The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, Europa Editions, 2020
Reading is and has always been spatial. Zadie Smith has said it, Henry James said it before her, and I am certain someone else said it even before him. We often enter novels as if they were houses, taking in whole rooms at once, or stopping to admire a well-positioned taboret or fix a crooked frame. Because of this, reading different novels by the same author often gives us an uncanny sense of déjà vu, the familiar feeling of a thing estranged, of perhaps entering our neighbor’s house to realize that, unlike us, they have held on to carpeted floors, or have shown a preference for impressionist art or gaudy vases, but that, fundamentally, our house and theirs were designed by the same mind. This is exactly the kind of unfamiliarity I felt as soon as I began reading The Lying Life of Adults, Elena Ferrante’s latest novel, translated by Ann Goldstein. At first glance, fans and devoted readers of Ferrante’s work will not be surprised by this novel, which reworks some of the major themes that have made the pseudonymous author a worldwide phenomenon. It traffics in urgent issues like gender and its intersections with class, the tension between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie of Naples, the perils of friendship and sexual desire, and the hypocrisy that often subtends the life of intellectuals. Ferrante isn’t exactly charting new territory here, and yet, as an undisputed master in rendering the familiar strange, her prose packs a punch just when we are about to settle into a sense of familiarity. With the publication of The Lying Life of Adults, we see an author at her peak, deftly synthetizing the density of her first three novels with the sprawling quality of the Neapolitan Novels, all while managing to uncover complex and challenging human truths.
Unlike its immensely popular predecessors, this novel does not trace a woman’s laborious ascent up the social ladder, but rather begins when the protagonist’s father has emerged victorious from the social battle and is comfortably settled into a middle-class life, which includes a position as a teacher in a prestigious liceo. The story is told in the first person, as are all of Ferrante’s novels. It’s hard to imagine otherwise at this point; prose, for her, serves as a conduit for the most rigorous kind of self-examination, often dragging us into psychic places we’d rather not inhabit. Take, for instance, the uncomfortable scene that opens the novel: Giovanna Trada, at age twelve, overhears a conversation between her parents in which her father calls her ugly. Or rather, she overhears him say that she is beginning to look like his long-estranged sister, Vittoria, a woman in whom “ugliness and spite were combined to perfection.” This aunt, whom Giovanna barely remembers ever seeing, has come to symbolize in the Trada household the squalor and indignity of the Neapolitan lower class—her name has, through the years, become a moniker for everything that Giovanna’s father has fought hard to leave behind. Thrown into disarray by her father’s words, an initiation into adulthood of sorts, Giovanna determines to establish contact with Vittoria, unleashing a series of events fated to unearth her family past and shed new light on her present.
Among the many merits of The Lying Life of Adults (though the title isn’t one of them) is Ferrante’s razor-sharp portrayal of a woman’s coming into consciousness through confrontation with a different set of class values. Vittoria, a morbidly ambiguous character as only Ferrante knows how to portray, refuses to accommodate the bourgeois sensibilities that shape Giovanna’s life. She continually presses her niece to “look, look” around and through the veneer of bourgeois acceptability coating her parents’ behavior. Faced with new forms of sociability (Vittoria’s daily life with her dead lover’s widow and her kids is a wonderfully odd depiction of a female-centered household), Giuliana begins to scrutinize the niceties of her world until—go figure—she identifies cracks in the façade that both her mother and father have meticulously constructed. Affairs are revealed, old resentments resurface, and at the center of it all, Giovanna struggles to understand womanhood outside the parameters of male imposed ascriptions.
And beauty is exactly one of these ascriptions. An obsessive attention to appearance, especially that of women, infuses these pages. From the initial scene of parental rejection, with its invocation of female physique, the novel goes on to portray characters that appear luminous one moment, only to morph into monstrous figures the next. So much is made of beauty and ugliness, and so marked is their commerce, that we cannot help but conclude that either word is nothing but an arbitrary ascription, and one, the novel suggests, that is inherently patriarchal, specifically of the middle-class variety. In this novel, conflicts of class play out against the backdrop of a rigidly stratified Naples. More than any other of Ferrante’s novels (with the possible exception of Troubling Love), The Lying Life of Adults has a distinct topography. Giovanna and her family live in the well-to-do San Giacomo dei Capri, sitting haughtily atop the Neapolitan cityscape, and though her parents venture into the city center for work or errands, much of Naples, like her own psyche, remains hidden to her. Vittoria, on the other hand, lives in the Pascone, “down, down, down on the edge of Naples.” In this sense, while the Neapolitan saga depicts upward movement, this story traces the obverse motion—a descent into the “depths of Naples,” but also into the geological stratifications of Giovanna’s unconscious and her family history.
Though split into seven sections, the novel is substantially divided into two parts: the first focuses on Giovanna’s rapprochement to her aunt and the proletarian world of her father’s youth, while the second begins with the appearance of Roberto, a young man for whom Giovanna develops a violent passion. An incandescent figure (and charming like her father: a red flag!), Roberto casts a spell on all those around him, Giovanna most of all. The scene in which she sees him for the first time is an excellent example of Ferrante’s stunning ability to depict the melodramatic in an ironic way (an impressive feat to achieve for a first-person narrator). Amidst Giovanna’s swooning, readers (in particular those familiar with the likes of Nino Sarratore) intuit that appearances are misleading, and that the more alluring a man is on the surface, the more deeply rooted the deceit must be. Especially in its second half, the novel explores covert forms of dependence hiding under a woman’s struggle for intellectual and emotional freedom—the threat that filial autonomy will come at the cost of romantic dependence.
At times, The Lying Life of Adults risks turning into an archetypal tale of teenage rebellion, but just when it does we get the impression that such moments are carefully calibrated by an author keenly attuned to popular tropes. Ferrante aims to shock, and she aims to please. But she also aims to critique. The novel works smartly to inscribe Giovanna’s behavior into a larger commentary of gender and class. All of the liberties conceded to her, we realize, are predicated on an analogous set of interdictions relating to the values of middle-class womanhood. In questioning these and trying to distance herself from her parents’ world, Vittoria will rebel against some of their most basic tenets: she will frequent “disreputable” people, she will embrace vulgarity, she will speak Neapolitan dialect (the language of the proletariat, the language of the “depths of Naples”), she will trade the pink dresses of her early adolescence for black miniskirts, all in a series of actions that will culminate with the loss of her virginity (that most patriarchal of constructs) in a quintessential Ferrantean scene of bodily discomfort—a Kafkaesque moment for the twenty-first century.
Perhaps The Lying Life of Adults could be conceived as a spiritual sequel to the Neapolitan Quartet. After all, Giovanna’s mother, Nella, is only five years older than Elena Greco; her father is uncomfortably similar to the universally reviled Nino Sarratore, both tricksters and womanizers, both pseudo-intellectual; and perhaps most strikingly, the Mephistophelian Vittoria, in both character and function, resembles Lila Cerullo. So, we ask, have things not changed? Why is Giovanna, thirty years later, fighting the same battles that Elena did? Is the future bound to replicate the past? The novel, in fact, raises questions of heredity from its very beginning, laden with the anxiety that the past is anything but. Throughout, it makes us wonder if all the effort we exert to avoid making our parents’ mistakes will, in the end, be for nothing. In Ferrante’s novels there is always the danger that the features of an abusive father will sooner or later misshape the face of an ideal husband, or that an aunt’s monstrous features will mar a twelve-year old’s expression. That alongside progress always lurks regress. But more than depicting an impasse, I’d like to think that these pages serve as a warning. A warning that the fight for feminist autonomy waged in the seventies, of which Elena Greco was representative in the quartet (and, we assume, Vittoria’s mother), and innumerable other struggles for social betterment that have consumed whole generations, are not work of the past. That women, more than ever, are subject to the ascriptions of men around them. All that is left to us, Ferrante seems to be saying, is revolt.
Victor Xavier Zarour Zarzar is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center, CUNY. His research focuses on narrative theory and the works of Elena Ferrante. He has articles forthcoming in journals including Modern Language Notes, Journal of Narrative Theory and Contemporary Women’s Writing. He is managing editor of the journal gender/sexuality/italy.
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