By Elena Ferrante

ALL POSTS CONTAIN SPOILERS

I’ve never written about Elena Ferrante here before except once, in passing. At that time, all I said was:

“Sometimes, a Tier 2 novels transcends category: it is a story only about the specific people and specific incidents described, but it is so beautiful and perfect, so finely and humanely drawn, that it feels as though it touches on something universal, and so becomes about the common human experience without ever becoming a metaphor. Elena Ferrante’s novels are, in my opinion, the best of example of this kind of category-straddle: indisputably, to me, Tier 2 novels, the depiction of the two women at the heart of those books is so deft and true that it becomes about us all, in the ways that we are all alike.”

I didn’t go into specifics because the books to which I was referring, ‘The Neapolitan Novels’, are among the most hyped novels of the past twenty years. There was about a two-year period where every single book critic, NPR podcaster, or coastal culture-head was raving about ‘The Neapolitan Novels’, raving. You’d have thought they were the best books ever written by anyone, ever.

I tend to avoid books that are so popular, because I’m contrarian and reactive. But my mother asked me to read the first book, to give it a go and let her know if it was as good as everyone said. And it was, it was exactly as good as everyone said, and I ordered the remaining three novels immediately and read all four books within the space of a week, so that I cannot now remember which one is which, I can only recall the story complete.

Ferrante actually wrote ‘The Lost Daughter’ before ‘The Neapolitan Novels’. It is much shorter, a novella really, but it is recognizably the same author. It’s protagonist, Leda, is a single mother whose two young-adult daughters have just moved out of her home. To celebrate her new freedom, Leda decides to take a long summer holiday. While sitting on the beach, she begins observing a large Neapolitan family, becoming obsessed with a young mother and her daughter. When the little girl, Elena, briefly goes missing, Leda finds herself involved in the family drama, her own maternal regrets coming to the surface.

The same things that Ferrante did so well in ‘The Neapolitan Novels’, she does them here as well. Her most remarkable ability as a novelist, from my point of view, is her ability to invent women whose interior world is instantly recognizable to other women, even when their circumstances are very different from ours.

That is what I meant when I wrote that Ferrante’s novels transcend the stories that they tell. They are stories about individual women, individual lives, but they are so well-imagined, so well-drawn, that they speak convincingly about womanhood itself.

It’s really difficult to do this. In general, the more specific a story, the fewer people will connect with it. Perversely, the more we believe in a character, the less the character can serve as our avatar. It is easier to project yourself onto a blank slate; the more specific difference between you and a character, the greater the challenge of identification. There is no reason for me to identify with the struggles of a Neapolitan mother, fighting against rigid patriarchy, violence (implied or otherwise), poverty, motherhood. None of these factors describe my life.

But Ferrante’s women somehow fully inhabit their own stories and yet also leave space for ours. They are complete as characters, no holes or gaps, but they also contain us within them. Their womanhood informs them in the same way our womanhood informs us, and Ferrante’s particular gift is being able to show that without telling you about it, so you as her reader can find yourself in her characters, their womanhoods and the events of their peculiar lives.

It’s complicated, and I’m not explaining it well. But it is very powerful, in part because her characters are all ambivalent women. They are all women who feel constrained in some way by their own femininity, either by marriage, motherhood, family. They are limited by the intersection of their womanhood and the rest of the world, and even if you have not been so limited, to be a woman is to be constantly aware of the possibility.

I did not love ‘The Lost Daughter’ as much as I loved ‘The Neapolitan Novels’, but that isn’t because it isn’t excellent – it absolutely is. I think I loved it less because it is shorter. ‘The Neapolitan Novels’ are luxurious – they span nearly 2000 pages. You live in those books for the duration of reading – they are so well-done that you can.

‘The Lost Daughter’ is too short to inhabit: it accomplishes with gesture what ‘The Neapolitan Novels’ accomplish with depth. Nevertheless, the world, the problems, the bitternesses, are all the same, all recognizable. Like ‘The Neapolitan Novels’, ‘The Lost Daughter’ is so well-imagined that it is completely persuasive. And, for a woman who carries her own maternal ambivalences around with her wherever she goes, it is haunting and unsettling.

Regretful motherhood is so rarely depicted that it is difficult to know how much it happens. American culture (of which I am a member but Ferrante, importantly, is not) is oppressive in its celebration of maternal joy – it is very unusual to hear people talk about disliking or regretting their own children.

And I am grateful to Ferrante for doing it – her willingness to examine the hatreds and bitternesses of mothers is a godsend to women like me, women who did not have children because we were scared we would become mothers like Leda: trapped, angry, thwarted and bitter. I can’t think of another author who explores this exact territory in this way, and certainly no other author who explores it with so much humanity.

I highly recommend ‘The Lost Daughter’, but I do not recommend it nearly as highly as I recommend ‘The Neapolitan Novels’. But, really, I recommend them both: they are both forays into the same world, the same psychology. I am hard-put to think of novels that meant more to me as woman, or novels which impressed me more in their world-building. ‘The Lost Daughter’ is basically an amuse-bouche to the meal of ‘The Neapolitan Novels’ – if you ask me, you should eat it all.