6 The New York Review
tangled knot, and nobody, not even
the one who at this moment is writ-
ing, knows if it contains the right
thread for a story.She reveals nothing about her adult
identity, but swiftly establishes the
facts of her childhood, notably that
she grew up knowing very little about
the rougher neighborhoods of her
hometown.
Giovanna is twelve when her story
begins. She lives with her parents, both
high school teachers, in the comfort-
able Naples neighborhood of Rione
Alto, at the highest elevations of the
city. Only on a few vaguely remem-
bered occasions in early childhood has
Giovanna been to the Industrial Zone
neighborhood where her father, An-
drea, grew up. It is he who traveled the
familiar route from poverty to middle-
class intelligentsia through scholar-
ships and education; Giovanna’s story
is a child’s- eye view of one of Ferran-
te’s socially ascendant characters. She
knows only that descending into the
poorer neighborhoods of Naples makes
her parents, especially her father, tense.
Apparently for that reason, they hardly
ever visit his relatives.
Her orderly, reasonable, bien- pensant
parents never scold, answer all ques-
tions factually, and explain sex and
bodily functions with age- appropriate
books. They don’t pray or go to church,
though they encourage her to read the
Gospels as a work of literature. They
put a lot of store in her doing well in
school. Giovanna has always been a
good student but lately has started
slipping. Her mother calmly attributes
the bad grades to Giovanna’s having
reached a difficult age, but her father
becomes cold and mean, clearly fright-
ened beyond reason by the possibility of
her not succeeding in school. Giovanna
overhears him say to her mother, in
the harsh tone and Neapolitan dialect
that is normally banned in their house,
“Adolescence has nothing to do with it:
she’s getting the face of Vittoria.”
Giovanna reels. Vittoria’s name is a
curse in the household, though the girl
doesn’t really know why. Vittoria is
one of her father’s sisters. They haven’t
spoken in years and her father refuses
to discuss her. Among the few things
Giovanna knows about her aunt, whom
she hasn’t seen since she was very
small, is that Vittoria lives alone in her
grandparents’ old apartment in the In-
dustrial Zone and works as a maid.
Her father’s remark abruptly de-
ranges Giovanna’s sense of herself,
for she takes the statement literally. Is
Vittoria ugly? Am I? Giovanna feels
betrayed by her normally affectionate
father, just at the time when her chang-
ing body and face make her status in
the world seem uncertain. Half literal-
minded child, half enterprising young
adult, Giovanna decides that she must
see Vittoria for herself in order to fig-
ure out what terrible fate is in store for
her as the bearer of Vittoria’s face. She
asks her parents if she could pay a visit.
Her parents hesitate, agonize, reluc-
tantly agree. Andrea drives her to Vit-
toria’s building, the same one in which
he grew up, and waits in the car while
she goes upstairs.
Vittoria’s presence, her manners, her
appearance, her way of moving and
speaking immediately cause a small ex-
plosion in Giovanna’s sense of things.
Her aunt’s sentences are brusque and
rough. Upon seeing Giovanna for the
first time in years, she scolds her (for
ringing the bell more than once). She
invites her in simply by telling her
to close the door behind her. Vitto-
ria’s main mode of communication is
the clipped command. “In Vittoria’s
voice, or perhaps in her whole body,”
Giovanna recalls, “there was an im-
patience without filters that hit me in
a flash.” It’s a way of being and a form
of femininity that Giovanna has never
encountered in her middle- class world.Ferrante is often glossed and pro-
moted as a novelist who gives voice to
anger, specifically to female anger or
to anger at the female condition, to the
extent that female anger or the female
condition can be said to exist in some
discrete yet generalizable sense. The
Europa Editions English translations
of the novels prominently quote Janet
Maslin’s admiring description of Fer-
rante’s “raging, torrential voice,” Alice
Sebold’s somewhat menacing promise
that Ferrante “will blow you away,”
John Waters’s declaration that Fer-
rante is “the best angry woman writer
ever!,” and John Freeman’s suggestion
to “imagine if Jane Austen got angry
and you’ll have some idea how explo-
sive these books are.”
Given her narrators’ memorable acts
of malice, these characterizations are
not surprising. But the idea of Ferran-
te’s books overflowing or exploding
with anger belies the calm of her narra-
tors as they describe earlier selves over-
taken by rage. You could better say that
Ferrante is a specialist in composure:
the drama of achieving, losing, feign-
ing, and regaining composure is central
to her work. More importantly, the role
of anger in her characters’ lives is com-
plex and ambiguous; even in a time of
interest in politically powerful feminist
anger, Ferrante’s books can quickly still
any simple impulse to celebrate women’s
fury. Leda throws her daughter’s doll
off a balcony. Olga not only attacks her
cheating husband, but also beats her dog.
Ferrante’s narrators regret their
anger more often than they exult in it,
and not only because it can hurt the
people around them. It’s the one emo-
tion whose expression inevitably marks
them as having been poor Neapolitans.
They’ve found gentler ways to express
other feelings, and they have learned as
much as possible not to express hostil-
ity, irritation, or indignation. When they
are unable to suppress their anger, they
are in danger of being revealed as lower-
class outsiders in their adopted north-
er n cities or literar y circles : anger, as an
emotion as well as a mien, is closely en-
twined with working- class Naples itself.
Ferrante’s characters come from a
world in which women rage freely, fac-
ing little social pressure to be sweet or
mild. That’s one of the reasons they
want to get the hell out of the old neigh-
borhood: both men and women express
their anger loudly and often violently,
and from early childhood the narrators
experience all this free expression as
an oppressive, bullying clamor. In cul-
tures where there are strong social con-
straints on women’s public expression
(or even private experience) of anger,
the emotion might seem liberating, a
dormant, suppressed force in need of
recognition as a precondition for either
social change or self- improvement. Not
so in Ferrante’s poor Naples, where
women’s angry displays are socially
acceptable without being politically orpersonally liberating. They are merely
necessary: the aggressive front they
have to wea r i n preemptive sel f- defense.
Vittoria, a spinster maid, has no so-
cial or marital or professional status to
elevate her, no institutional power on
her side, no particular neighborhood
influence or leverage except for her
emotive force, which is considerable: to
Giovanna her seething is majestic. Vit-
toria starts trashing Giovanna’s father
only a few minutes into their meeting;
Giovanna gets an earful of thrilling,
obscenity- laced commentary on how
Andrea spoiled Vittoria’s dreams of
being a dancer and broke up her af-
fair with the one lover she’d ever had,
a married police officer named Enzo
who died not long afterward.
Since then, Vittoria has cherished
Enzo’s memory—or at least she offers
Giovanna a showy performance of
cherishing his memory, playing the first
song they danced to and insisting that
Giovanna learn the dance by standing
on Vittoria’s feet as she whirls the girl
around. The affair was so short and so
long ago that Vittoria’s laments seem
more insisted upon than felt, her celi-
bacy a stubborn and self- destructive
display of will; it might be more accu-
rate to say that she cherishes her anger
over the destruction of her affair more
than the affair itself.
As for Vittoria’s maligned face,
Giovanna’s first impression is that her
aunt had “a beauty so unbearable that
to consider her ugly became a neces-
sity.” In this peculiar formulation, Vit-
toria’s face holds a Medusa- like danger
for anyone who, like Giovanna, longs
to look and keep looking. “I don’t
want to see her again,” Giovanna tells
her father when she leaves Vittoria’s
apartment.But already as I uttered that sen-
tence I knew on what day, at what
hour, in what place I would see
her again.... I had her every word
in my head, every gesture, every
expression of her face, and they
didn’t seem things that had just
happened, it all seemed to be still
happening.They begin to see each other on Sun-
days. Through Vittoria’s gruffness it
becomes apparent that she is ready
to like Giovanna, or in any case to
make a last- ditch attempt to reeducate
Giovanna in the old- neighborhood
sensibility that her father has refused to
pass down. Vittoria picks up Giovanna
in her small green Fiat 500, and together
they trace her father’s journey in re-
verse, down from Rione Alto into the
working- class parts of the city the girl
has never seen. Vittoria takes Giovanna
to meet the rest of her father’s estranged
siblings, de mystified now as ordinary,
friendly uncles and aunts who work for
the railroad or the postal service, scat-
tered in modest neighborhoods in apart-
ments that weresmall, drab, furnished with ob-
jects that I had been brought up to
judge crude if not vulgar.... They
all spoke to me in a cordial dialect
mixed with Italian, and I made an
effort to do the same, or at least I
made room in my hypercorrect Ital-
ian for some Neapolitan cadences.She goes to church with Vittoria and
meets Enzo’s widow and teenage chil-dren. To Giovanna, nothing about this
world seems as dark or threatening as
her father’s terse comments have al-
ways suggested. Only Vittoria herself
radiates a thrilling mixture of posses-
siveness and spite.
Once Vittoria is back in contact with
her brother’s family, a disaster of just
the sort that Giovanna’s parents feared
unfolds. A casual (or was it calculated?)
comment of Vittoria’s precipitates a
revelation about Andrea’s ongoing af-
fair with another woman, Costanza, a
close family friend and the mother of
Giovanna’s two oldest friends.
Although an affair could come to
light in any number of ways, it’s notably
Vittoria, the emissary of the Industrial
Zone, who reveals it. Ferrante must
labor to get Vittoria up to Costanza’s
affluent neighborhood to meet this
woman and spot a bracelet on her wrist
that happens to be the one Vittoria
gave to Giovanna when she was born.
Giovanna never received it because, it
emerges, her father had given it to his
lover instead. This plot twist has a fairy-
tale quality: Vittoria is a jealous fairy
godmother whose legacy was spurned.
Given the contrivance involved, it’s
hard not to see still another layer of
symbolism in Vittoria’s revenge.
With the publication of the first vol-
ume of the Neapolitan Quartet, Fer-
rante became an international literary
celebrity very closely—and authori-
tatively—associated with her native
city. Naples, in the quartet, is not just
a part of Elena Greco’s past, it’s a
high- intensity backdrop to the many
complex subplots of the quartet in-
volving family feuds, murder, criminal
commercial enterprises, violent politi-
cal activism, extramarital affairs, and
out- of- wedlock births. The stakes are
higher in poor Naples: the violence,
domestic abuse, corruption, and pov-
erty give ordinary decisions a life- and-
death urgency. “I renounce nothing
that can give pleasure to the reader,”
Ferrante said in The Paris Review,
“not even what is considered old, trite,
vulgar, not even the devices of genre
fiction.” But what if the pleasures are,
potentially, voyeuristic interest in a
poor and violent world? Could there be
a moral hazard lurking for the author?
We don’t know what E. Ferrante’s
answer would be, but E. Greco cer-
tainly seems to fear that there is. All of
Elena Greco’s many books are set in or
around the city; the one that makes her
famous is a page- turner about “poorest
and most violent Naples.” Her obses-
sion with her friend Lila’s in fluence and
opinions, which grows more acute the
more successful Elena becomes, seems
like guilt turned inside out, an en-
crypted confession: she doesn’t deserve
credit for what she’s written because she
has used her friend’s and her neighbors’
stories in the service of a literary star-
dom that never changed anything for
the neighborhood itself. Whether this
is accurate or reasonable is of course
beside the point. In Ferrante’s books
most charismatic female characters of
the old neighborhood—Lila, Vittoria—
are phantasms haunting those who es-
cape. Naples herself might turn out to
be a vengeful fairy godmother, angry
that her gifts are first spurned, then ex-
ploited from a safe distance by writers
who run away from home.Their marriage shattered, Giovanna’s
parents decide to separate. Her father