Between Women

The third novel in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series tracks a long and complicated friendship.

them back. Don Achille is a real criminal, if I were getting married by myself. And
By ROXANA ROBINSON and their meeting is neither funny nor she suddenly asked me, as if she really
charming. wanted an opinion: Do you think I exist?
ELENA FERRANTE IS one of the great nov- The shock of Ferrante’s writing lies in Look at me, in your view do I exist? She
elists of our time. Her voice is passionate, troubling juxtapositions like this. Children hit her full breasts with her open hand,
her view sweeping and her gaze basilisk. are our private, most intimate and vul- but she did it as if to demonstrate physi-
Her subject is the domestic world, and nerable selves; they should never meet cally that the hand went right through her,
part of her genius lies in her capacity to criminals, those impersonal, brutal and that her body, because of Michele, wasn’t
turn this sphere into an infernal region, destructive forces. In Ferrante’s series there. He had taken everything of her, im-
full of rage and violence, unlimited in its this disturbing conjunction is continual: mediately, when she was almost a child.
intellectual and emotional reach. Ferran- Crime affects every life, at every level. He had consumed her, crumpled her, and
te’s view of family life is anything but sen- Ferrante’s Naples is in thrall to the now that she was 25 he was used to her,
timental, anything but comforting. Camorra, which determines the girls’ he didn’t even look at her anymore.” He
In fact, her writing is remarkable for its behavior toward their classmates (suck- has sex “here and there as he likes. . . . In
velocity and ruthlessness. Reading her ing up to Camorra kids), the jobs their front of everyone he treats me like a rag
is like getting into a fast car with Tony boyfriends are allowed (maybe working for wiping the floor.” The novel’s pace is
Soprano: At once you are caught up and as an attendant at a gas station on the breakneck, packed with incident. The
silenced, rendered breathless, respectful. stradone) and what the girls wear when scenes are lit by emotion, as if struck by
Ferrante is the author of six novels. Her they come back from a honeymoon (big lightning.
sunglasses and voluminous scarves, to Ferrante herself is reclusive. (Google
THOSE WHO LEAVE AND hide black eyes and bruises). In “Those Images, asked for Ferrante, helpfully of-
THOSE WHO STAY Who Leave and Those Who Stay,” Lila has fers photographs of Meg Wolitzer and
Book 3, The Neapolitan Novels: “Middle Time” married a rich young Camorra lord, had Elizabeth Strout.) Oddly, rumors claim
By Elena Ferrante a child and separated from her husband. that these books have actually been writ-
Translated by Ann Goldstein
She’s poor again, working at a nightmar- ten by a man — perhaps because Fer-
ish factory job. During the day, she leaves rante’s narrative is so troubling, not what
418 pp. Europa Editions. Paper, $18.
her son with the neighbors, watching him we expect from a woman. Though haven’t
sink into the morass of ignorance and we learned anything from Doris Lessing,
most recently translated, “Those Who brutality. Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates?
Leave and Those Who Stay,” is the third in Elena has finished her studies at the There are many ways to examine crime.
a Neapolitan series that began with “My university, written a critically successful The Camorra and the Mafia have long
Brilliant Friend” and “The Story of a New book and become engaged to an academ- held a sinister and glamorous fascination.
Name.” The books (impeccably translated ic. She has joined the intelligentsia and is The Sopranos, with their vulgar, expen-
by Ann Goldstein) track the lives of two about to marry into the middle class, yet sive suburban house and mostly ordinary
women, Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo,
born in Naples near the end of World War
II. Their neighborhood, bone-scrape poor,
is deeply and permanently infested by the
verminous, lethal presence of the Camor-
ra. These novels reveal the intersection of
poverty and crime, and their effects on the
lives of women. Narrated by Elena, now in
her 60s, the series begins with the disap-
pearance of Lila and goes on to recapitu-
late a lost history — one that Lila has tried
to erase through vanishing, but that Elena
stubbornly records.
The two girls are schoolmates and
close friends, though their friendship is
complicated. They’re both poor and in-
telligent, but Elena is a good girl, duti- SIMONE MASSONI
ful and responsible, Lila a bad one, bold
and transgressive. Elena does well in
the world, but Lila, not allowed to finish her life is still rife with limitations. Her family life, present a skewed version of
school, charts a path of dangerous defi- distinguished husband is narrow-minded the American dream, suggesting that the
ance. The two women are counterparts, and restrictive, and she finds mother- Mafia is simply an alternative form of au-
twinned and competitive, mirroring, hood numbing. During the struggles of thority. Ferrante reminds us that crime
challenging and absorbing each other’s the 1970s between the Communists and corrodes, that violence and dishonesty
choices, each living a life that might have the Socialists she turns to politics, only to have a deep and permanent impact on
been the other’s. find that the Camorra rules here too. The society. She shows how they destroy the
It all starts innocently — little girls violent demonstrations are controlled by family, that most essential social unit;
playing with dolls — but nothing is inno- thugs. how the Camorra undermines the father’s
cent here. Lila and Elena drop each oth- Ferrante’s writing style is simple and authority, the mother’s love, the children’s
er’s dolls into a black cellar, where they straightforward, headlong almost to the futures.
vanish. Lila declares that Don Achille, point of clumsiness. Consider this passage In these bold, gorgeous, relentless nov-
the local Camorra chief, has taken them about Gigliola, a neighborhood girl who is els, Ferrante traces the deep connections
and insists on visiting him to ask for about to marry Michele, a Camorra lord. between the political and the domestic.
Standing in her new apartment, she de- This is a new version of the way we live
ROXANA ROBINSON is the author of nine books, scribes her plight to Elena: now — one we need, one told brilliantly, by
most recently the novel “Sparta.” “Michele, she said, is never here, it’s as a woman. h

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 9

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