Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet

Book One, My Brilliant Friend

Elena Greco and Lila Cerrullo are two girls growing up in 1950s working-class Naples, friends as intensely loyal to each other as they are competitive. Elena’s family allows her to continue school beyond the fifth grade; the parents of Lila, the “brilliant friend” of the title, declare her schooling is over. This divergence in their paths determines their fates. As they grow into adolescence, Lila seemingly accepts her lot, despite the fact that she has a brilliant mind and knows it. She becomes determined to raise her shoemaker father and her family out of poverty and obscurity with her design of a pair of men’s shoes. At the same time, Lila shows increasingly less interest in the world beyond her family and neighborhood, and instead attempts to reap all the benefits that accrue to a large fish in a small pond. Meanwhile Elena develops as a young scholar and writer and, as she gains the respect of her teachers and two young men who are her peers, slowly accepts that she’s ready to leave her neighborhood in order to lead a life of the mind.

The book opens with Elena, now somewhere in her sixties and the book’s narrator, receiving a Naples-to-Turin phone call from Lila’s son: Lila’s been missing for two weeks, he’s looked everywhere, even gone to the hospitals and the police. On top of that Lila hasn’t left a trace. All her clothes, papers, photos, her computer, everything’s gone, swept away as if burglars had cleaned her out. No, Elena responds, no one would have any interest in that stuff. She thinks: “So, she’s finally gone and done it . . . “ Because once, thirty years earlier, Lila told Elena that someday she’d disappear and not leave a trace. Okay, Elena thinks, “This time we’ll see who wins.” She fires up her computer, determined to write the story of their friendship in as many details as she can recall. If Lila’s decided to erase her life story, a story that’s informed the greater part of Elena’s own life—well, Elena would do the very opposite.

Elena Ferrante is a pen name, the author’s identity a mystery to her growing audience. Perhaps such a degree of privacy is necessary, given that the novel bursts with baroque verisimilitude, the personalities and events of the Neapolitan neighborhood in which it’s set dramatically depicted in details so precise, and larger-than-life that, given my familiarity with Southern Italian culture, I’d say they’re not products solely of the imagination. My Brilliant Friend has all the elements of verismo opera—La Cavalleria Rusticana, I Pagliacci, Tosca—would that someone please write the score. A brute who’s murdered from behind, by a knife to the throat, in his own kitchen. A pair of handmade shoes Lila dreams will someday enrich her poor family and transform the Cerrullo name into a brand. The philandering poet whose lover falls into madness when he abandons her. The nefarious Solara brothers in their Millecento, prowling for girls in the dark narrow streets. A copper cooking pot that bursts into pieces for no detectable reason other than to mark a prophetic moment. Lines ready-made for chorus and arias: “Greco—do you know what a commoner is? You know what riffraff means?” “A city without love goes from good to evil . . . ”

Both girls dream of becoming writers and of co-authoring a book. In the fifth grade, they read a battered copy of Little Women several times over, and fantasize that someday they'll write a novel that will make them rich. But Lila doesn’t wait. While Elena attends tutoring sessions to prepare for the admissions exam to middle school, Lila dives into writing the novel. Disappointed but proud of her friend, Elena shows the book, entitled The Blue Fairy, to their teacher, La Oliviera. We never actually learn what the novel’s about; we can guess from the girls’ daydreams that it involves finding a treasure chest. What we do read about is La Oliviera’s reproach when Elena asks her opinion of Lila’s work. “Greco,” La Oliviera says, “do you know what a commoner is? You understand what riffraff means? If someone never wants to leave the riffraff, then he, and his kids, and his grandkids don’t deserve a thing. So forget about Cerrullo, and focus on yourself.” Precisely what Elena Greco can’t and won’t ever do.

At times Elena adopts aspects of Lila’s braggadocio, asking herself What would Lila do in this situation? The most memorable of these events is when Elena takes a few boys up on their offer of a few lire, enough for a gelato, if she would show them her breasts in an abandoned building not far from school, as proof that her large breasts aren’t fake. Elena afterwards reflects upon what she’s done, and realizes that had Lila been at her side, she herself would have urged that they run away, knowing that Lila would have wanted to stay and take up the dare. But without Lila at her side: “At first I hesitated, then I put myself in her place, no actually, I placed her inside myself. . . and mimicked her tone and her way of moving . . . and I was happy.”

When Elena goes off to middle school, and Lila begins work in her father’s shoemaking shop, Lila attempts to stay abreast of Elena’s schooling. She single-handedly teaches herself Latin, even clueing Elena into the best technique for translating a Latin sentence. She teaches herself Greek. She reads The Aeneid in its entirety before Elena does, and talks to her at length about Dido, sharing this thought: “Without love, life withers not only for the individual, but for the city too.” That thought strikes a deep chord within Elena, reflecting, it seems to her, the nature of their neighborhood, with all its violence and squalor. Later, Elena develops that same thought in an essay— “ . . . when love is exiled from a city, the city changes in nature from benevolent to evil . . . examples being Italy under Fascism, Germany under Nazism”—earning praise from her teachers. Ultimately, Elena feels intense guilt for having taken credit for an idea that originated with the “brilliant” Lila, and an intense loneliness, since by then Lila has abandoned her reading (or so she claims) to pursue her family’s shoemaking business.

During the summer they’re fifteen, Elena lives and works in an inn on the island of Ischia and writes religiously to Lila. When, finally, Lila returns the favor, with a densely inscribed letter of five pages, Elena is humbled by Lila’s eloquence, embarrassed by what she considers her own childish scribblings. She notes that the tone Lila struck in her letter-writing was familiar—in fact, Elena was hearing the same voice she’d heard years ago in The Blue Fairy: “Lila knew how to speak through writing; so different from my way . . . she expresses herself with phrases so well-honed, and without error even though she’d stopped her studies, more so there wasn’t a trace of the unnatural, nothing artificial in what she wrote . . . I read and I saw her, I heard her . . even more than when, face to face, we spoke.”

Towards the end of the book, on Lila’s wedding day, Lila invites Elena into her bedroom, so that they can be alone, so that Elena can help bathe Lila and dress her in her wedding gown. Before Lila disrobes, and Elena sees her friend in the nude for the first time, they have this conversation:

L: “Whatever happens, you have to continue your studies.”

E: “Two more years. Then I get my license and I’m finished.”

L: “No, don’t you ever finish: I will give you the money, you need to go on studying.”

E: “Thanks, but school does end after a point.”

L: “Not for you: You are my brilliant friend, you must become the best of all, of men and women.”

And so we witness an unexpected reversal: Elena Greco has inherited the title of Elena Ferrante’s novel, has gained the respect of the friend she most loves and of the writer she wishes to emulate.

Book Two, Story of a New Name

Yes, Elena Ferrante’s Naples quartet is a saga of the long and fiery friendship between two women—Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo—it’s what all the headlines say. But behind that narrative is another story, a story of how two intellectually gifted women must struggle to grow into full, independent beings against odds stacked vertiginously high against them. Because no matter how smart, how crafty, how beautiful Elena and Lila might be—and they are all those—the awful truth in these books is Number One, the world was not created for women, and Number Two, it was certainly not created for women like Elena and Lila, born and raised in a poor and insular Neapolitan neighborhood. No matter how hard they try, and try they do, each in her own way, there are more reasons than not for them to stay trapped in poverty, mediocrity, vulgarity, and abuse.

As six-year-olds, in My Brilliant Friend, Book 1, they’re already well aware of the scarcities in their lives. They dream of co-authoring a book that will someday make them rich. As older girls, when one of them is permitted to attend middle school (Elena) and the other not (Lila), they’re forced to confront head-on other kinds of poverty: poverty of mind, poverty of spirit. Indeed, their parents know and care so little about the world beyond the stradone, the slum avenue on which they live—they’re uneducated and they’re always working—that they never even take their children to downtown Naples or to the beach. Imagine: To live in Naples and not know it faces the sea! (The one time that Elena’s father takes her downtown it’s to figure out how she should take public transportation to middle school.) Abuse of women in their world is taken for granted, it’s an essential ingredient in male and female relationships and both girls have watched their fathers slap their mothers around. Elena wisely appreciates that to witness those slaps and beatings constitutes a sort of training, a sort of forerunner to her own future entanglements and she therefore proceeds cautiously. Caution is no part of Lila’s personality, however, and when on her wedding day she learns that the men in her life—her new husband, her brother and father—have sold her shoe designs without her consent, she protests vigorously, the result being that her husband beats and rapes her on the first night of their honeymoon. So begins Story of a New Name, Volume 2.

The pace of the second volume is faster than that of the first, and there are many more dramatic highs and lows, shifts between scenes, and a wider range of characters. Whereas I likened the characterizations and events of the first volume to verismo opera, I found the second volume to be more like a soap opera. I found it difficult to keep track of all the twists and turns of events and of secondary characters. And since for the most part we’re offered descriptions of the many secondary characters only once, when we first meet them, I found it difficult to visualize them as they appeared in what was at times an almost dizzying array of incident. Characters and events seemed more fantastic in the first volume, perhaps because in that book the narrator looks back to childhood, where so much of life seems large and mysterious. In the second volume, in which the points of view are those of teenagers and young adults, the events are more quotidian.

The second volume opens, as did the first, with a highly provocative scene. On one of Elena’s visits home from Pisa, where she’s on scholarship at a prestigious university, Lila entrusts her with a metal box for safekeeping. Inside the metal box are eight notebooks that Lila wants no one to ever read—not her husband nor Elena. Elena guarantees their safety and privacy. Then, as soon as she gets back on the train to Pisa, she opens the box and reads every one, awed and humbled by the power of Lila’s writing, by her eloquence, her attention to detail and the seeming perfection of every sentence, written in the same longhand style they both learned as young girls. The notebooks begin with Lila’s life at the end of elementary school and they close with her growing despair as Stefano’s wife. They encompass her life on the stradone—descriptions of the people, buildings and streets, shops and gardens; her thoughts on the books she’s read and movies she’s seen; her interactions with Elena and everyone else; all her ups and downs. Elena says: “I studied them, and finished by committing to memory the paragraphs I liked, those that excited me, that hypnotized me, that humiliated me.” And so, at the start of the second book, we hear echoes of the first: What began as the desire to write a novel together at age six becomes realized as Elena draws upon Lila’s notebooks to write her own books—yes—the very same novels we are in the process of reading. (In yet another echo, the fictional Elena writes the novels of her eponymous, anonymous author.) With Elena’s discovery of Lila’s writing, the fires of competition between them are once more stoked. For as Elena correctly intuits, whatever Elena may succeed in doing, Lila invariably shows her up. Back in Pisa, having digested her friend’s work, Elena grows angry: “I couldn’t deal anymore with having Lila on my back, and inside me, especially now that I had gained such respect, now that I had finally gotten out of Naples.” She carries the notebooks to the Arno and throws them in.

 As small girls Elena and Lila know they’re the smartest students in their class, and their bond is based on recognition of each other’s sharp native intelligence. As adolescents, even though they no longer go to school together, their bond grows in proportion to their shared hunger, a hunger to know and to have more than the meager amount assigned them by destiny, a hunger to reach to the top of the tree, to grasp the fruit they can barely see from where they stand on the ground below. Elena learns through the women who are her teachers, La Oliviera and La Galiana, that the world is immense, and that to have knowledge is to take control of one’s life. But there is so much to know! How does one put it all together? Elena ponders these questions repeatedly, middle school through university. Diligent scholar that she is, no sooner does she arrives at one plateau of knowledge and accomplishment than that she sees the next rise, and feels her sense of inadequacy renewed. As she slowly and painstakingly commands respect from her professors and fellow students, and earns her university scholarship, and her final degree, summa cum laude, her social orbits expand accordingly. She becomes a favorite of her professors, is befriended by their families, becomes friends with young men whom she considers oh so worldly and even takes one as a lover. As she ascends and sees more of how the world is constructed, she understands with every step how dramatically underprepared she is for success of any real merit, and fears she will never catch up, and that somewhere along the line she will fall and never again rise. Happily, for Elena and reader both, she comes into her own by the end of the book with an over-the-top success that I will not reveal here.

Lila, Elena’s foil, is self-taught and quick on the draw. She’s like an animal trapped in a cage, biting and clawing her way out, game for any strategy that looks like it might work, ready to attack whoever gets in her way. Whereas Elena is plagued by self-doubt, always afraid of falling short in her studies, hesitant with men, Lila is full of herself, proud of her beauty and wit and sexual prowess. Elena says at several points that she draws strength from Lila’s brashness, that without Lila as a model she’d not only lack the courage to stand up for herself but wouldn’t even have a clue as to what to do, or how to act. Yet on the other hand she at times considers Lila to be naïve, even vulgar. On the evening of the grand opening of the shoe store in downtown Naples in which Lila and her husband own a large share, Lila uncharacteristically suffers a bad case of jitters. She pulls Elena down a side street in order to talk and calm herself. She reminds Elena of a scuffle they once witnessed on that very same street, years earlier, between the boys of their stradone against a group of well-dressed, upper-class kids. There were a few girls in that group, and one in particular. Lila asks Elena: “Do you remember that girl dressed in green, the one with the little hat?” Elena remembers at once and knows exactly what Lila’s thinking. Elena says, “It was all a question of money, Lila. Today everything’s different, you’re much prettier than that girl in the green dress.” But what Elena thinks and never says is that she’s lying, that there was something rotten in the inequality they experienced, and that she had come to understand what Lila didn’t: It didn’t matter how much money Lila withdrew from the cash registers at Stefano’s shop or the shoe store, money wasn’t enough to hide their origins. That girl in the green dress was superior to them and always would be.

 Like a goddess of classical mythology, Lila changes guise as she adopts various missions. When in the first volume, her parents refuse to let her continue from elementary school to middle school, and she can no longer count on becoming rich by writing books, she sets her mind to designing shoes that her shoemaker father and brother fabricate, all the while secretly reading, writing, and teaching herself Latin and Greek. When Stefano, the seemingly successful salumeria owner, courts her, she readily accepts him and the beautiful jewelry and clothes he showers upon her. When the second volume opens, she’s enraged at the close of her wedding day, when she learns she’s lost control of the shoe business she herself inspired, in a deal made by her father, brother, and husband with the mobster Solari brothers; however, soon after the horror of her honeymoon, she allows herself to compromise, finding comfort in the luxuries of her new station as Stefano’s wife: a brand new apartment in the new section of the neighborhood, with a real bathtub (begone the large copper pot of her parents’ home); new kitchen appliances and furniture; a telephone and TV; and, parked right out front, a convertible. Having money for the first time in her life, she spends it giddily, absent any restraints, so much so that her new mother-in-law complains to her son about how fast the money’s disappearing. When Elena sees Lila and Stefano driving around in their convertible, she imagines them the Neapolitan version of John and Jackie Kennedy. There’s no doubt Lila thinks of herself the same way. But the large dark sunglasses Lila wears, as Elena soon learns, are meant to hide the bruises from Stefano’s beatings. When not long after her first wedding anniversary, Lila falls for Nino, an old friend from elementary school, a brilliant student that Elena is secretly in love with, and has an affair with him practically under Stefano’s nose, she dives back into the books, wants to know everything Nino knows, wants to be just like him, wants to be considered a person of taste and intellect. At that same point, Lila reassumes control of the shoe business, specifically the new shop in downtown Naples, where she adds her new literary sophistication to selling shoes. She creates a boutique complete with art and books, and divans where her customers—the wives and daughters of lawyers, doctors, and engineers—can gather for conversation and coffee, having fashioned herself a mid-century Miuccia Prada, so to speak. Just as I won’t reveal Elena’s closing victory I won’t reveal Lila’s last two transformations, other than to say that they lead in the direction opposite Elena’s: down, and further down. Nevertheless, despite all the metamorphoses Lila assumes, some things about her never change and those are the brand marks with which Elena connects with her friend, over and over again, the same way a hapless mortal might intuit the presence of a goddess: her ferocious intelligence, a wit like lightning with anger to match, and a way of narrowing her eyes into slits as she thinks through a problem and hatches a plan.

Whereas both women attempt to make sense of the world through reading and the written word—by the end of the second volume Lila is reading Ulysses while she sits with her infant son in a park—spoken language is the primary tool Elena uses to reshape her identity. She learns early, in middle school, that the ability to abandon dialect and speak standard Italian will be vital to her separating from her origins and assuming citizenship in a wider world. She works hard at that, and takes great pride in her spoken Italian and in the fact that, until she enters university, her Neapolitan professors praise her eloquence. Once at the university, however, she’s told that her Italian is old-fashioned, somewhat flowery, and she’s teased for her Neapolitan accent. Humiliated, she embarks upon a campaign to rid herself of her accent and to learn a more sophisticated Italian. And she succeeds, so much so that when she returns to Naples to visit her family, her neighbors detect the loss of her accent and dub her La Pisana, the Pisan woman. One of the many poignant moments in the book occurs when, on that same visit home, Elena’s siblings attempt to speak with her in standard Italian rather than in dialect. They’re tentative, and self-correct their errors in embarrassment. Only slowly does she regain intimacy with them.

Book Three, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

Set from 1968 through the late 70s, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay opens with a flash-forward to 2005. Elena Greco’s gone back to the rione, her old Naples neighborhood, to visit Lila Cerullo, her lifelong friend, alter ego, and frequent nemesis. Out for a walk, the two women are drawn to a crowd gathered by the church. There they discover Gigliola, a childhood friend, lying dead in a flowerbed. This is one of the many “horrible things” that have happened in the untold amount of time since Elena last saw Lila. But we won’t read about those things just yet—not in this book. At the end of the visit, Lila tells Elena that if she, Elena, plans to write about her, Lila, or Gigliola, or anyone else in the rione, she should just forget about it, because they don’t deserve it, she and Gigliola don’t deserve anything, they should all just disappear. Furthermore, if Elena dares write about Lila, Lila will find Elena’s computer and erase all her files.

Once again, Ferrante pulls us into her narrative with a shocking incident and the recitation of a pact renegotiated already several times: We started out as novelists but I (Lila) no longer write so you (Elena) must continue to do so for both of us. But don’t you dare write about me. In the first two books of this series, the doppelganger-writer trope was a powerful device, especially in Book Two, where it brought dimension to the fractious, often tedious adolescent friendship of Elena and Lila. I’d been expecting that in Book Three, where the two friends must deal with marriage, children, and work in a time of intense political turmoil, there’d be a fair amount of grappling with serious life issues. There is—but only when Lila’s in the story. Unfortunately, whenever Lila’s missing, so is the book’s heat.

Book 3 easily falls into three parts. In the first and most engaging, the action surrounds Lila in her job at a sausage factory in the Naples periphery, where working conditions are grisly and sexual harassment rampant. Not to mention that the factory owner—an old friend from summer days in Ischia—is in alliance with a far-right faction and indebted to loan-shark Michele Solara. Lila’s drawn unwillingly into a student-worker alliance, and she authors an eloquent manifesto/ grievances list which becomes the basis of an article Elena then writes for L’Unita, the Communist Party newspaper. At the same time, Lila suffers a nervous breakdown, and Elena helps pull her through it.

In the second part, the focus shifts to Florence, where Elena marries Pietro, a self-centered classics professor, and they start a family. Italian factories, streets and universities are teeming with dissent and repression. Against a background of bombings, kidnappings, and battles between student-worker alliances and right-wing factions, Elena and Pietro lead an isolated life, he consumed with his teaching and writing, she with raising two small girls. Elena now has precious little time to write, and the focus of this book shifts to that dilemma: What will become of her if she’s unable to write because of all her domestic demands? After she’s worked so hard to pull herself out of the rione, and has earned her degree, and published her first novel? Now that she’s married to a self-centered pedant who shows no respect for her mind or her work? Living in a city where she has no friends?

The third part begins when Nino Sarratore, the secret love of Elena’s life, appears in Florence as a visiting professor from Naples. Lila reappears a few times in this section, in her new guise as programmer for a database firm owned by the nefarious Michele Solara, but these appearances are fleeting.

The narrative in this volume, as in the second, involves more telling than showing—first this happened, then that, then this—often making for a tiresome read. Incidents are plentiful but few are memorable. Whenever the narrative develops into a full scene, however, especially those scenes set in and about Naples, all that changes and the writing becomes positively cinematic. As when Lila goes missing one evening and returns, traumatized, and tells Elena her story of abuse and violence in the sausage factory, including her confrontation with Bruno Soccavo, the factory owner, and Michele Solara. Or when Elena hosts her erstwhile friend Pasquale, who arrives at her Florence apartment unannounced and disheveled, growling about her bourgeois lifestyle. Or when Elena brings Pietro home for the first time to visit her family. He’s a fountain of facts, knowing more about Naples than Elena, but incapable of reading the people around him, so that when the Neapolitans on the street stare at his big head of hair he’s oblivious; so that when he takes her family out to dinner and is ridiculed by a few students at a table across the way, he’s again oblivious, and when Elena’s brothers go over and start delivering punches, he has no idea why—maybe everyone acts this way in restaurants in Naples? They walk over to the other tables and start fights?

The timeframe of this book is the Anni di Piombo, the Years of Lead. Although Elena writes news articles about strikes, police surveillance, and disruptions at universities, it’s not because she’s politically engaged but because they’re something to write about. They’ll prove to her friends and in-laws that she’s knowledgeable and politically correct: “The rest was a flurry of air, an immaterial wave of images and sounds that, whether disastrous or beneficial, gave me material for my work, it threatened or it passed over, so that I could put it into magic words inside a story, an article, a speech, making sure that nothing was out of line and that every concept would be pleasing to the Airotas, to the publishing house, to Nino who for sure was reading it somewhere . . . and to Lila, who would have to finally say: Look, we were unfair to Elena, she’s on our side, look at these things she’s writing.” Elena’s engagement, such as it is, and her references to assassinations and bombings function primarily as background to the central story of her learning to believe and trust in herself. Is her situation as an educated and talented woman, now isolated as a wife and mother, and condescended to by her husband, not worthy of sympathy? Indeed, it is. Is it tiresome to read about her frustrations, her insecurities, and her lack of clarity? Indeed, it is.

Does Elena ever make a move on her own? At times. She wants to start birth control before her marriage, so as to not put her writing career at risk, but her husband and her doctor are against it, and so she doesn’t start on the pill until after her second child. She becomes a member of a women’s consciousness group. She writes a second book, a long essay about female characters as created by male writers (DeFoe, Flaubert, Tolstoy) and how their work functions as a retelling of the Adam and Eve story. (It’s not clear what the reader is supposed to take away from this. A reference to the controversy surrounding the identity of the pseudonymous Elena Ferrante?) I found this account somewhat garbled and the ideas not at all new, even considering that Elena would have been writing in the heady feminism of the 70s: Simone de Beauvoir did a similar analysis of five male authors in 1949, in a chapter of The Second Sex. In fact, whenever Elena refers to this other writing—the essay on the Holy Spirit in Book 2, or her first novel, or her newspaper articles—she simply refers to them, she doesn’t fully discuss them, and therefore the reader fails to learn exactly how Elena thinks or who she really is. An odd situation for a series that’s partly about a woman struggling to affirm her identity as a writer. Unless, that is, we’re supposed to regard the products of Elena’s writing as ghost texts, say, illusive meta-texts, texts that in themselves amount to little or nothing when set beside whatever it is that Lila’s doing. Or writing. After all, Elena began writing the tetralogy I’m now reading when Lila disappeared, precisely because Lila disappeared. Even though we’ve read that Elena threw Lila’s journals into the Arno, and that Lila burnt the novel she wrote as a young girl, Lila’s life remains the ur-text of this tetralogy. Even though Lila protests in Book 3 that she hasn’t read a book in years, we’d be foolish to think she isn’t still writing something, somewhere. Writing something that she destroyed before she disappeared without a trace, back in Book 1, as her son says, disappeared without leaving so much as a scrap. If that’s the strategy, that Elena’s texts aren’t meant to have a weight equal to that of Lila’s texts, then something else about Elena needs weight if her character is to hold our interest.

Finally, at the end of the book, Elena takes a big step on her own behalf, but the manner of her doing so is bizarre. Up until then she’s embodied all the virtues of a devoted mother. She speaks about her daughters with great love if not adoration. She showers them with attention, teaches them to read before they enter school, buys them the prettiest clothes. That people compliment her on her daughters’ intelligence and model behavior is a great source of pride. But she makes a life-altering decision and executes it in a way that’s abrupt and altogether unnecessary. And that will no doubt affect her daughters negatively. Is this Ferrante’s way of turning the selfless motherhood trope on its head? The soap-opera pacing that plagues this book is here capped by a ridiculous chick-lit ending.

Book Four, Story of the Lost Child

Book Four picks up where Book Three left off with its rather flip ending. Elena continues her affair with Nino. Throughout that drama and the tumult surrounding her separation from Pietro, and despite several publishing successes, Elena’s voice can be wearying. But when she moves with her daughters to Naples, and Lila is squarely back in the story, the book takes off. The two women attempt to re-establish intimacy. In fact, Lila, now the owner of a fledgling computer firm, attempts to draw Elena into her plan to reform the rione—the neighborhood—forcing Elena to grapple with the conflicting demands of her roles as mother and writer in the public spotlight. Several crises interfere, one literally earth-shattering: The 1980 Naples earthquake, described in haunting, palpable detail. The “lost child” of the title is the most significant crisis by far, creating a gap between the two women that’s extremely difficult to bridge. Within the great web of troubles and comings and goings that Elena recounts, we see again all the characters we’ve come to know and love—or fear; by the book’s close, all their final tales have been told, and every thread stitched into place, much of it against the backdrops of corruption both in Naples and on the national stage during the 80s and 90s. Rising far above all those tales is the spellbinding story of Lila “the brilliant friend” (or is that Elena?) who grows more mysterious and unpredictable in late middle age, as at the same time Elena’s loneliness and self-doubt expand. The questions readers have been asking ever since Lila disappeared at the start of Book 1—Is she still she alive? Will she reappear?—are finally answered, in a way that, not surprisingly, leads to more questions. It was often difficult to put the book down; at other times I yearned for fewer plot turns and a more cohesive structure. But that’s a minor complaint. Book 4 ends a powerful tale about the odds against anyone who tries to rise above a world of poverty and violence to lead a life of meaning. In Book 4 that “anyone” is not only Elena, but also Lila, Alfonso, Enzo, Antonio, and Pasquale. Their stories move me deeply. I can’t get them out of mind, nor do I want to.

There are spoilers in the discussion below.

At the start of Book Four Elena again reminds us of the imperative for her writing—the fact that Lila has disappeared and taken away or destroyed everything she ever owned, down to the last scrap of paper. “Now that I’m at the saddest part of our story, I want to find, on the page, an equilibrium between myself and her that I’ve not been able to find in life even between myself and me.” Elena’s need to see herself through Lila is the engine of all four books; Lila is by far the stronger, more interesting character, and I often found myself wishing not for an equilibrium, but for an imbalance. Meaning: Less of Elena, more of Lila.

Yes, Elena can be tiresome. She blindly suffers Nino’s narcissism and philandering. She frequently voices insecurities about her writing, adding up her accomplishments as if to assure herself they’re real. As with the earlier volumes, the reader never learns the specific content of Elena’s books and articles. For example, she says her essays on feminist politics and gender equality are often discussed at readings and conferences, yet we never learn how she really thinks. Feminist? Yes. Proletarian? Yes. Beyond that? Unknown. She admits that she speaks about politics in only generic terms: Observing how Nino writes and speaks, she acknowledges that revolutionary parlance is naïve, and that a more complex approach to understanding problems is necessary, but it’s one she doesn’t own. She grows cautious and relies on what she knows best:  “It came naturally to me to transform the small events of my private life into public reflections . . . I spoke each evening of the world I came from, of its misery and decay, the rage of men, and women too . . . of the most humiliating aspects of family life, of motherhood, of subservience to men . . . I spoke about how I always tried, in order to assert myself, to adopt a masculine intelligence.“ When she’s criticized in public for her statements surrounding the Moro case, she loses her self-confidence. There are various mentions of the political climate, as when we witness her former lover Franco’s depression and suicide and read his reasons as to why Italy is in decline. But we never get much beyond that. Elena is proud of the intellectual life she shares with Nino in private, of the “cultivated conversations” of the dinner parties they host, but again, Elena simply alludes to the topics of those conversations. Those evenings, like her descriptions of her talks and articles, lack details and bear little weight. Or at least less weight than would seem appropriate for a writer whose public profile is discussed so very much within these pages.

Yet so different are Elena’s accounts of the grim reality of the rione! (Another mirror image is at play here: Elena Greco’s third publishing triumph—her novel about the rione—mirrors the Ferrante novel in our hands.) These scenes are the great riches of this tetralogy. Positively cinematographic, lush with intense highlights and shadows as if inspired by a Caravaggio painting, they contrast poverty and violence against intense affections and loyalties: Elena’s mother’s rage over Elena’s separation from her husband; her mother’s illness and death; Elena’s observation of the change in her younger sister, now married to the mobster Marcello; the earthquake; Nino’s multiple betrayals; the pregnancies of Elena and Lila; the reappearance of alleged terrorists Pasquale and Nadia; Elena and Antonio’s reconciliation; Carmen’s protection of Pasquale; Rino and Gennaro’s heroin addictions; Alfonso’s gender transition; and so on. Elena Greco is insider and outsider wrapped into one. Once a sister and friend who’s left them for the big outside world, it’s precisely due to her reputation as a successful writer in that big outside world, and despite the fact that few in the rione have read much beyond her first “dirty” book, that her old friends accord her their deepest respect and reveal to her their fears, their pasts, their secrets. All of which she then shares with us. Beati noi. Lucky us.

Lila is, of course, the first and greatest of Elena’s outsize characters, both her feet in the gritty world of the rione. But at times Lila departs from the real and the gritty, her perceptions and behaviors rising above and beyond the ordinary. She suffers moments of “disappearing borders”, as when in Book 1, her brother Rino’s face deconstructs among the fireworks and gunshots of New Year’s Eve. A copper pot bursts into pieces in her kitchen, the cause never understood. These events and others are summarized in Lila’s impassioned self-explanation after the earthquake: She has many fears, and no idea how to control their physical manifestations, and she runs from one man to the next to hide from them. Then there’s the iconic photo of her as a bride on the wall of the shoe shore that bursts into flames. And the fact that, though unschooled beyond fifth grade, she teaches herself Latin and Greek, and computer programming, and reads Ulysses, and has for years been writing a memoir. Do we want to believe in this outsize character? Yes, she’s the brilliant friend who was not allowed to go on in school, and married too young, and was abused. Does she have an undiagnosed psychological disorder? Quite likely. Should we believe that she has extraordinary powers? Hmmmm.

Another example of Ferrante’s hand perhaps forcing a situation is the mistaken identities of Elena’s and Lila’s daughters. The photographer who comes to shoot portraits of Elena, on the eve of her second novel’s debut, photographs her with Tina, Lila’s daughter, instead of with Elena’s daughter Imma. The caption accompanying the photo describes the pair as the author and her daughter. This mix-up is foreshadowed during Elena’s and Lila’s pregnancies, when Elena says to Lila: “I already have two girls. If in fact you do have a boy will you give him to me?” and Lila responds: “Sure, no problem, we’ll do an exchange.”

Later, Lila suspects that the erroneous caption is the reason her daughter Tina was kidnapped, that because Elena is a notable public figure the kidnappers wanted her daughter for ransom, not Lila’s daughter. That theory doesn’t quite hold, since news articles would have made clear that Lila was not without financial resources and could have paid a ransom, but it makes room for yet another squabble between the two women: Elena is tempted to tell Lila that her fixed attention on Nino that afternoon is what caused her daughter to wander off. Does the book really need this last bit of rancor?

Attached to the disappearance of Tina is the delivery of the two old and broken childhood dolls: Elena’s discovery as she opens an unsigned package. The two dolls tie the two little girls of Book One together with the two mothers of Book Four, and with the image of the bereft and wandering Lila, now on a quest to somehow reconnect with her daughter. At the same time that the dolls are symbolic of the daughters, they can be read as totem objects, the embodiments of the two disparate selves of Elena and Lila. They’re also the artifacts of a friendship that’s ended, that can live only in their respective memories. Or perhaps in one memory only, that being Elena’s. The doll metaphor is so strong on its own I would have preferred less foreshadowing. Less plotting.

Standing back and looking at all four books: We could read them as one long tale of a divided self, with the two halves struggling to reunite into a mythic or psychological whole—Elena as the one who left, Lila as the one who stayed. I’d like to read it that way, but to do so I must embrace the Myth of Lila, the Outsize Lila, and not feel uncomfortable when tossed between realistic detail and hyperbole, or when manipulated by a too obvious hand.

At the same time, the high note of ambivalence that was struck at the end of Book Four swept me right back under Ferrante’s spell. By then, Elena’s a grandmother, and her daughters are building lives outside of Italy. She has a dog. She has a lover she sees from time to time. She’s lonely. The best she has to hold onto is the book she’s written, the one we’re reading. But she fails to find peace in that. Again, she’s haunted by insecurity—she fears that the disappeared and seemingly broken Lila is secretly writing a book, somewhere, and that Lila’s book will be better than anything she herself has yet written . . . she would happily be Lila’s editor . . . and her book’s promoter. . . Is this a nod to Lila’s never-ending capacity for self-invention? Or simply a final acknowledgement of her ties to Lila and their common language, ties now and forever broken? When Elena says: “My entire life can be summed up as a petty struggle to change my social class”—should we take her at face value? Could it really be that Elena, in her loneliness, her aloneness, her otherness, regrets having ever left the ‘hood? Doubtful. Rather, we can read her aloneness as the result of her quest to self-invent, to defy her destiny in the face of overwhelming odds.