“Sometimes,” writes Anthony Rudolf (about whom more in a coming entry), “a book comes out by a writer, whether or not a personal friend or acquaintance, which one cannot wait to read, so significant, however briefly, is he or she to one’s life as a reader, which is to say, one’s life.” When my daughter was young I used to have to preorder each new Harry Potter so that she could plunge into reading it on the day of its release. I thought to do something similar for myself with Elena Ferrante’s new book, but when it arrived I was busy in the way that adults sometimes are. I couldn’t start in on it for a few days. And what a difference a few days makes! By the time I cracked the book, a hundred reviews had already been published. I haven’t read them and probably won’t. But let me apologize in advance if what I say is what they all said or, worse, if it’s just the opposite. You might almost call The Lying Life of Adults Ferrante’s first “normal” novel. Her first three were more or less what I call (as readers of the last few entries of this diary know) novellas, concentrated, compelling, and claustrophobic—intensive rather than extensive, unlike the Neapolitan sequence beginning with My Brilliant Friend, which amazingly managed to stretch a similar feverish intensity on the framework of a multifamily saga across some 1700 pages and several decades of Italian cultural history. And all the melodramatic stops were pulled out; I like to read in bed before going to sleep, and Ferrante’s cliffhanger chapter endings cost me many hours of shuteye. Plus the sprawling saga was a kind of covert metafiction, entirely about reading and writing. By contrast, The Lying Life of Adults is of conventional length and scope—either short nor long but “just right,” as Goldilocks said. It’s no metafiction but not exactly realism either. Again, the scene is Naples, but the time is vague: there is television but no internet, and the PCI newspaper L’Unità still counts for something. The sixties, seventies, eighties? There’s a very overt thematic armature, built around a few basic dichotomies: truth and lie, beauty and ugliness, and perhaps above all the more closely aligned pairs of middle class and poor, refined and brutal, standard Italian and Neapolitan dialect. Unlike Elena in My Brilliant Friend and its sequels, Giovanna, the adolescent narrator of The Lying Life of Adults, is a product of middle class Naples, but only because her father had been able to escape from the slums to become an academic—to detach himself from his background; he’s taught her to consider his family, whom at the beginning she’s never met, as benighted inhabitants of an “undefined, nameless” space: “to visit them you had to go down, and down, keep going down, into the depths of the depths.” Into those depths a stray remark of his inexorably draws her, unraveling the cocoon of her life. But me, the book didn’t draw in so much. Having wasted a lot of breath in recent months reiterating to all and sundry that these entries in my Reader’s Diary are not reviews, I am here going to set down a sadly reviewerlike judgement: while The Lying Life of Adults is, by any standards but those set by Ferrante’s previous work, an eminently readable novel, in comparison to her other books it seems labored, abstract, and thin. The use of an overdeterminedly significant object, a bracelet, to tie the plot together feels like a writing workshop exercise. And without the gripping narrative voice of the Neapolitan quartet and predecessors to keep me focused almost obsessively on the fates of her characters, a question that had been lurking quietly in the back of my mind when reading the previous novels began to come to the fore: doesn’t Ferrante, despite all the complications she introduces, always leave us with the feeling that lower-class Neapolitan life is nothing but squalor and its dialect an instrument for the expression of brutality and ugliness? Can I accept that? Her protagonists may learn to see through the hypocrisies of the educated middle class even if they’ve struggled mightily and against odds to enter it, but in Ferrante’s books “the depths of the depths” of Naples are always a trap. And while her educated characters may debate “the usual subjects, politics, Marxism, the end of history, economics, the state,” The Lying Life of Adults, unlike the tetralogy, barely notices the system that creates and sustains the poverty of the poor. Education, in the world Ferrante depicts, makes an individual escape possible—at the price of self-forgetting.
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Elena Ferrante, The Lying Life of Adults, translated by Ann Goldstein, is published by Europa Editions, New York, 2020.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.