The Story of the Lost Child is the fourth and final part of a 1700-page saga that spans a half-century of friendship between two women born in a brutal mafia-run slum on the edge of Naples. In Ann Goldstein’s translation from the original Italian, previous books in the series (known collectively as the Neapolitan novels) have received rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic, selling more than 250,000 copies in the United States alone.
Before the first instalment appeared three years ago, the author—whose real name she and her publishers keep secret—already had an international audience for pungent short novels such as The Days of Abandonment (2002), about a wife’s rage at the husband who leaves her with two children to run off with his younger mistress. Those books anticipate but can’t fully prepare you for the size and scope of the Naples quartet, peopled by some 50 characters spread over several generations. Truly the conclusion of a single novel cut in four, The Story of the Lost Child doesn’t stand alone: you have to start at the beginning with My Brilliant Friend (2012).
If that sounds like an undertaking, it isn’t. No precis could capture the thrilling sense of life pulsing throughout this magnificent epic. Ferrante is a great writer of scenes fraught with the accumulated emotional weight of the cast’s shared history. Yet she also has the skill of making her plot seem entirely natural, as if there’s simply no other way the story could happen. You can puzzle and argue over the books, too—it’s just that Ferrante never makes an obstacle out of difficulty. Nothing stops the flow until the end: it wasn’t long before I read the whole thing all over again.
Like all of Ferrante’s fiction, the quartet unfolds in a direct and conversational first person that sticks as a rule to a single linear time frame. This engaging style looks simple but proves appropriately Vesuvian: placid with the capacity to erupt. No chapter exceeds more than a few pages and after a slowish start the narrative becomes almost unbearably compulsive, not least in the latest volume, which crams half the story’s total time span into a quarter of its length.
Part of what makes the books feel so fresh and vital is their portrayal of women chiefly in relation to each other rather than to men, which remains rare. Rarer still is how Ferrante writes seriously about female experience in a way that doesn’t preclude writing about (for instance) organised crime, politics, terrorism or technology. (Her interest in subjects often seen as the dominion of men may partly account for the idea that she is really a man; Ferrante’s interviews conducted by email make clear she is indeed a woman.)
The intimate tale of Lila and Elena is also the tale of a city and a nation; in one especially vertiginous passage it even becomes “a lens through which to look at the entire West”—being born in Naples, we’re told, “is useful for a single thing: to have always known, almost instinctively... that the dream of unlimited progress is in reality a nightmare full of savagery and death.”
Framing the series is a mystery introduced in the prologue to My Brilliant Friend. Elena is a middle-aged writer in Turin; it’s 2010. When Lila’s son calls from Naples to say his mother’s gone missing—taking all her possessions and even cutting her image out of family photos—Elena switches on her computer and starts to write down everything she can remember about her childhood friend. “We’ll see who wins this time,” she thinks, a remark we can understand only in the context of what follows. From schooldays spent snatching each other’s dolls through tangled love affairs, broken marriages and the agonies of motherhood, Elena charts her and Lila’s fight to control their destiny in a time and place that regards women as objects and tokens or worse.
In postwar Naples the girls are bright but poor. Elena is able to persuade her parents to let her attend school past the age of 10; tomboyish Lila—more gifted—isn’t. It’s a fork in the road. Lila marries at 16, brutally forced to have sex by her husband on her wedding night after finding out that she was more or less sold to her husband as part of a business deal involving local gangsters. When, in part two, The Story of a New Name (2013), her marriage burns out in mutual betrayal, she gets a job stripping carcasses in a sausage factory whose boss molests the female employees. Meanwhile Elena gets to attend university in Pisa, becoming a writer ill at ease in her cohort of well-to-do 1960s radicals. Yet nor is she any longer at home in Naples, her mother-tongue dialect drying up, stung by Lila’s taunt that she has left her and the old district “alone in our own shit.”
The confusion of loyalty and rivalry in Elena and Lila’s relationship fuels the narrative in ways you might expect, with well-caught anxieties about who’s cleverest, who gets their period first and (later) whose children are the best behaved. But Elena’s feeling that Lila is always up to something also provides an inbuilt mechanism for page-turning suspense.
It starts small—why does Lila borrow Latin books from the library if she can’t go to school?—but grows to the point where she’s regarded as “a kind of holy warrior” who is “the only one capable of putting things in order in the neighbourhood.” She’s a picaresque heroine with a talent for rocking the boat whenever she seems cornered. As a young girl she holds a predatory local tough at knifepoint; at the sausage factory she ends up the figurehead of a campaign for workers’ rights; and she’s even suspected of masterminding a paramilitary cell as 1960s political tumult boils over into the violence of Italy’s Years of Lead. By the time she gets a surprising new job as a computer technician to gangsters she’s always resented, we’re afraid for them, not her.
Elena’s trajectory is more familiar. In Book Three, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014), she’s married in her thirties with two young daughters in Florence, her literary career stalled. It’s a set-up Ferrante portrays with tart humour. Elena considers asking her husband, a Virgil scholar who always works into the night, to do his fair share at home—but “what did I gain from a few washed dishes, poorly washed at that?” The solution is more radical: “Who gave a damn about the shopping, I had to take care of my future. And my future was to write...” In this gung-ho frame of mind she abandons her family to run away to France with an old girlhood love, Nino, himself a married parent. At the end of the book, she’s euphoric: “Something great is happening that will dissolve the old way of living entirely and I’m part of that dissolution.”
If we’re not convinced, nor is Lila, who at the start of The Story of the Lost Child tells Elena she’s an idiot: readers of prior instalments will know Nino isn’t the safest person with whom to set up as the vanguard of a new world order. On returning to Italy Elena must rely embarrassingly for childcare on the mother of the husband she’s just left. Trying to maintain a public profile while staying in sight of her daughters leaves her close to breakdown, as Ferrante’s narrators tend to be. Once she’s drawn back to Naples in 1979 and gets involved with Lila’s anti-mafia initiative it can seem Lila has forever been manoeuvring Elena just where she needs her: into the position of a famous novelist able to pen an exposé of the area’s crime lords, now busy flooding the district with drugs.
Halfway through this final volume the narrative hits breakneck pace, as Ferrante starts making inroads into her outsize cast list with terminal illness, murders, a suicide and—in the book’s poleaxing climax—another disappearance that precedes and perhaps inspires Lila’s. Perhaps one purpose of the classical references strewn throughout the novels is to remind any serious-minded readers discomfited by the surfeit of action that no one worries too much about whether or not Homer is sufficiently literary. In any case the scholars are already getting to work: in March two American academics were soliciting contributions to a book on “The Works of Elena Ferrante: History, Poetics and Theory.” There’s certainly plenty to chew on—not least what actually happens at the end.
It doesn’t spoil anything to say that Ferrante doesn’t settle on a motive for why Lila has disappeared: possibilities of grief, revenge or, in Elena’s words, “a sort of aesthetic project” are all kept in play. We’re told that from the late 1990s, “and especially from 2000 on,” Lila began to talk more about the idea of “eliminating herself” in the Google era: “One can’t go on anymore, she said, electronics seems so clean and yet it dirties, dirties tremendously, and it obliges you to leave yourself everywhere as if you were shitting and peeing on yourself continuously: I want to leave nothing, my favourite key is the one that deletes.”
Historical novels don’t normally comment on selfhood in the digital age. You can’t help but think of Ferrante’s own disappearing act; in 1991, with her debut imminent, she told her publishers she’d never promote her work in person. Whether the result of shyness or slyness or both, Ferrante’s peculiarly ostentatious form of privacy, conceived last century, looks yet more radical in the backlit present; as if, like Lila, she’s always been one step ahead.
Of course the question of who she “really” is won’t go away any time soon—and the fuss can’t be entirely unwelcome to an author who chooses to give her narrator her own pseudonym. One rumour suggests she’s Anita Raja, a middle-aged translator from Naples. In 2003 Ferrante’s Italian publisher brought out her translation of Christa Wolf’s novel The Quest for Christa T, in which a woman reconstructs the life of a free-spirited friend who dies young in the new East Germany, no place for nonconformity. Christa T (who fears she “might vanish without a trace”) wrestles with how to improve society but later regrets having the “presumption to think one could haul oneself up out of the swamp by one’s own bootstraps.” That’s Lila’s arc too. But if reading Wolf illuminates Ferrante it’s because the difference says more than any likeness. Banned in East Germany when it came out in 1968, The Quest for Christa T is a disorientating, impressionistic revolt against socialist realism, insistent on the impossibility of storytelling, less satisfying to read than to reflect on. The Neapolitan novels, by contrast, are the work of someone who by her own admission has “always been more interested in storytelling than in writing.” They go for the heart and head at once.
Before the first instalment appeared three years ago, the author—whose real name she and her publishers keep secret—already had an international audience for pungent short novels such as The Days of Abandonment (2002), about a wife’s rage at the husband who leaves her with two children to run off with his younger mistress. Those books anticipate but can’t fully prepare you for the size and scope of the Naples quartet, peopled by some 50 characters spread over several generations. Truly the conclusion of a single novel cut in four, The Story of the Lost Child doesn’t stand alone: you have to start at the beginning with My Brilliant Friend (2012).
If that sounds like an undertaking, it isn’t. No precis could capture the thrilling sense of life pulsing throughout this magnificent epic. Ferrante is a great writer of scenes fraught with the accumulated emotional weight of the cast’s shared history. Yet she also has the skill of making her plot seem entirely natural, as if there’s simply no other way the story could happen. You can puzzle and argue over the books, too—it’s just that Ferrante never makes an obstacle out of difficulty. Nothing stops the flow until the end: it wasn’t long before I read the whole thing all over again.
Like all of Ferrante’s fiction, the quartet unfolds in a direct and conversational first person that sticks as a rule to a single linear time frame. This engaging style looks simple but proves appropriately Vesuvian: placid with the capacity to erupt. No chapter exceeds more than a few pages and after a slowish start the narrative becomes almost unbearably compulsive, not least in the latest volume, which crams half the story’s total time span into a quarter of its length.
Part of what makes the books feel so fresh and vital is their portrayal of women chiefly in relation to each other rather than to men, which remains rare. Rarer still is how Ferrante writes seriously about female experience in a way that doesn’t preclude writing about (for instance) organised crime, politics, terrorism or technology. (Her interest in subjects often seen as the dominion of men may partly account for the idea that she is really a man; Ferrante’s interviews conducted by email make clear she is indeed a woman.)
The intimate tale of Lila and Elena is also the tale of a city and a nation; in one especially vertiginous passage it even becomes “a lens through which to look at the entire West”—being born in Naples, we’re told, “is useful for a single thing: to have always known, almost instinctively... that the dream of unlimited progress is in reality a nightmare full of savagery and death.”
Framing the series is a mystery introduced in the prologue to My Brilliant Friend. Elena is a middle-aged writer in Turin; it’s 2010. When Lila’s son calls from Naples to say his mother’s gone missing—taking all her possessions and even cutting her image out of family photos—Elena switches on her computer and starts to write down everything she can remember about her childhood friend. “We’ll see who wins this time,” she thinks, a remark we can understand only in the context of what follows. From schooldays spent snatching each other’s dolls through tangled love affairs, broken marriages and the agonies of motherhood, Elena charts her and Lila’s fight to control their destiny in a time and place that regards women as objects and tokens or worse.
In postwar Naples the girls are bright but poor. Elena is able to persuade her parents to let her attend school past the age of 10; tomboyish Lila—more gifted—isn’t. It’s a fork in the road. Lila marries at 16, brutally forced to have sex by her husband on her wedding night after finding out that she was more or less sold to her husband as part of a business deal involving local gangsters. When, in part two, The Story of a New Name (2013), her marriage burns out in mutual betrayal, she gets a job stripping carcasses in a sausage factory whose boss molests the female employees. Meanwhile Elena gets to attend university in Pisa, becoming a writer ill at ease in her cohort of well-to-do 1960s radicals. Yet nor is she any longer at home in Naples, her mother-tongue dialect drying up, stung by Lila’s taunt that she has left her and the old district “alone in our own shit.”
The confusion of loyalty and rivalry in Elena and Lila’s relationship fuels the narrative in ways you might expect, with well-caught anxieties about who’s cleverest, who gets their period first and (later) whose children are the best behaved. But Elena’s feeling that Lila is always up to something also provides an inbuilt mechanism for page-turning suspense.
It starts small—why does Lila borrow Latin books from the library if she can’t go to school?—but grows to the point where she’s regarded as “a kind of holy warrior” who is “the only one capable of putting things in order in the neighbourhood.” She’s a picaresque heroine with a talent for rocking the boat whenever she seems cornered. As a young girl she holds a predatory local tough at knifepoint; at the sausage factory she ends up the figurehead of a campaign for workers’ rights; and she’s even suspected of masterminding a paramilitary cell as 1960s political tumult boils over into the violence of Italy’s Years of Lead. By the time she gets a surprising new job as a computer technician to gangsters she’s always resented, we’re afraid for them, not her.
Elena’s trajectory is more familiar. In Book Three, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014), she’s married in her thirties with two young daughters in Florence, her literary career stalled. It’s a set-up Ferrante portrays with tart humour. Elena considers asking her husband, a Virgil scholar who always works into the night, to do his fair share at home—but “what did I gain from a few washed dishes, poorly washed at that?” The solution is more radical: “Who gave a damn about the shopping, I had to take care of my future. And my future was to write...” In this gung-ho frame of mind she abandons her family to run away to France with an old girlhood love, Nino, himself a married parent. At the end of the book, she’s euphoric: “Something great is happening that will dissolve the old way of living entirely and I’m part of that dissolution.”
If we’re not convinced, nor is Lila, who at the start of The Story of the Lost Child tells Elena she’s an idiot: readers of prior instalments will know Nino isn’t the safest person with whom to set up as the vanguard of a new world order. On returning to Italy Elena must rely embarrassingly for childcare on the mother of the husband she’s just left. Trying to maintain a public profile while staying in sight of her daughters leaves her close to breakdown, as Ferrante’s narrators tend to be. Once she’s drawn back to Naples in 1979 and gets involved with Lila’s anti-mafia initiative it can seem Lila has forever been manoeuvring Elena just where she needs her: into the position of a famous novelist able to pen an exposé of the area’s crime lords, now busy flooding the district with drugs.
Halfway through this final volume the narrative hits breakneck pace, as Ferrante starts making inroads into her outsize cast list with terminal illness, murders, a suicide and—in the book’s poleaxing climax—another disappearance that precedes and perhaps inspires Lila’s. Perhaps one purpose of the classical references strewn throughout the novels is to remind any serious-minded readers discomfited by the surfeit of action that no one worries too much about whether or not Homer is sufficiently literary. In any case the scholars are already getting to work: in March two American academics were soliciting contributions to a book on “The Works of Elena Ferrante: History, Poetics and Theory.” There’s certainly plenty to chew on—not least what actually happens at the end.
It doesn’t spoil anything to say that Ferrante doesn’t settle on a motive for why Lila has disappeared: possibilities of grief, revenge or, in Elena’s words, “a sort of aesthetic project” are all kept in play. We’re told that from the late 1990s, “and especially from 2000 on,” Lila began to talk more about the idea of “eliminating herself” in the Google era: “One can’t go on anymore, she said, electronics seems so clean and yet it dirties, dirties tremendously, and it obliges you to leave yourself everywhere as if you were shitting and peeing on yourself continuously: I want to leave nothing, my favourite key is the one that deletes.”
Historical novels don’t normally comment on selfhood in the digital age. You can’t help but think of Ferrante’s own disappearing act; in 1991, with her debut imminent, she told her publishers she’d never promote her work in person. Whether the result of shyness or slyness or both, Ferrante’s peculiarly ostentatious form of privacy, conceived last century, looks yet more radical in the backlit present; as if, like Lila, she’s always been one step ahead.
Of course the question of who she “really” is won’t go away any time soon—and the fuss can’t be entirely unwelcome to an author who chooses to give her narrator her own pseudonym. One rumour suggests she’s Anita Raja, a middle-aged translator from Naples. In 2003 Ferrante’s Italian publisher brought out her translation of Christa Wolf’s novel The Quest for Christa T, in which a woman reconstructs the life of a free-spirited friend who dies young in the new East Germany, no place for nonconformity. Christa T (who fears she “might vanish without a trace”) wrestles with how to improve society but later regrets having the “presumption to think one could haul oneself up out of the swamp by one’s own bootstraps.” That’s Lila’s arc too. But if reading Wolf illuminates Ferrante it’s because the difference says more than any likeness. Banned in East Germany when it came out in 1968, The Quest for Christa T is a disorientating, impressionistic revolt against socialist realism, insistent on the impossibility of storytelling, less satisfying to read than to reflect on. The Neapolitan novels, by contrast, are the work of someone who by her own admission has “always been more interested in storytelling than in writing.” They go for the heart and head at once.
