In _Bread and Wine_ Luigi Murica tells Pietro Spina, “I decided that politics was grotesque--nothing but an artificial struggle between rival degenerates.” His comment may be taken literally as well as figuratively, for political and sexual pathology are combined in the cases of the deviates in these novels. There are enough to fill a textbook of abnormal psychology. The most common is the homosexual who often seeks to achieve through political association the sense of acceptance by his fellows which he feels is denied him by his maladjustment. Such a one is Marcello Clerici in _The Conformist_. Moravia’s detailed treatment virtually gives a case history following a familiar pattern. Marcello’s feeling of abnormality is deepened by a childhood traumatic experience in which he barely escapes assault by a middle-aged man. Marcello marries, but he remains a latent homosexual throughout his life, feeling a frightening desire to submit when he is accosted by an old man in a situation very like the first one. He hopes to achieve conformity through marriage and membership in the Fascist Party. After paving the way for the political murder of a former teacher, he reflects that the success of the regime is needful to him psychologically. “Only in that way,” he thinks, “could what was normally considered an ordinary crime become, instead, a positive step in a necessary direction.” This maladjustment is found on many levels, from that of Communist General Ares in _The Crack in the Column_ to post-adolescent Winthrop Strang in _The Grand Design_. The son of a famous author now deceased, Strang petulantly complains that he is not receiving enough attention from his dominating mother, a well-known newspaper columnist. In what appears to be an attempt to obtain this affection from other sources, he has thrown himself into Communist Party work and an affair with young Mervyn Packett, another Party member who writes for the Negro press. Lee Sarason, who succeeds Buzz Windrip as American dictator in _It Can’t Happen Here_, surrounds himself with strong young members of the Minute Men: “He was either angry with his young friends, and then he whipped them, or he was in a paroxysm of apology to them, and caressed their wounds.” The parallel between Sarason and Nazi Ernst Röhm is completed when he is shot late at night by another American Nazi, Colonel Dewey Haik. Several brusque and mannish women appear in these novels. Lannie Madison in _Barbary Shore_ is a lesbian who has denied herself everything, including love, to work for the Communist Party. Having broken with it, she is now a completely disorganized personality.