Elena Greco is a difficult person to like, and an even more difficult person to respect, especially over four novels and nearly 2,000 pages. One gets exhausted listening to the internal dialogue of her jealousies, desires, worries – especially when she reaches a point of resolve, and the resolution is obviously the wrong choice. But, reader’s revenge — as if to substantiate Elena’s fearful jealousies, I find that I am, like virtually every man in this story, also in love with her best friend Lila.
Whether Elena Greco, often called by her nickname “Lenu,” first person narrator of these stories, is the alter ego of the author, Elena Ferrante, is not that important. Part of the allure to readers of the books appears to be the use of a pseudonym by the author and the effort by the author to avoid detection of her or his identity. Ferrante, like the narrator Greco, grew up in Naples and went on to become a highly regarded writer of books of women and relationships. Their first names, Elena, match of course. Not a big deal. Don’t most authors write what they know? But, note to self, adopting a pseudonym and attempting to avoid detection is catnip for attracting reviewers and marketing.
On one level it could be viewed as the remarkable success story of a woman coming of age in the transitory period of mid-20th century Neapolitan poverty, through the idealism of the 1960s, to the total victory of capitalism and the accompanying isolation of the digital age. Here, a female survives and emerges from the worst of a violent, misogynist, conservative corner of a dangerous and poor neighborhood in Naples.
Lenu is the first born of a poor family who begrudges her an education, and is raised in a neighborhood where a girl dreams of no more than to marry, as teenager, a man with nice clothes and a job. A neighborhood of boys and men for whom honor demands violence if another boy looks at his sister or if his wife talks to another man without an escort. A man who will impulsively strike the face of his wife if he feels insulted or shown up. A neighborhood in which credit is handled by the brothers of a Camorrist family tracking debts in a little book, enforcing debt and allegiance with violence. Brothers who fund fascists in street fights with the local communists. Brothers who can carry a cordial conversation in which greetings are exchanged but in which threats are implied.
Lenu, it would seem, is a bright girl, but unimaginative and conforming. It is her great fortune to be the best friend of Lila Cerullo, daughter of the shoemaker. From the beginning, Lila is beautiful, lively, opinionated, cynical, creative and smart – and she recognizes that Lenu is also smart, but careful. She takes it upon herself to encourage Lenu in school, to push Lenu to excel, and watch out for Lenu’s best interests. It is as if Lila can foresee that she herself is unlikely to escape the neighborhood but that Lenu has a chance with her social skills and school studies.
Why would Lila suspect that Lenu is more likely to succeed than herself? Because Lila recognizes that she is unwilling to compromise in the interests of pleasing others. Lila calls out everyone. The grade school teacher is humiliated when Lila shows her up, but the teacher loves Lenu for her hard work and diligence. Lila, at any early age, argues with her father to such an extent that he literally throws her out of the apartment window. Lila puts a knife at the throat of the teenage heir to the Camorrist family when he and his brother attempt to force Lenu into their car. Lila later humiliates one of those brothers who arrogantly attempts to choose her for marriage. Lila avoids that marriage by marrying, at 16 years old, another relatively successful, but older neighborhood boy. When she realizes at their wedding night that he has betrayed her by allying his business and personal power with the brothers, she insults him and refuses his bed. He beats and rapes her on the night of their wedding.
While Lila is a brilliant troublemaker, Lenu conforms, avoids conflict, excels in school, and is smart. Lila is determined to help Lenu succeed. But, this is not an expressed objective, and for the next 50 years, Lenu fails time and again to recognize the ways her best friend has sacrificed to help Lenu succeed.
This failure of Lenu to understand that Lila has aided Lenu’s success is maddening, though Lila herself lets it go. The failure to appreciate and empathize is even aggravated by the passive-aggressive ways she betrays Lila over the decades.
As children they read Little Women together and decide that the best of all lives is that of a writer of books. Surely, a writer is both famous and rich. Lenu takes it to heart, propelled in many ways by hoping to measure up to Lila’s imagination.
As much as the book shows women escaping the destiny of generations of Neapolitan women, the problem is men — boys and men from the neighborhood, and boyfriends and husbands beyond that. Lenu eventually finds her novelist voice in writing of women who escape the expectations of men. And yet, her life becomes ground down by her obsessive fixation on attentions of men.
She has the first love syndrome of a middle-school girl, loving from a distance a callow young man, Nino. Nino’s behavior is foreshadowed by his father who attempts to charm and bed every woman he meets, and who takes Lenu, as a teenage virgin on the sand of a public beach at night, at a moment’s notice. Lenu orchestrates this rendezvous because she is jealous that Lila is having an affair with his son, Nino.
Later, when Lenu is married to Pietro, a courteous if dull professor in Florence, Nino, by then a professor himself, pays a professional visit and stays with the family for a few weeks. Lenu leaves her bed in the middle of the night to make love with Nino while her husband and children sleep down the same hall.
Completely infatuated with Nino, and wanting to be with him for a weeklong conference in another city, she knocks on the door of a neighbor to ask her to watch the children for a bit. No one, her children or husband or the neighbor, realizes that she has left the city for a week.
She cannot leave the ways and dialects of the neighborhood behind, and finds herself often screaming in irritation at her children for behaving… as children.
Worse of all is how she betrays Lila repeatedly. At one point several years into her disastrous marriage, Lila asks Lenu to safeguard Lila’s diary for fear that Lila’s husband will find it and beat her when he reads her accounts of the marriage. Her charge to Lenu, that Lenu accepts, is for Lenu to keep it safe and to not read it. Lenu, of course, immediately reads it. Jealous over Lila’s writing ability and the accounts of Lila’s affair with Nino and Lila’s extraordinarily creative interactions with the neighborhood over the years, Lenu tosses the diary into the river.
It is not difficult to guess that the child lost in the final book, The Story of the Lost Child, is Lila’s extraordinarily precocious child of four, who is snatched from the neighborhood. Over the years Lenu even begins to repeat the gossip of neighbors that perhaps Lila had a role in her own child’s disappearance. Worse, as an aging writer who is losing her audience and who wants to find a compelling topic for another book, she breaks her promise to Lila by writing the story of the lost child.
Lila is not, and never will be, a victim — despite experiencing much more than her share of violence and unfairness. Lila keeps her own counsel, never feels sorry for herself, and moves forward without relying on others. She is a woman of action, without paralyzing internal dialogue – and amazingly, never seems to give up on Lenu.
In contrast, Lenu’s fortune is to catch most of the good breaks, but her inner turmoil of indecision and insecurity fills most of the pages of this quartet.
Lenu is not exceptional, but the allure of Lenu is that she has lived the life of what modern complex feminism arguably looks like. It is not pretty, and it does not necessarily resolve itself to a happy ending, but it is a relatable account of the challenges faced by a woman navigating the tidal forces of the entrenched patriarchal society. I get this, but it would have been more rewarding to feel, at the end of the inner turmoil, that we all gained something, experienced something, that we joined the complicated life of a complex character worthy of investment. The redemption never comes. In the end, Lenu has not distinguished herself from someone who could be your neighbor who managed up and found a more comfortable life than she was born into. In a few years I’ll remember Lila, but not Lenu.
Elena Ferrante, Neapolitan Quartet, all translated by Ann Goldstein
My Brilliant Friend, 2012 (audiobook narrated by Hillary Huber)
The Story of a New Name, 2013
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, 2014 (audiobook narrated by Hillary Huber)
The Story of the Lost Child, 2015
Bob Fall 
I slogged through all of these, too, and, a couple of years later, I don’t much remember Lenu OR Lila, just a generalized dreariness, an impression that was recently refreshed by encountering some of Ferrante’s current writing for The Guardian.
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Good to hear about the Guardian. It will probably be healthy and refreshing for her to write about something other than another version of her own story.
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I’ve got to figure out this blog. I don’t know why my reply was from Anonymous
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