Craft & Criticism
There is a moment early in Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend when the narrator, Elena Greco, describes her friend Lila as "my brilliant friend." The phrase is possessive, and it is also a kind of confession. Elena is not just describing Lila. She is describing her own relationship to Lila—the way Lila's brilliance has shaped her, threatened her, and made her possible. Over the course of four novels, Ferrante examines this relationship with a relentlessness that is both exhilarating and exhausting. By the end of The Story of the Lost Child, you understand that you have not been reading a story about two women. You have been reading a story about how we become who we are, and how much of that becoming is tangled up with the people we love.
The Naples of Ferrante's novels is not a backdrop. It is a force. The neighborhood where Elena and Lila grow up—a poor, violent, claustrophobic quarter on the outskirts of the city—shapes them in ways they spend their lives trying to understand. Ferrante writes about class with a clarity that is rare in contemporary fiction. She shows how poverty is not just a lack of money but a lack of options, a narrowing of the possible. Elena escapes through education, through marriage, through distance. But she never really escapes. The neighborhood is in her, and the novels are her attempt to reckon with it.
What makes the quartet so powerful is the way Ferrante refuses to sentimentalize. Elena is not a heroic narrator. She is often petty, self-serving, and blind to her own motivations. She loves Lila and resents her. She wants to be free of the neighborhood and she wants to be recognized by it. She is, in other words, a person. And because Ferrante allows her to be a person—with all the contradictions that entails—the novels feel more true than any tidy narrative of escape could.
Much has been made of Ferrante's anonymity. She has never appeared in public, never given an interview that reveals her identity. This choice has been interpreted in many ways: as a feminist gesture, as a marketing strategy, as a personal preference. But whatever the reason, it has an effect on how we read the novels. We cannot separate the story from the storyteller, because we do not know who the storyteller is. We are left with the text, and the text is about the impossibility of ever fully knowing another person—or ourselves.
In the end, the Naples Quartet is a confession, but not in the way we usually mean. It is not a confession of specific sins. It is a confession of the messiness of being alive, of the ways we hurt the people we love, of the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of it all. Ferrante does not offer absolution. She offers something better: the truth, as close as she can get to it, in all its unresolved complexity.
