much resented, with a ban as a result.  He does so by letting us listen in into quite some internal monologues of all of the characters, to show their careful calculation when they try to bring someone to do something in their own interest.  In the end money is the only thing that drives everyone, except Lisa maybe, but she just uses people for her own personal pleasure.  Well, sex is the tool they all use in one form or another, not for pleasure, but for power.

Not the most heart-warming characters on first sight, and yet certainly Michele is not unsympathetic.  At least he's the only honest one.  And Michele's clumsiness, together with his mother's flamboyance, do lighten up this otherwise pretty gloomy book.
I think it's worth a read, today too.  The fascism of before the second World War is long gone, still the book has quite some parallels with todays selfish and egocentric society.  That alone makes it remarkably contemporary.