The first Elena Ferrante novel I read, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2013), third book of the celebrated, internationally popular Neapolitan Quartet, is noticeably misshapen. A conversation lasts about 75 pages, seven years pass within one. This may sound like carelessness of structure that distracts and obscures, dousing the material. But Ferrante tells the story of a relationship that doesn't fit snugly into a plot, one lasting from childhood to adulthood, in episodes and shards, whatever matters most as life proceeds. Form matches content, following along isn't a problem, and the material burns undiminished. The Lying Life of Adults (2019), Ferrante's latest novel, is about a girl named Giovanna, living in Naples, Italy in the early 1990s, and the years leading to her becoming a woman. First sentence, first lie: She overhears her father call her ugly. Actually, he says she has the face of his hated sister, her aunt, Vittoria. Giovanna, ashamed yet curious, eventually sets off to meet Vittoria. The novel unfolds neatly and chronologically, chapters broken up into numbered sections of about equal length, with no shifts in approach from one to the next.
Ferrante's conventional choice of structure conflicts with what brought me back to her work: the real, presented before a misguided sense of propriety can censor it. Uncomfortable details. Messy relationships. Seething and the ineluctable explosion. Giovanna passes over stretches of time too but it has no influence on the shape of the narrative. Alone, this might not even qualify as a minor criticism if structure serves the basic purpose of smoothing the reader's path. But form matches content, the twist, the revelation, the gasp-inducing moment occurring precisely when needed. For instance, Giovanna goes from guys occupying no mental space, hardly exploring her romantic or sexual feelings, to falling madly in love, at first sight, not with a boy but a man, and not just any man but precisely the man she shouldn't, which would cause more of a programmatic explosion. In addition to being handsome, he's remarkably intelligent and charismatic, we're told.
Giovanna has no distinct verbal stamp - no tics, no slang, no depth of lexicon, no particular gift for a memorable line. (The good reviews do not savor her voice.) She frequently refers to the difference between Italian and dialect but, possibly due to the difficulty of translating the difference, never goes further than pointing it out. What's more, the character's sense of self is narrowed to the drama of her family life. Even modest, passing references to what else is going on with her, who she is outside of it, what else she thinks, are few. Thus, in language and personality, Giovanna, the most fully drawn character, isn't.
The world of the novel is highly circumscribed. Given the paucity of anything to distinguish the time period, the 90s could have been the 70s or the 50s. It's not a novel of place. And though the book covers years of her life, external events never break into the narrative - no storm, no car accident, no change in the country's political makeup, no errant ball to the head.
So what's left to involve the reader? What seems to come easiest to Ferrante, what I came for, her brand of the real. She's inconsistent with it. And after what devolves into a fatiguing wash of incidents, of rifts and reshuffled alliances and sudden changes of heart, they coalesce at the very end, with perhaps the best scene, a sexual encounter, brief, squalid, and farcical. After all the lies, the swerves, the sheer confusion, adults pulled one way or another by sexual desire, a declaration of freedom, an anti-romance novel.
The element of soap opera in all this is pronounced. Ferrante doesn't wildly escalate, into the realm of amnesia and evil twins (although there is a "magic" bracelet). But things happen at regular intervals because they must, to bring the viewer back for the next episode, to keep the book going. Soap opera in the guise of a diary: venting (controlled), honest and heated, narcissistic and tedious.
The Lying Life of Adults reads like a competent debut.
