Frantumaglia: Elena Ferrante's Blurred Lines

The enormous attention to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet—first the books published in the US between 2012 and 2015 and then the HBO series that has so far covered the first two titles, My Brilliant Friend and The Story of a New Name—has obscured the fact that in Ferrante's novelistic output as a whole, female friendship has not been a primary theme. The three intense and at times phantasmagorical novels she published before the Neapolitan quartet dealt with friendship almost not at all. Troubling Love (1992) is about the relationship between a middle-aged woman and her recently deceased mother; in The Days of Abandonment (2002) a mother of two young children is abruptly left by her husband; and while The Lost Daughter (2006) concerns two women who meet on a beach vacation, it has more to do with the narrator's odd, impulsive theft of a doll beloved by the other woman's daughter. Messy familial bonds have been the focus of Ferrante's work: bonds between grown daughters and their mothers, mothers and their young children, and women and their husbands. She is interested in intimacy and betrayal, merging and separation, the peril of togetherness on the one hand and solitude on the other. Either losing oneself in another or remaining too distant can threaten the stability of her first-person, female narrators. Above all, in Ferrante's novels, close relationships, whether hostile or loving, never truly end.

All three of Ferrante's pre-quartet novels involve a small number of significant characters and take place in highly compressed periods of time. Troubling Love, the first, is the least accessible. The theme of merging and identity (Delia, the narrator, at times cannot even distinguish her face from her dead mother's) is combined with prose in which imagination and reality are also merged, which creates confusion and claustrophobia for the reader. It's a novel with many fascinations, and rewards repeat readings, but its impact is diffused by a kind of cloudiness. By the time she released her next novel, The Days of Abandonment, Ferrante had found a way to differentiate and clarify her different registers: Narrator Olga's deranged grief never obscures the backdrop of "normal" life against which it takes place. The result is exhilarating, a portrait of a woman desperate not to break down after her husband's callous betrayal, breaking down nonetheless, and eventually scraping herself back together again. (It is the only Ferrante novel that has a comic ending, in the traditional sense of the restoration of sanity and love.) The Lost Daughter is maybe Ferrante's oddest novel, and it is the one she reports "made me feel most guilty…the writing dragged in unspeakable things." The narrator's bizarre behavior is never accounted for, leaving this reader, at least, uneasy and a little stunned. The Lost Daughter is a compelling fairy tale that doesn't wrap up its loose ends, a parable that can't be parsed.

While these three books made Ferrante a respected and much-discussed author in her native Italy, it is not surprising that she didn't become a global sensation until My Brilliant Friend and the subsequent volumes in the Neapolitan quartet (all translated into English by Ann Goldstein), the story of friends Lila and Lenù as they move from childhood through adolescence, adulthood, and finally, the beginnings of old age. In these four books, Ferrante vastly expanded both her cast of characters and the outward-facing elements of her storytelling. Now, instead of narratives taking place entirely inside of one apartment, or on one stretch of beach over a few days, there is a teeming world of shopkeepers and gas-station attendants and porters and cobblers, schools and universities, meat-processing plants, political protests, travel. Ferrante manages to maintain the deep interiority of her characters while giving them a much larger canvas for their activities. As many readers have noticed, the area in Naples where many of those characters...