Elena Greco is an Italian woman who was born in Naples in 1944. (“Neapolitan” means “of Naples.”) As a girl, she lives in a shabby tenement in an outlying district of the city. Families in her neighborhood are identified by their trade: the Greco’s are “the porter’s family”; the Cerullo’s are “the shoemaker’s family”; and the Peluso’s are “the carpenter’s family.” Children stay in school for as long as they distinguish themselves, which for most is only a few years. Then they take to the family trade (if they are boys) or marry (if they are girls). Elena Greco continues to distinguish herself and is allowed to attend high school and then to go away to college in Pisa. She becomes engaged to the scion of a family with academic and publishing credentials, writes and publishes a book, and becomes a success. She goes on to publish many more books, both fiction and nonfiction.
= = = =
Elena Ferrante is an Italian woman who was born in Naples, probably some time after 1944. We know little of her life except that she has published many books and become a success. The Neapolitan Novels is her magnum opus, and Elena Greco is her fictional creation. Elena Ferrante is provisionally real—she has chosen not to reveal her real name, and what little we know of her cannot be verified. So what we have here is an unknown author, who has created a provisionally real avatar named Elena Ferrante, also an author, who has written a series of books about a third author named Elena Greco.
If this is all starting to sound rather metafictional, there is nothing insubstantial or notional about the 1600 or so pages that make up the four Neapolitan novels. They present a set of lives lived that is as real seeming and as emotionally compelling as anything I’ve read in a long while. There are four volumes—My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child—but they are really one book.
I used to live in New York City, not far from the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the edge of Central Park. Every so often I would skip work and walk over and spend a few hours in the museum. Once I went after a few inches of snow had fallen overnight, and the pure white light coming in the windows of the museum gave everything a kind of religious radiance. The thing about the Met is that it’s just too gigantic for anyone to take in during a single visit. There are galleries and there are wings, there are paintings and sculptures, and there are even entire buildings that have been crated up and then reassembled inside that museum. The Met will exhaust you, even if you spend only the minute or two in front of each painting that museum decorum requires.
I suppose it’s a bit of a stretch to suggest that the wonders of The Neapolitan Novels rival those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but this is my way of letting you know that there is no way I can hope to catalog all the things that Elena Ferrante has done well in this mega-book. So I’m going to focus on two things that seemed especially significant to me.
= = = =
First is Ferrante’s psychological realism. There are two main characters in the story, Elena Greco and her childhood friend Rafaella Cerullo (called Lila), but there are several other prominent characters and then a whole gallery of lesser characters. This book is as populated as War and Peace, and in much the same way, with interlinking extended families. Elena Greco is the first-person narrator and her world is so detailed and intense that, as we’re reading, we become Elena. Her insecurities are our insecurities; her triumphs our triumphs. Never mind that she’s female and I’m male, I barely exist while I’m reading these books. It’s virtual reality in the most traditional sense possible. To take a random example: Elena marries Pietro Airota, the son of two distinguished academics who are well connected in the publishing world. Pietro becomes a university professor and is working on a book. He has intelligence, but he also has a kind of dull, mulish obstinacy, in contrast to his mercurial sister Mariarosa. He courts Elena shyly, without a great deal of heat. I was suspecting that he might turn out to be gay. They marry, and he gives her a solid, upper-middle-class respectability; they move to Florence, where he joins the faculty of the university, and they have two children, daughters. When Elena leaves Pietro after several years of marriage for another man we wonder what he will do—we don’t know at first, but as we continue reading we find out that he does exactly what such a character would inevitably do, which is to rant and rage for a while, make a dramatic scene, allude to suicide, but then finally accept his fate stoically. But the “inevitability” of this outcome is only apparent after the fact. As events unfold, our ability to predict what will happen is about as good as our ability to predict how people will react to such events in the real world. Ferrante depicts people and events as well as any author I’ve ever read. You simply can’t hold the idea in your head that what transpires is “made up.” Is this writer really skilled enough to create such an abundance of detail and incident out of her head? Or is it just because we can never know the extent to which she has borrowed from her own life that we are so conscious of the sheer weight of reality the book conveys?
Of course, as we ponder such things, it is quite entertaining to watch Elena throw a bomb (metaphorically speaking) into what had seemed a solid, prosperous existence. Nobody is spared and nothing is easy. The husband’s parents turn against her in their subtle, mandarin way, with the children as emotional hostages. The sister-in-law maintains her connection to Elena for while, but then becomes involved in her own struggles. The world changes around Ferrante’s characters, and they change too, except that they remain the same people. The daughters grow up through the next several hundred page and turn out to be people we could never have anticipated—just the way our friends’ children do. And yet they could not have turned out to be anybody other than who they are.
And I’m not even going to talk about Nino Sarratore, the Byronic cad that Elena leaves Pietro for. Ah, Nino, you scoundrel.
Book clubs will critique the decisions, qualities, and failings of the various characters. That’s how I assume most book clubs operate, and when authors fails to deliver on such expectations, people find books disappointing. I wouldn’t disdain the book club perspective—I could offer my own opinions about how various characters behave. In fact, I felt a little disoriented when I came to the end of the last volume and realized I’d have to part ways with this society.
So this book is like one of those large, intricate, and amazingly interesting paintings that you come across from time to time in a museum. You know that it’s artificial, but you appreciate that there is enough going on in a single square foot of the billboard-sized canvas to gaze at for hours. In the foreground are children dancing, or a dog hiding under a woman’s skirts; in the distance are mountains with chasms and waterfalls, and in between are roads and houses giving way to towns and fields. Off to one side is the ocean with an armada of ships fighting the wind. It’s an entire 17th century universe in a single picture. That kind of comprehensiveness is one of the pleasures of The Neapolitan Novels.
= = = =
But what I liked best about the book is the mystery of the two characters at its center: the narrator Elena and her lifelong friend Lila. We see less of Lila than of Elena, which makes sense because the book is Elena’s account of her own life. But Ferrante never lets the reader forget that Lila is not just a supporting character in a large cast. Reviewers acknowledge this by describing the book in terms such as “one of modern fiction’s richest portraits of a friendship,” or “an intense, forensic exploration of the friendship between Lila and … Elena.” But that word—friendship—is so inadequate to describe the relationship at the core of this book. Lila is as much Elena's nemesis as she is her friend.
The first thing we learn about Lila in the first volume is the last thing that Elena knows about her—before Elena begins to tell us the story of their lives, she tells us that Lila has disappeared at the age of 66, vanished from her home in Naples after removing every trace of her existence from that home. Elena learns this from Lila’s son, Rino.
"It’s been at least three decades since she told me that she wanted to disappear without leaving a trace, and I’m the only one who knows what she means. She never had in mind any sort of flight, a change in identity, the dream of making a new life somewhere else. And she never thought of suicide, repulsed by the idea that Rino would have anything to do with her body, and be forced to attend to the details. She meant something different: she wanted to vanish; she wanted every one of her cells to disappear, nothing of her ever to be found. And since I know her well, or at least I think I know her, I take it for granted that she has found a way to disappear, to not leave so much as a hair anywhere in this world."
Whatever creative impulse drives Elena Greco to unspool her world in words, there is a counterforce, personified by Lila, that wants to conceal or erase the details. She wants to un-write The Neapolitan Novels.
As a precocious child, Lila does actually write a bit of a story, a fable she calls “The Blue Fairy,” which to Elena demonstrates that Lila possesses a creative power that she can never hope to equal. But while Elena pursues her education and becomes a writer, Lila’s family will not allow her to continue past elementary school, and thereafter she becomes a kind of dark force, more significant for what she will not do (write), and for what she will not reveal about herself and what she knows. She is a fallen angel, an occult force. The word “occult” in fact is from a Latin word meaning to hide or conceal.
Elena and Lila are like a binary star system, where Elena shines brightly and Lila evolves over time into a kind of narrative black hole. As with such an astronomical pair, we only deduce the presence of the invisible one by its effect upon the visible one. The story is Elena’s but Lila is a catalyst, a refutation of the idea of narrative omniscience. Lila’s is the creative power of destruction. At one point she takes a blown-up photograph of her wedding day and enhances it by covering parts of it in black paper:
Then, with that expression of extreme concentration which enabled her to isolate herself from everything around her, she went back to the panel. Before our astonished and, in the cases of some, openly hostile eyes, she cut strips of black paper, with the manual precision she had always possessed, and pinned them here and there to the photograph, asking for my help with slight gestures or quick glances.
I joined in with the devotion that I had felt ever since we were children. Those moments were thrilling, it was a pleasure to be beside her, slipping inside her intentions, to the point of anticipating her. I felt that she was seeing something that wasn't there, and that she was struggling to make us see it, too. I was suddenly happy, feeling the intensity that invested her, that flowed through her fingers as they grasped the scissors, as they pinned the black paper.
Lila adds by subtracting, reveals by concealing. It is a thing great artists must master, but one that Elena Greco could never manage on her own.
The reader learns to pay attention to anything Elena Ferrante has to say about Lila, because much of what she says is meaningful on both a narrative and a metaphysical level. Lila’s life is harder and stranger than Elena Greco’s. She is bitter and often rude, yet she has a mysterious power over many of the characters in the book. Elena says:
I felt all the fascination of the way Lila governed the imagination of others or set it free, at will, with just a few words: that speaking, stopping, letting images and emotions go without adding anything else. I’m wrong, I said to myself in confusion, to write as I’ve done until now, recording everything I know. I should write the way she speaks, leave abysses, construct bridges and not finish them, force the reader to establish the flow…
But if Elena Greco cannot write like that, Elena Ferrante can. There is so much more that could be said about how Lila and Elena together, like deities or demiurges in some unknown religion, bring the universe of The Neapolitan Novels into existence. The triumph of this book is that these metaphysical elements never slow or deflect the story, never make it seem like an allegory or a fable. Even Lila, the presumptive avatar of non-existence, leads a full life, marrying young, then embarking on a disastrous affair, having two children, working in a factory, and ultimately becoming a successful businesswoman. But somehow she accepts the need to exist only provisionally. Life is a contract she has signed by having children, and once she has made good on the terms of this contract to the best of her abilities, she disappears, and the story ends.
