Why is it, wonders a character in Elena Ferrante’s new novel, “The Lying Life of Adults,” that when talking about sex, one adjective will never suffice? “Why does it take many — embarrassing, bland, tragic, happy, pleasant, repulsive — and never one at a time but all together?”
I can think of one word copious enough. The name Ferrante — the pseudonym of the Italian novelist — evokes for me all the ordinary, warring paradoxes of intimate life. It is shorthand for the tangle of impulses that drive her heroines, mothers and daughters torn between mutual dependence and contempt, their desires to devour and abandon each other, their instincts to nourish and betray.
Ferrante’s fiction has become a global phenomenon. “A cold surface and, visible underneath it, a magma of unbearable heat,” she has described her style, brought smoothly into English by her translator Ann Goldstein. Her quartet of Neapolitan novels, following a pair of rivalrous friends in postwar Italy, has sold more than 11 million copies worldwide, and was made into an HBO series. “The Lying Life of Adults” will be adapted by Netflix.
The new novel is suspenseful and propulsive; in style and theme, a sibling to her previous books. But it’s also a more vulnerable performance, less tightly woven and deliberately plotted, even turning uncharacteristically jagged at points as it explores some of the writer’s touchiest preoccupations.
The story begins in typical Ferrante fashion. A woman sits at her desk recalling a moment of painful disillusionment in her youth. Giovanna seems to combine the personalities of the two friends in the Neapolitan novels — Lila’s fire along with milder Lenù’s deliberation. But she has grown up middle-class and in the present day; the world has been gentler to her. Still, the idyll of her childhood was shattered at age 12, when she overheard her father calling her ugly.
His remark unleashed a wave of shame and self-loathing in the girl, almost too big for her body to hold. Her father said she was beginning to resemble his loathed, long-estranged sister Vittoria. “I slipped away,” Giovanna says, “and am still slipping away.” Something in her became permanently untethered.
This information is delivered swiftly in the opening pages. I read them also flushed with shame, feeling implicated, monstrous, apologetic — in short, that horrid sensation: 12 again. I also felt prickly recognition. This moment recreates a famous scene from “Madame Bovary”: Emma, beholding her small daughter, exclaiming at her ugliness. It’s a scene that has long obsessed Ferrante. In essays and interviews, she has wondered if her own mother ever expressed such a sentiment. She has envied Flaubert his shocking bluntness. She once wrote: “I’ve believed, angrily, bitterly, that men who are masters of writing are able to have their female characters say what women truly think and say and live but do not dare write.”
It’s true that Ferrante’s women never utter such a phrase. They never declare their children ugly or unlovable. They run away instead, or destroy themselves. In this novel, however, Ferrante lifts the line and twists it, putting it in the mouth of a man.
What does it mean to be ugly to your father? If your mother declares you ugly, the impulse, as in “Madame Bovary,” would be to find fault with her — the unnatural mother. There’s a feeling in Ferrante’s novel that had Giovanna overheard such a remark from her mother, there would be an immediate confrontation, and, perhaps, no book. But to be declared coarse and wanting by the father, by the family’s voice of “dazzling authority,” as Ferrante writes? Giovanna loses her moorings. She believes him. She begins to court his disapproval and, later, the disapproval of the world. She becomes consumed with befriending Aunt Vittoria. Her rebellion tips into an odd kind of freedom. She spies on her parents for Vittoria and reports on her aunt to her parents, liberally embellishing her stories. In the course of her double-agent dealings, she unearths the deep mendacity of the adults around her.
In a sense, Ferrante’s fiction has long been preoccupied with the notion of being ugly in the eyes of the father — of writing against the grain, against authority and convention. At the center of her work are not just women’s lives — but femininity itself. Dolls are important totems. A bracelet in “The Lying Life of Adults” takes on almost supernatural significance. Reviews of Ferrante’s work note how liberally her work borrows elements of the romance and the potboiler: the unapologetic melodrama, the cliffhangers. She pays serious attention to pregnancy, and to little girls and old women — rarely the subjects of serious fiction.
It was a form born of initial resistance. Ferrante grew up in the ordinary way; that is, believing that if she didn’t win male approval, “it would have been tantamount to not existing at all,” she has written. Only later did she discover the feminist literature that reoriented her thinking. “I realized that I had to do exactly the opposite: I had to start with myself and with my relationships with other women — this is another essential formula — if I really wanted to give myself a shape.” Her work began to draw on the classics as well as the stories in women’s magazines — “a fund of pleasure that for years I repressed in the name of Literature.”
It is the same trajectory she gives Giovanna. The father is dethroned; who will take his place? For a time, the girl finds a substitute in the chaotic allure of her aunt. Then, in another man — the charismatic Roberto. “I now felt him as an authority,” she thinks to herself. He declares her beautiful, and her self-image, blotted away by one man, is restored by another. But in Giovanna reigns a streak of stubborn independence. She reads what Roberto wants her to, but comes to her own conclusions (she finds the Gospels nonsensical and a bore).
She returns to her childhood friends, and crucially, she finds a freedom and privacy in deception, in authoring her own reality — an old theme in Ferrante. As a young woman the writer kept a diary, striving to record her life with absolute honesty. When she became terrified it would be discovered, she planted her “most unutterable truths” in fiction. It’s a move that seems to presage the adoption of her pseudonym and the artistic freedom afforded by anonymity.
Ferrante’s women go so spectacularly to pieces that it is easy to forget that the vast majority of her novels have, if not happy endings, then notes of reconciliation. Her women come through the fire because they are writers; the act of narration becomes an act of mending. Not of truth necessarily; as Lila says in “My Brilliant Friend”: “Each of us narrates our life as it suits us.”
The pleasure for the reader is often in spotting those moments of disjuncture that Ferrante flags for us, where the narrative is partial or incomplete. But here is where some wobbliness presents itself in the new novel. The mournful opening paragraph — with its caveat that this tale might only be “a snarled confusion of suffering, without redemption” — doesn’t square with the story in our hands, of the evolution of a young woman, so brash and sensibly secretive, allergic to banality, prone to fabrication but honest with herself about her desires. Ferrante leaves many threads dangling; we’re left to wonder at the initial forecast and the novel’s enigmatic, oddly heroic conclusion: What is this progress that seems to contain the seeds of regression? When is a revolt indistinguishable from a retreat? There might very well be a word for it.
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