The Neapolitan Quartet

"Yes, I read all of them. I know that there’s been a TV adaptation of them, which is apparently brilliant. It’s done by Italians, thank God: they’ve haven’t Americanized it or anything like that. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to watch it, because I know what Lila and Elena are like to me, and I want to retain that."

"SC: All of Ferrante’s novels are narrated by women who are somehow related to literature (they’re writers, editors or journalists); they mostly have children of a certain age, and they’re usually from Naples. There’s an impulse to attribute those qualities to Elena Ferrante herself, because that’s an assumption we’re used to making with female authors. The four-volume novel that is My Brilliant Friend plays into that very seductively. The narrator, also named Elena and nicknamed Lenù, falls into these parameters: she’s from Naples and she’s a writer. In the first volume, we follow Lenù and her friend Lila through their childhood. They’re raised in a very poor neighborhood, and they’re both girls with ambitions. And that’s sort of it. That’s the plot. But the body of the book describes the neighborhood, and the people there, and the political moment in mid-century Italy that they’re in. ME: The plot of the book is about education, and how education puts these two women onto divergent paths. One of the most moving scenes is when they buy a copy of Little Women . They read it together in this courtyard and it becomes their book. It’s clear that this is a friendship that is everywhere touched and mediated by the literary—both by how it can bring people together in a shared vision of the world and how it can drive people apart. Lenù gets to go to school, and she gets to cultivate her literary interests in a very institutionalized and culturally valued way, and Lila has to work in her father’s shoe shop. ME: Yes, Lila takes everything with her—there’s no trace of her left. No clothes, no books. She cuts herself out of all the photographs. And Lenù starts writing the novel that we are reading as an act of vengeance. It becomes a way of trapping her friend. She says, “We’ll see who wins this time.” SC: We’re supposed to think that they are. I think one of the things that’s so interesting about this book is that we’re supposed to interrogate what friendship is. Because friendship is not nice—a lot of the time. [ Laughs .] That’s what I love about My Brilliant Friend . The four of us all have different favorite books, but the first one might be my favorite because it starts with how little children are so cruel to each other, even if they love each other. They’re cruelest towards the things that they love the most. And friendship in Ferrante is both the greatest thing and the worst thing: the person who loves you can hurt you more than anyone else because they’re supposed to not hurt you. And I think that in her vision of friendship—and this is why it’s significant that the first book and the quartet are called ‘My Brilliant Friend’—both of them are the brilliant friend to each other. “Friendship is not nice—a lot of the time” ME: We see this return at the end of the fourth book, when Lenù writes a novella called A Friendship that’s about her and Lila’s childhood. Importantly, it’s a novella, rather than a quartet of novels. SC: It tries to sum up a pat version of what friendship is, a lifelong friendship. And Lila cannot abide that. ME: Friendship is a shadow text, the failed attempt against which we are supposed to judge the novels. The novella is too pat, too formally symmetrical, too perfect. And the quartet is this kind of sprawling— SC: —Scrambling— ME: —Messy, generically promiscuous— SC: —Unstructured— ME: —Vacillating, unformed thing. SC: But friendship is like that. ME: Yes, it is. I’d add to your point about cruelty, Sarah, that children are often fascinated by each other for reasons they cannot explicate to themselves, and so that fascination leads them to create interior lives for one another that are fantastical, even mythological—lives that borrow from literature because for some children, that’s their primary example of other peoples’ minds. One of the things Lenù is doing to Lila is mythologizing her and their friendship—partially so she can mythologize herself. That recedes in the later books when they are older and have seen each other at moments of vulnerability. SC: It’s a longer process of seeing each other. And meanwhile, we get the feeling that Lila has maybe seen Lenù earlier, while it takes all four books for Lenù to see Lila. But I like that point about children. There’s an opacity to people when you’re a child. You can’t totally get inside another person. ME: And you also don’t know yet that you can’t get inside another person. SC: It’s like in Ian McEwan ’s Atonement when Briony, the child protagonist, has a sort of Virginia Woolf conversation with herself about whether other people exist or not. Do other people have minds, or they just automatons? I remember being very preoccupied by something like this when I was a child. What is it like to be another person? What are they like on the inside? Do they think the way I think? The first volume of My Brilliant Friend is very much like that: what is it like to be Lila? What is it like to think like Lila? ME: And Lenù can never quite rid herself of that impulse. Which is why that first book starts with her saying “We’ll see who wins this time.” She thinks: I’ll trap her, I’ll fix her thought or her being within these pages so that even though she may try to erase herself, my writing will contain more than just the traces she left behind. It will be a full reckoning with the world that Lila has created for her, for the two of them. SC: Which she never accomplishes. ME: The first starts with their childhood, when they’re six or seven, and it ends with Lila’s marriage when she’s 17. The second book picks up immediately after that, on the night of Lila’s wedding. SC: It actually begins by recapping the first book, like we’re watching a new episode of a television show. It does this in a refracted way, where we hear it re-narrated through what Lila said about her wedding night to Lenù later. At the end of the first book we see the wedding firsthand through Lenù’s eyes, and then at the beginning of the second book we get it from Lila’s side. ME: The second book tells the story of Lila’s marriage to a man who abuses her, whom she has essentially married for money in the first book. SC: Book two is the end of romance for Lila. ME: She has a terrible marriage; she has an affair with Nino, who Lenù has been in love with since they were children. Lila thinks that they’re going to have an idyllic intellectual life, living together, writing together, her helping him make his career. But Nino leaves after several weeks. At the same time, Lenù goes to college; she does incredibly well. She meets a man from a very well-connected, well-established family of bourgeois intellectuals and marries him. SC: Lila has stayed in the neighborhood and not, by external measures, succeeded. Lenù has left the neighborhood and left Naples completely, and by external measures has been clawing her way up. ME: She writes her first book and starts making a name for herself as a writer who writes about women from a woman’s perspective and is not afraid to write about sex or desire. ME: I think that we are supposed to see both the narrator, Lenù as narrator, and the characters, Lila and Lenù, acting in ways we might judge as petty, or uncontrolled, or base. And yet they’re often things we have all done; things that we wanted not to want to do. There’s a frankness about what women desire in Ferrante; how they desire things selfishly, for themselves; and why they feel compelled to act against their desires or fear acknowledging them. “There’s a frankness about what women desire in Ferrante; how they desire things selfishly, for themselves” SC: I think that there’s a frankness about Ferrante, but for me I’m not sure it’s about doing things or not doing things or judgment or not-judgment. I think there’s something very interesting in how she describes the banal happenings of life, or of growing up, or of being someone who wants things, who is ambitious, where there’s a very different story that could be told. An easier version that’s a positive spin: women who support each other and, through their love for each other, through their beautiful friendship, transcend the intellectual boundaries that are imposed upon them. That story is much more familiar to us from other kinds of novels. But what’s interesting about Ferrante is she’s unafraid to show us the ugly feelings that are not even the consequences of, but that naturally accrue with the appearance of, things like ambition or competition. ME: Or what you see in book three: the ugly feelings that accrue with children and marriage. SC: Right. Again, the banalities of domestic life, and the kinds of things that she’s talking about—despite the fact that people refer to these books as soap operas—are not that dramatic, but they’re important. ME: I think they’re dramatic! Or at least the two narrative strands of book three are to me. On the one hand, you have Lenù, who’s now comfortably established as a bourgeois intellectual; she’s married and has two children. Book three is about her having gained everything, but feeling like she’s lost her sense of self as a desirable and desirous person, her sense of privacy, in the process. At the same time, Lila goes back to the neighborhood and becomes increasingly involved in its local politics, which are also starting to intersect with the national politics of Italy in the 1970s. As Sarah said, you see on both the domestic and more explicitly political front how really basic, day-to-day events—shopping for groceries, changing diapers—become occasions, or somehow manage to scale into far-reaching social concerns. Individual decisions seem to have massive externalities, if only imaginatively. All of a sudden, you’re back in the neighborhood where the girls grew up, but the neighborhood seems to encapsulate the world—the same way in Lenù’s house, domestic squabble seems to encapsulate everything that happens between men and women. Between bourgeois, heterosexual men and women who are academics with children—let me just say this in the most autobiographical way possible! [ Laughs .] SC: One of the things that I love about these four books in particular is that they do accomplish what Merve is talking about—that torqueing of scale—but they don’t have to. There’s nothing didactic or pedantic about these books. And this is why it’s possible for so many people to read them; this is why my mom loves these books. She doesn’t give a shit about Italian politics or feminism in the ’70s. Even though she is exactly of that generation, she’s not in it for the labor politics. ME: And neither are the characters, though at times they feel as if they should want to be. But they can’t quite be. SC: Right. There are characters who want to be and characters who don’t want to be. We get this whole wide range, as we do in all of our lives, of characters who want to be important politically and characters who just want to work at the counter of the pastry shop and mind their own business. But Ferrante manages to gesture towards that expansive scale without ever coming out and saying it. ME: My controversial opinion is that there should not have been a fourth book. I think it’s a fantastic trilogy. And then as a quartet, I think the fourth one—I do not think it sticks the landing. SC: Interesting. I think that the fourth book has many flaws, but it’s necessary. I do think the third book is the height of involvement for me. Reading it the second time—I got older, and that helped—it more directly addressed some of the things happening in my professional life since we started. But I think that the fourth book is much more interesting than I originally gave it credit for. If we didn’t have the fourth book, we wouldn’t have this amazing scene with the earthquake. ME: That is the best scene. The fourth book gets out of her control. SC: Well, I think that’s on purpose. ME: I know you do! That doesn’t mean it’s good, though. SC: I don’t think that the fourth book is necessarily good. I think there are large spots of writing in all of the books that are not very good, or could be edited down. But I think the fourth book is necessary. It does bring in the tropes of Ferrante that we are going to talk about with the other four choices here. ME: The ending comes so abruptly. In the first book, the way that Lila and Lenù connect is by playing with their dolls. And Lenù convinces Lila to drop her doll, who is a much prettier doll than Lenù’s doll, into a grate. They to try to find the dolls, and they can’t. The fourth book ends after Lila’s disappearance, with an epilogue called ‘Restitution’. One day, Lenù finds a big parcel outside her door. It contains the dolls from 60 years ago. I’m getting goosebumps telling this for some reason!— “If you read her other work after you read the quartet, you start seeing these lost dolls and lost children everywhere” SC: And this happens at the end point the first book begins with; Lila has disappeared and the framing device of the quartet comes full circle. ME: This clues us in to the fact that these dolls are doing this kind of framing work. And then if you read her other work after you read the quartet, you start seeing these lost dolls and lost children everywhere. The other thing that happens in book four is that Lila is pregnant with a girl, an incredibly gifted, dark-eyed, darting-gazed child, who disappears. And nobody can find her. Lila becomes a madwoman wandering the streets, looking for her daughter, and she can never, ever find her. And that makes everything that’s happened in books one, two and three all of a sudden look like child’s play. The absolute tragedy of not just losing a child, but having no idea what has happened to that child, illuminates Lila’s decision to disappear at the beginning of the first book."