Reflections on Elena Ferrante in anticipation of “The Lying Life of Adults”
This week Europa Editions hosted a Zoom event to promote Elena Ferrante’s new novel, The Lying Life of Adults. The novel came out in Italy in 2019, but the publication of the English translation is delayed until fall because of Coronavirus. I’d looked forward to the event, and enjoyed most of it. My favorite part was a reading of passages from the novel’s translations into different languages. Apart from English, I could only make out some of the Italian and the German, but it was interesting to hear the cadences and intonations of the six or so different languages.
I’ve been reflecting on Ferrante quite a bit in the last year. I finished the first two novels in the “Neapolitan” series, traveled to Naples in January, then watched both seasons of the T.V. adaptation. The novels raised many questions for me having to do with writing, social class, and ways of approaching a difficult past.
You might think that I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Ferrante fan, but I’m not. I didn’t voraciously read the whole series in a span of few weeks like some of her followers. In fact, when I began reading My Brilliant Friend shortly after I moved to New York City, I set it aside and hadn’t returned to it for several years. I’m not sure what it was, but I suspect that immersive quality of the prose that appeals to so many readers, instead felt a bit suffocating. I grew up far from Ferrante’s Naples, but I know what it means to grow up in a self-enclosed, matter-of-fact world from which there’s no apparent way out.
I returned to the books this year and gained a greater appreciation for Ferrante’s enormous talent for storytelling, her ability to create that solid, believable and expansive world. What impressed me most, though, was the honesty with which she represents the childhood experiences of her two heroines, Lila and Lenú. That narrative is a far cry from the “miserable childhood” genre that’s so prevalent in contemporary America fiction. In Ferrante’s novels the experience is deeply personal, but the point isn’t simply to tell an individual story or protest a social wrong. It’s somehow always larger than that.
On the other hand, in the narratives that tell us about the characters as adolescents and young adults, Ferrante often falls back on stock representations of Women’s Experiences — that is, the kinds of events and emotional dramas that already define “women” in the popular imagination. Even the friendship between Lila and Lenú is shot through with clichés: a studious but less-than-attractive girl competes with the pretty one who marries early; the pretty one steals the studious girl’s great crush. I was surprised that little was said about this aspect of Ferrante’s gender politics at the Europa event.
Despite that shortcoming, the novels have a lot to offer, and I’m glad that I read past the passages that grated on me. The expansive storytelling impulse is both their strength and their weakness. Like in The Thousand and one Nights, one narrative inevitably generates another. This narrative impulse doesn’t always leave much space for critical reflection; on the other hand, it expands the field of experiences that can be brought into language.
Ferrante’s new novel, The Lying Life of Adults, whose English translation should be release in September, appears to be another offshoot of that initial tale, even if it is presented as a stand-alone book. Based on early reviews, this novel is also set in Naples, but centers on a young middle-class character, an insecure adolescent girl not unlike Lenú. At the center there’s a relationship not between the protagonist and an older aunt, the family’s “black sheep” whom the girl is said to resemble.
Perhaps we’ll find more of that post-Second Wave feminism in this novel. I suspect, though, that even if it is there, such feminism won’t be its main strength. What we can count on is that Ferrante will once again tell us an engrossing story, leaving us hungering for more.
