Elena Ferrante 'The Lying Life of Adults’: A Disappointment

by Karen Bojar
Posted 10/7/20

I fell in love with Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet and read all four volumes, as well as the earlier novellas, at least three times each. The latest book,  The Lying Life of Adults …

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Elena Ferrante 'The Lying Life of Adults’: A Disappointment

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I fell in love with Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet and read all four volumes, as well as the earlier novellas, at least three times each. The latest book, The Lying Life of Adults (LLA), just doesn’t measure up to the earlier works.

LLA has the familiar Neapolitan setting and the signature Ferrante themes: fractured family ties; the pain of marital infidelity; the psychological costs of upward mobility; the complicated interplay of standard Italian and Neapolitan dialect; the experience of life in a female body; and the torments of adolescent sexuality. However, while in the Neapolitan Quartet the narrative complexity and dazzling prose saved it from falling into melodrama, LLA too often descends into soap opera.

Most Ferrante fans do not share my assessment of her new novel. I have yet to encounter a seriously negative review, although many generally positive reviews contain caveats about Ferrante’s control of her narrative. Judith Thurman in the New Yorker comes closest to acknowledging the weaknesses of LLA, wondering “if Ferrante hadn’t drafted the story as a much younger writer, still honing her craft.”

LLA lacks both the frequently incandescent prose and the fully developed characters of the Neapolitan Quartet. One of the great strengths of the Quartet was the creation of complicated characters with conflicting motives and values; to me, those bundles of contradictions were indeed real people. Giovanna, the teenage narrator of LLA, will not stay with me as a real human being like Elena and Lila in the Quartet. I will not re-read The Lying Life of Adults to try to unlock the secrets of the novel. Once was enough.

More like the compressed time frame of the novellas than the sixty-year time span of the Neapolitan Quartet, LLA covers four years in the life of the adolescent narrator Giovanna who, unlike Elena Greco in the Quartet, leads a comfortable middle-class life. Elena is the classic striver focused on escaping the poverty and violence of working-class Naples; Giovanna’s family has already made that journey into the educated middle class. Giovanna overhears her father, upset that she has gotten bad grades in school, remark “she’s getting the face of Vittoria,” his much-despised sister. Obsessed with meeting her aunt, Giovanna descends into the lower depths of Naples to meet Vittoria and explore the world her father was desperate to leave behind.

As Giovanna is dealing with the turbulence of adolescence, she learns of her father’s infidelity and struggles to cope with her parents’ divorce. Fifteen-year-old Giovanna then falls madly in love with her friend’s fiancé Roberto, a 25-year-old professor. Ferrante in the Quartet brilliantly described the frustrations of adolescent sexuality in the sexually repressed Neapolitan working class culture of the 1950s; in The Lying Life of Adults  she describes how those tensions play out in the sexually liberated world of the 1990s educated upper middle class. The novel ends with Giovanna’s sexual initiation with a man she dislikes, a scene reminiscent of Elena’s turning to the much-despised Donato Sarratore to lose the burden of her virginity. Ferrante is known for her scenes of bad sex, and The Lying Life of Adults ends with a long drawn-out, clumsily written scene of bad sex. It lacks the emotional complexity, irony and occasional sparks of mordant humor that characterize such scenes in Ferrante’s earlier work.

Unlike the Neapolitan Quartet, there is little sense of the wider world in which the characters’ lives unfold. Although LLA is generally thought to take place in the 1990s, we learn nothing of the political events then roiling Italian society. Giovanna’s father refers to “disastrous times” but there is no explanation as to what this means. In the Quartet Ferrante has skillfully inter-woven the history of the corruption scandals of the early 1990s with the lives of her principal characters.

In The Lying Life of Adults we have Ferrante’s themes without Ferrante’s genius. How do we account for this? In 2016, journalist Claudio Gatti identified the pseudonymous author as Rome-based translator Anita Raja and speculated that her husband novelist Domenico Starnone might be her collaborator. In Italian literary circles Raja and Starnone had long been identified as the likely authors. To my knowledge there are four separate teams of linguists whose text analysis software concluded that there was a “high probability” that Starnone was the principal author. If there are linguistic analyses of LLA, I expect that Starnone will not be identified as the principal author and this may account for the relative weakness of Ferrante’s latest novel.

I had hoped for another extraordinary book from the author[s] writing under the pseudonym of Elena Ferrante, but LLA lacks the narrative skills and the compelling prose of Ferrante’s earlier works. It is the first Ferrante book I will not re-read.