lo s
a n g e l e s
r e v i e w
Instead of allowing the specific miasma of the Neapolitan Quartet to seep out and move through Ferrante’s other work, we must be suspicious of the smoothing processes of amalgamation or incorporation. The particular Naples of The Lying Life is not exactly the blurry-edged Naples of the Quartet, which in turn is neither the haunted, subterranean one of Troubling Love, nor the loud, dark Naples of memory that overlays the removed locales of The Days of Abandonment or The Lost Daughter. The uglinesses of all these books’ Naples are subtly different; laid atop one another, their imaginative maps form a harmonious, ever-expanding palimpsest, but not a single plan. Along with the desire for a singular, shared Naples, another of the tacit assumptions of the Ferrante novel is that the first-person female narrator must always herself be the author of the book itself. Yet, as Merve Emre notes sharply in The Atlantic, this is not articulated in The Lying Life of Adults. Unlike the narrators of her earlier books, who are literary women, authors or editors themselves, Giovanna never declares herself a writer. Instead, she refers obliquely to “the one who is writing,” who may be her, or may be her childhood friend Ida (the only self-declared writer in the book), or may be someone else entirely. “The one who is writing” writes in conversation with Giovanna, but we don’t know if that’s the internal conversation of the past self with the present, or the external conversation of the interviewer and interviewee. It is the conversation that is signified, rather than the one with whom Giovanna converses, to whom she could be telling the story from a distance of decades or mere months, even days. This non-specificity of perspective gives the novel a necessary 60
o f
b o o k s
immediacy and contingency that none of Ferrante’s earlier accounts of adolescence possess; the reader has nowhere to ground herself but the present moment of the narrative. The novel follows Giovanna from the ages of 13 to 16, the lurching years when every new experience is edged on one side with vague desire and the other with revulsion. It is also the age when the choice between wearing raw interiority on one’s face, or hiding it underneath the mask of comely politeness becomes necessary. One of the elements that The Lying Life of Adults captures best about early adolescence is the ugliest feeling of this time that Giovanna calls “those ugly years”: the involuted, self-loathing pleasure of the sulk. The teenage sulk is a phenomenon rarely expressed with sensitivity or accuracy; it is often caricaturized as a frivolous, playacting affect, where the sulker selfishly gives in to their pettiest negativities and lets them run rampant, at the expense of whoever happens to get in their way. But sulkiness, as Ferrante shows us through Giovanna, is more than just pouting and flouncing. It is also an exploratory, masochistic impulse to lean right into ugliness rather than turn away from it. “I thought I was hideous and wanted to be more hideous,” says Giovanna, a feeling that I remember clearly from those early teenage years, a confrontational, challenging way of being in the world. Like the “ugly feelings” that Sianne Ngai theorizes in her book of the same name, sulkiness might be classed as “minor and generally unprestigious […] [e]xplicitly amoral and noncathartic.” Yet this type of affective response is no less real or readable — or generative — than its grander, more easily aestheticized cousins like anger, sympathy, or shame. Rather than blockages on the
