Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante

Become.  It was a verb that had always obsessed me, but I realized it for the first time only in that situation.  I wanted to become, even though I had never known what.  And I had become, that was certain, but without an object, without a real passion, without a determined ambition.  I had wanted to become something--here was the point--only because I was afraid that Lila would become someone and I would stay behind.  My becoming was a becoming in her wake.  I had to start again to become, but for myself, as an adult, outside of her.

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay picks up directly where its predecessor, The Story of a New Name, leaves off: the narrator, Elena, has just published a novel based on her experiences as a young girl living in Naples.  She has been catapulted to a kind of sudden fame, and she agonizes over every review, ping-ponged between elation, when they praise, and despair, when they condemn.  As it was in the second book, Elena's novel is a kind of funhouse mirror version of the Neapolitan novels themselves; it's hard not to read about the agony that being in the public eye brings Elena and and see a reflection of Ferrante, a pseudonym meant to get around exactly that kind of scrutiny.  Those critics who condemn the novel for being "risque" are condemning Elena's life itself, which has inspired it, and shaming young women's sexual development--it makes you wonder whether Ferrante's secretiveness is a way of keeping people like that at arm's length.

These books are so panoramic, so packed with event and detail, but when you take a step back, they're also so perfectly and neatly constructed.  The Story of a New Name ends with Elena triumphant and her friend Lila, in whose shadow Elena has lived, at her lowest, forced into a life of manual labor at a sausage factory.  Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay reverses the trendlines: ultimately, Lila becomes a respected expert in industrial computers, while Elena finds her literary success dwindling, and impossible to repeat.  Elena marries her boyfriend, Pietro, who turns out to be a pedant and a boor who expects Elena to care for house, home, and children so that he can focus on his academic work.  Elena has two daughters, and the life of a wife and mother squeezes the creative impulse out of her completely, producing a familiar despair.

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay is the most political of the novels so far.  The sausage factory where Lila works becomes the focus of a battle between associated labor union-Socialist forces and anti-labor fascists.  The citizens of the "old neighborhood" fall on each side of the conflict, with Elena, Lila, Enzo, and the Communist agitator Pasquale on the left, and the sinister mafioso Solara brothers on the right.  Over and over again, Elena finds herself in the middle of internecine leftist squabbles.  The subject of these debates is always a little bit obscure, and you get the sense that Ferrante's not interested in advancing any theories of social change.

Instead, her subject is the way that all sides of these political battles--Camorrists, Socialists, petit bourgeois class traitors, students, whatever--treat women like trash.  Her old boyfriend Franco dismisses her novel as sentimental and irrelevant, not willing to understand that the lived experience of a woman at the bottom of the class hierarchy is exactly what revolution is about.  The bohemian Pasquale looks at Elena's bourgeois comfort and sees a class traitor, but he's not willing to see the way that patriarchy has diminished her.  Nino, the man whom Elena has loved secretly since the first book, leaves illegitimate children in his wake everywhere:

And so, in spite of his virtues, he was a frivolous, superficial man, an animal organism who dripped sweat and fluids and left behind, like the residue of a careless pleasure, living material conceived, nourished, shaped within female bellies.

And yet--spoiler alert--at the end of the book, Elena makes the rash choice to abandon her husband and children to be with Nino, who finally reciprocates her love.  It's a bad decision, probably a doomed one.  But who can blame her?  Will the results be worse than the slow crushing life of being Signora Airota?  The title takes on a double meaning: at first it seems to illuminate the difference between those, like Elena, who have left the old neighborhood for greener pastures, and those, like Lila, who have chosen to stay.  At the end it brings Elena and Lila back together, because they are those who left behind the suffocations and abuses of married life in the wild hope of freedom.  How that works out, I guess we'll see.