4 The New York Review
Making Order of the Breakdown
Elaine Blair
The Lying Life of Adults
by Elena Ferrante,
translated from the Italian
by Ann Goldstein.
Europa, 322 pp., $26.
Elena Ferrante’s novels, whatever else
they’re about, are always describing the
distance between two points: working-
class Naples and the putatively better
neighborhoods and cities and social
worlds in which her narrators now
move. It’s not simply that Fer-
rante has written about Na-
ples, but that over the course
of her work—now eight nov-
els—she has so often sent
her characters back and forth
along the route between the
impoverished old neighbor-
hood and the new life that we
know the landmarks well: the
raucous and violent family
of birth, the childhood wish
for a way out, the scholar-
ships, the fl ight, the studied
assumption of middle- class
manners. Here is a sampling
of lines from Ferrante’s fi rst
three novels and from her
Neapolitan Quartet:
Starting from the age of
thirteen or fourteen I had
aspired to a bourgeois de-
corum, proper Italian, a
good life, cultured and re-
fl ective. Naples had seemed
a wave that would drown
me.I had left the city with
the intention of never
returning.For the fi rst time, I left Na-
ples, left Campania. I dis-
covered that I was afraid
of everything: afraid of
taking the wrong train,
afraid of having to pee and
not knowing where to do it,
afraid that it would be night and I
wouldn’t be able to orient myself in
an unfamiliar city.I knew almost nothing about et-
iquette, I spoke in a loud voice, I
chewed noisily; I became aware of
other people’s embarrassment and
tried to restrain myself.I learned to subdue my voice and
gestures.I kept my Neapolitan accent as
much under control as possible.I had...taught myself to wait pa-
tiently until every emotion im-
ploded and could come out in a
tone of calm, my voice held back in
my throat so that I would not make
a spectacle of myself.It’s crucial that the movement runs
in both directions. Even after having
left, Ferrante’s characters are inevita-
bly pulled back, whether in actuality or
in memory, to the old neighborhood—
by a funeral or a sick relative, by the
extreme stress of a husband’s aban-
donment, or by the sounds of the Nea-
politan dialect spoken by a noisy family
on a nearby stretch of beach:They were just like the relations
from whom I had fl ed as a girl. I
couldn’t bear them and yet they held
me tight, I had them all inside me.I remember the dialect on my
mother’s lips when she lost that
gentle cadence and yelled at us,
poisoned by her unhappiness.I walked along the burning- hot
wall of the Botanic Garden to Pi-
azza Cavour, in air made heavier
by the exhaust from the cars and
the buzz of dialect sounds that I
deciphered unwillingly.
It was the language of my
mother, which I had vainly tried
to forget, along with many other
things about her.Upon every return to my own city I
feared that some unexpected event
would prevent me from escaping.The best known of Ferrante’s narra-
tors, who barely needs introduction, is
Elena Greco, pilot of the immense and
immensely popular Neapolitan Quar-
tet, a series about her lifelong, intensely
rivalrous friendship with another girl
from the old neighborhood. In English
there has been no shortage of books
depicting friendship among women;
it has been a major subject of the last
hundred years (with older antecedents
in fi ction and lyric poetry), taken up
in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Note-
book, Edna O’Brien’s The Country
Girls trilogy, Toni Morrison’s Sula,Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica, to name a
few. Ferrante, for her part, has given it
macho scope at 1,600 pages, expand-
ing the stories of two poor girls—one
of whom escapes the old neighborhood
while the other stays behind—into a
historical epic that encompasses six de-
cades of postwar Italy.
Ferrante’s early, short books—Trou -
bling Love, Days of Abandonment, and
The Lost Daughter—are compressed,
pressurized accounts of events thatfl are into crises: Delia’s mother dies
under mysterious circumstances; Ol-
ga’s husband tells her he’s leaving; on a
seaside holiday Leda becomes obsessed
with a young Neapolitan mother who
reminds her—treacherously—of herself
and the daughters she left behind for
three years of their childhood to pur-
sue academic work abroad. All three
characters are sent reeling, unable to
maintain their hard- won surface calm.
The ever- present subtext of these
crises is that the narrators’ successful
fl ights from Naples had a cost, and now
the payment has come due. The strain
of speaking gently and chewing quietly
and living on their guard all those years
surely has something to do with the
startling intensity of their emotional
extremes, their obscene outbursts and
streaks of eccentricity. The question of
just who or what is really driving them
crazy—the gendered expectations of
family life? the better- born men they
married? their native Neapolitan im-
patience? their own self- betrayals? the
class system that necessitated them?—
has no simple answer, but they settle
scores with people they’re closest to.
Olga physically attacks her estranged,
cheating husband, bloodying his noseand ripping his shirt. Leda steals a
child’s doll, buys it new clothes, talks
to it, lies to the frantic child’s mother.
Delia wears her dead mother’s un-
derwear. Elena—most perfi dious of
all—turns her best friend’s life into a
best- selling novel.
In a 2015 interview in The Paris
Review, Ferrante described a break-
through on her fi rst novel, Troubling
Love, a manuscript she had been work-
ing on fruitlessly until one day she expe-
rienced “a small miracle that
came only after years of prac-
tice. It seemed to me I had
achieved a style that was solid,
lucid, very controlled, and yet
open to sudden breakdowns.”
That controlled description
of loss of control is distinctive
in Ferrante. Usually where
we fi nd fi rst- person fi ctional
accounts of breakdowns, we
also fi nd elision, hyperbole,
lyrical phrasing, stream of
consciousness, and episodes
presented out of chronolog-
ical order—techniques that
heighten the sense of the nar-
rator’s disorientation.
Ferrante’s narrators instead
sound more like essayists or
memoirists sifting through
their experience in order to
get it all down correctly. She
never thinks of her narrator as
“a voice giving a monologue,”
she says in the interview, but
as “a woman writing, and
this writer always struggles to
organize, in a text, what she
knows but doesn’t have clear
in her mind.” Her narrators
are fi ctional nonfi ction writ-
ers, writing their way out of
confusion, and through their
narration we can perceive two
Delias, two Olgas, two Ledas,
two Elenas—the one living
the experience and the one
writing.
The strong sense of du-
ality in Ferrante’s writing is not one
of warring—or even contrapuntal—
selves, but of an earlier and later self,
the latter lending a hand to the for-
mer. Which is why Ferrante’s novels
can feel reassuring despite the turmoil
recounted. In Days of Abandonment
and in some stretches of the quartet,
the older narrator’s recollections form
a kind of protective vessel around the
earlier, temporarily deranged self. Sen-
tence by sentence, Ferrante’s narrators
unfold one kind of story—about falling
apart—while the narration itself tells
another kind of story, about the possi-
bility of putting the pieces back together.The Lying Life of Adults, Ferrante’s
fi rst novel since the Neapolitan Quar-
tet, is a return to the shorter, more
concentrated forms of her earlier nov-
els. The crisis this time is adolescence,
recalled by an adult narrator who is
unusually, insistently recessive: “I
am nothing,” Giovanna tells us in the
book’s fi rst paragraph,nothing of my own, nothing that
has really begun or really been
brought to completion: only aIllustration by Anders Nilsen