8 The New York Review
moves in with his lover and her daugh-
ters, Angela and Ida. Her mother pines
for him. Both preoccupied parents
expect Giovanna to muddle through
these hideous developments on her
own.
Under Vittoria’s influence, Giovanna
begins to question her old assumptions
about her parents’ goodness and truth-
fulness. One of the delights of the book
is Giovanna’s growing awareness that
her parents’ command of words and
“those controlled tones of theirs” can
be a form of deception, meant to throw
their child off the trail of their actual
emotions and experiences, “as if truly
every word concealed others, truer,
from which they excluded me.” Their
responsible- parent frankness gives
them cover, a set of calm phrases be-
hind which to hide themselves.
Giovanna’s anger settles on the insult
of her father’s new family arrangement.
Ferrante captures, from Giovanna’s
wounded perspective, the grotesquerie
of stepfamilies and the implied inter-
changeability of daughters and spouses
and houses. Waiting in Costanza’s
house one afternoon for her father to
come home from work so they can cele-
brate Ida’s birthday, Giovanna reflects
thatwhat I most dreaded—I real-
ized—was the moment my father
returned with his bag full of books
and kissed that wife on the lips as
he had always done with the other
and said that he was very tired
and yet would joke around with
the three of us, would pretend to
love us, would take Ida on his lap
and help her blow out the candles
and sing happy birthday and then,
suddenly cool, as he knew how to
be, would withdraw into another
room, into his new study, whose
function was the same as the old
one on Via San Giacomo dei Capri,
and shut himself in, and Costanza
would say, just as my mother al-
ways had, keep your voices down,
please, don’t disturb Andrea, he
has to work.How can these adults pretend there is
any solidity to their household when
they were just recently married to other
people? In the mess of the family sep-
aration, adults, including Vittoria her-self, cease to loom mythically over
Giovanna. Her father is a needy social
climber, she decides, and her mother
mopes pathetically. Giovanna becomes
the first in her immediate family to be
able to perc eive th is fact about Vittor ia :
that she is lonely. Her haranguing style
is a way of expressing disappointment
and need. “Vittoria simply wanted me
to admit that I loved her,” Giovanna re-
alizes as Vittoria berates her one day.
With this insight, Giovanna is able to
assuage Vittoria by telling her exactly
what she hopes to hear, in the emotive
style that Vittoria best understands:
“I was amazed at how good I was at
speaking to her in a falsely heartfelt
way, at how carefully and effectively I
chose words, at how I wasn’t like her,
but worse.”
Where Vittoria expresses her pain
sincerely, in the aggressive tone that
is the only one she knows, Giovanna
learns passionate expression as a sec-
ond language. She uses it insincerely,
to manipulate Vittoria and increase
her own power in their relationship—
not to any nefarious ends but simply
to dabble and try things out on her
way to an adulthood that seems likelyto be even more cosmopolitan than
that of her parents. Her careless good
fortune in not really belonging to the
Industrial Zone seems almost unfair,
and oblique questions about bene-
fit and guilt play across the novel. We
don’t know what course Giovanna’s
life does take—the narrator, like her
elusive author, is barely there, offer-
ing an occasional abstract comment
about the blur of memory, just pres-
ent enough for us to feel her absence.
The teenage Giovanna has plenty of
wherewithal and hardly seems to need
the shelter of her narration. What then,
does the older Giovanna want with
her younger self, with Vittoria? What
has sent her back to pore over this
material?
The Lying Life of Adults feels like a
novel about Ferrante’s novels, a mix-
ture of familiar elements in new and
unexpected arrangements that invites a
self- referential reading. Not unlike an
offspring, actually, which is appropri-
ate for a novel that is essentially about
being second generation. Giovanna is
free, as her father never was, to make
use of poor Naples as it suits her, and to
leave the rest behind. Q1586I was in the dictionary looking up
the distinction between necessity
and need, or requirement, “the constraining
power of circumstances.” The dictionary
gives an example from Sidney and Golding:
Of the necessitie that is conditionall,
and not of the necessitie that is
absolute. Sidney met his end one morning
when, writes Greville, by the banks of the IJssel,
an “unfortunate hand” sent forth a bullet
that broke the bone in his thigh.
So great was his thirst, he asked
for drink; but before it touched his lips,
he saw a “poor soldier carried along”
who “ghastly cast his eyes up” at the bottle.
Sidney gave it to him. You, whose
“necessity,” he said, “is yet greater than mine.”
Within weeks, and with the “fixing
of a lover’s thought on those eternal
beauties,” he died in A r nhem on the baker’s street.2010Is there point to critical interpretation
that gives us “what we all know already, what
inescapably and instantly strikes
the eye,” as Rosen wrote in June? Then Ricks
asked if Rosen would agree to any
like assertion of a musical phrase
striking the ear? I spent the hours that season
in a basement library magnifying
Bishop’s hand ten times to read the word
“tidal.” On the daily train along
the river, the conductor sometimes returned,
sometimes pocketed, my ticket.
“An interpretation,” Rosen said,
“must either uncover or create a secret.”
“I give you simply what you have already,”reasoned Lowell. A fine morning.
Steady summer construction
on the avenue stories below.1947After the peace, autumn Sunday,
a fine one, smallest child inside, eldest
on a train journey, and he and a friend
in the meadow by the river.
He wore the military duty belt,
the find from the brush that he’d been snapped in
a few days before. They found the tree to climb
and then jumped down this time
onto a mine that had once—though the field
had been swept, they all thought—been laid there
by an unfortunate hand. For sixty years
his face looked up from picture frames
in the houses of their friends. She kept
in her clothes a piece of his skull,
and her thumb would stroke it,
as she had once stroked the fontanelle.1977The crow took a cracker and my grandfather
scolded it. Six, drinks under the apple tree,
the foxgloves leaning over flower beds
and down at children sipping juice,
white butterflies among the buddleia
and nettles with their feathery trichomes,
and hover flies in the last uncleared area
where meadow met the garden and lawn, arbor
and house. Amice was the crow’s name, it stepped
sideways, crossed its beak on the bench.
The order of six o’clock: shoulder blades
settling down the back, salt on fingers,
prints on glasses, books closed, their linen covers
warming in the westerly light.—Saskia HamiltonALL SOULS