The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante (Europa, 322 pp.)

Elena Ferrante has done it again. “Whenever I get to the real start of the story,” she told the Paris Review, “I tend toward an expansive sentence that has a cold surface and, visible underneath it, a magma of unbearable heat.”   Sure enough, her latest novel, The Lying Life of Adults, begins with a rumble: “Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly.”

The speaker is Giovanna, and the novel charts her path from adolescence to adulthood. It is set, like most of Ferrante’s novels, in the city of Naples, and it has all the character types and themes that have made her a household name: abandoned and half-mad women, treacherous and violent men, and a sense that personal identity is unstable, susceptible to malign influence, and perhaps a convenient fiction. Does it veer toward melodrama? At times. But credit where it’s due: Ferrante lives up to her own billing. Who else’s prose could bear comparison with a volcano?  

It turns out Giovanna is lying. Her father doesn’t call her ugly; he says something worse. “Adolescence has nothing to do with it,” he whispers to his wife when Giovanna’s grades slip, “she’s getting the face of Vittoria.” Giovanna’s father is a teacher and an intellectual, a supremely civilized man who “lived in utter autonomy, as though he had no blood relatives.” His estranged sister, Vittoria, is his mirror image: poor, uneducated, emotionally volatile, and capable of consuming weaker personalities. “In my house the name Vittoria was like the name of a monstrous being,” explains Giovanna, “who taints and infects anyone who touches her.” 

The comparison makes Giovanna curious, and she demands to meet her aunt, setting up a conflict between her father’s orderly, rational world and the seedy depths of the city.  Giovanna senses that “a violent struggle between my father and his sister was taking place in me.” Adulthood appears to entail becoming like one or the other.

As soon as Ferrante sets up the opposition between father and aunt, however, she troubles it. Both are lying, about each other and themselves. Giovanna’s father may not be as dispassionate as he seems, and her aunt may have weaknesses of her own. “Sometimes before falling asleep,” Giovanna reflects, “I imagined an underground tunnel that put in communication my father…and Vittoria, even against their will. Despite all their claims to being different, they seemed to be made of the same clay.” There is more than family resemblance at play here. Ferrante’s liveliest characters are always open to one another’s influence. They change and shift right there on the page, against their wills, right before our eyes.    

Ultimately, Giovanna suggests, reaching adulthood does not entail becoming like her father or her aunt. In fact, it means recognizing that a settled adult identity is a myth. Looking back at her childhood, she can’t say for certain that she’s become anyone: “I slipped away, and am still slipping away, within these lines that are intended to give me a story, while in fact I am nothing, nothing of my own, nothing that has really begun or really brought to completion.” Ferrante’s female narrators often come to a conclusion like this one. Their personalities are unstable, even fluid, and defy settled definitions, not least of all their own.

Not all of Ferrante’s characters are so enticingly mysterious. As a rule, Ferrante’s lower-class men are oversexed, unfaithful, physically abusive, emotionally needy, and incompetent lovers to boot. (“Boys get fed up with kissing,” Giovanna tells her friends, “they don’t even touch you, they go right ahead and unzip their pants.” Beneath a thin veneer of culture, the educated men are the same. Only needier. Perhaps turnabout is fair play. In 5,000 years of Western literary tradition, women have seldom had inner lives, let alone sympathetic ones. On the other hand, the hot-blooded Italian cafone is a bit of a stock figure. The predictability of Ferrante’s men saps some of the heat from her stories, and a righteous cliché is still a cliché.

Giovanna’s father is an exception. For all of his faults he’s as complicated as any of the women. In the exact middle of the novel he delivers a long, bewildered monologue: “You’re afraid of me, he said, I don’t seem what I was, and maybe you’re right, maybe every so often I become the person I never wanted to be, I’m sorry if I frighten you, give me time, you’ll see I’ll go back to being the way you know me, this is a difficult period, everything’s falling apart.” Giovanna wonders how a man so committed to rationality and self-control could suddenly become so dispossessed.

If Giovanna has anything of her own, it’s her stories. “The more I told and retold these stories, elaborating them,” Giovanna realizes, the more her friends “exclaimed: how wonderful, they make me cry.” She doesn’t want them to meet her aunt in real life, because the Vittoria of her story “was something of mine, my invention, that as long as it lasted made me feel good.” Although Giovanna does nothing so predictable as resolve to become a novelist, The Lying Life of Adults is recognizably a portrait of the artist as a young woman. She has the storyteller’s power: she can tell lies that enchant and delight, rather than harm.

As can Ferrante, of course. Here’s hoping she does it again.

"Paul W. Gleason is an associate editor at Psychiatric Times. He holds a PhD in religious studies and frequently reviews books on American religion, literature, and political economy. A member of the National Book Critics Circle's "emerging critics" class of 2018, he was recently a finalist for The Washington Monthly's "Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing."