I went into this book with one question: how seriously should I be taking Elena Ferrante as a writer? It is getting very hard to understand how to evaluate contemporary fiction in a media market that insists on productizing every idea it can get its hands on, so when I hear that a book has been made into an HBO miniseries, it’s hard to suppress my suspicion that the book was made for the miniseries audience rather than the literary audience.

The Book as a Physical Artifact

This suspicion was exacerbated by the cover of the book, which features an endorsement quote at the top from… Gwyneth Paltrow? Really? The cover of my edition also depicts a picturesque wedding scene that seems completely divorced from the imagery of the book. Perhaps worst of all, it is adorned with a printed medallion proclaiming the books as the “New York Times #1 Book of the Century”. I don’t put a lot of stock into these NYT lists, but this accolade was a little off-putting for me.

Ferrante as an Author

But back to my original question about Ferrante: look, we should be taking her seriously. I would be shocked to see this book sitting on top of the century list in 2099, but I expect Ferrante will enjoy a comfortable place in the conversation of best authors of the 21st Century.

Her writing is organized, well-constructed, and–in many of its best moments–quite moving. Her perspective is refreshingly female, authentically working class, and uniquely post-War Italian. I’m sure there are readers out there much more qualified to appreciate these elements of her style/influence, but they certainly made an impression on me.

My Brilliant Friend as a Work of Fiction

What I Liked:

• It is refreshing to have a female protagonist that did not simply serve as a foil to the male characters in the book. Ferrante reminds of Sally Rooney in her ability to make you forget that 95% of the books you’ve ever read have really been for/by men. It feels natural without minimizing the differences in gender perspectives. One way Ferrante does this so seamlessly is by leveraging the post-WII Italian societal norms, contrasting our love for the narrator with the disregard with which she is often treated due to her age, gender, and economic status.
• The book is as psychologically complex as anything I’ve read in the last year or so and indeed holds up well on my “all time” list from that perspective. The thing I think Ferrante gets so right is how multiple and unusual our internal motivations can be. One of the worst assumptions literature tends to make in a post-Freud world is treating sexuality as the absolute bedrock (or, at least, one of them) of the psyche. Ferrante’s narrator shows how even sexual drives are subject to the influence of other motivations (social status, friendship, hidden assumptions/culture, etc.)
• Moreover, what she really shows well–and what more coming of age stories could do better by her example–is how much time and mental energy an individual spends simply speculating as to who they are. Too many narratives focus on striving/becoming, as if this is the most natural mode of life. Like Ferrante’s Lenu, most of our thoughts are not as forward-looking as we would like to believe; instead, consciousness is largely a process of looking at where we are–and how we got there–and trying to make an inference about what that means we are.

What I Didn’t Like

• All of the strengths of the Adolescence are mirrored by corresponding weaknesses in the opening Childhood section. I don’t blame Ferrante for not being able to tap into her 8-year-old psyche as well as she can tap into her 16-year-old psyche; I do, however, blame her editor for including the section. Taking the historical relevance of the novel too seriously leads one to overrate the importance of the Childhood section. The result is a book that takes a long time to get out of the blocks. I almost quit.
• The translation seems clunky at times. I don’t read Italian, so I’m speaking less here about word choice and more about a formal issue with translating this book. Ferrante uses slang dialects, formal Italian, and even Latin throughout the book to symbolize the way characters move up and down (or pretend to move up and down) the socioeconomic and educational hierarchies. As a very old and very regional language, Italian permits this seamlessly in a way that English does not. Ann Goldstein has chosen to deal with this problem by having the narrator explicitly call out when characters are speaking in dialect. I’m not saying I have a better solution, but it creates choppiness in the exchanges and, I think, shortchanges the impact this masterful variation of language must have in the original.

Overall Rating: 7.5/10. Will I read the rest of the Neapolitan Quartet? No, I don’t think so–life is short, and time is finite. But I’m happy to have read this and overall would recommend.