Fifty Books Project 2023

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay  

Book Three of the Neapolitan Cycle by Elena Ferrante

I sometimes imagined what my life and Lila’s would have been if we had both taken the test for admission to middle school and then high school , if together we had studied to get our degree elbow to elbow, allied, a perfect couple, the sum of intellectual energies, of the pleasures of understanding and the imagination,  We would have written together, we would have been authors together, we would have drawn power from each other we would have fought shoulder to shoulder because what was ours was inimitably ours.  The solitude of women’s minds is regrettable, I said to myself.  It’s a waste to be separated from each other, without procedures, without tradition.

When we last saw Elena and Lina, they had come to occupy very different worlds.  Out of college and increasingly comfortable in the world of Italy’s bourgeoise intellectuals, Elena had written a heavily autobiographical novel.  Lina had abandoned her toxic husband, Stefano, for the man both women have treated like the holy grail of romance, Nino, only to be abandoned by him.  In her typically self-destructive principals, she had gone off with her son to live an independent working-class life working in a local sausage factory.  

In Book Three they seem certain to remain apart as Lina’s desperate life is increasingly invisible, while Elena’s novel - controversial and not universally revered – has nonetheless made her the most famous and successful person to come out of the neighborhood.  They are, of course, brought back together when Elena – through Nina, daughter of her old teacher and part of Italy’s educated left-wing – is drawn into writing about the labor movement and uses Lina’s factory (secretly owned by the local Mafiosi, Michele Solara) and some of Lina’s writing in an article that gains her new notoriety and draws them both into the violence of late 1960s Italian politics.  

This bit of reunion does not last long as Elena moves to Florence and marries Pietro, a mild-mannered academic, while Lina continues her life in the sausage factory.  It is clear that Elena’s marriage is too logical and passionless to last.  It immediately falls into family routines as two quick pregnancies overwhelm Elena and she abandons her intellectual life to that of a harried mother and housewife.  More surprisingly, Lina has been studying computer programming with her live-in partner, Enzo and leaves the sausage factory for increasingly lucrative positions as a systems manager, the last one working for Michele Solara, who has declared his love and admiration for her.

Elena’s marriage is disrupted first by the arrival of Nina and her boyfriend who have been drawn into the radical, violent fringe and disdain her and Pietro’s safe academic lifestyle.  It is further disrupted by the reappearance of Nino, now friends and colleagues with Pietro, who encourages Elena to begin writing again.  Elena writes a new book – a feminist essay on the ways that men create women – and begins an affair with Nino.  They tell their families and run away to France, only after Lila has reappeared asking Elena to babysit her son Gennaro for the summer.  

Elena and Lila’s relationship continues the same pattern of competition and codependence, with Elena periodically swearing off her friend and then becoming re-entwined with her.  Lina fades away, makes dramatic breaks that take her out of the old neighborhood, but then reemerges more entangled with their childhood companions than ever before.  Along the way they debate and reflect on the nature of womanhood, sex, love, family and independence.  

The historical context is increasingly specific:  we see the 1968 Paris student riots, the controversies of the Vietnam War, the consciousness raising phase of the feminist movement and the emergence of the Red Brigades.  This has become a startling document on the changing roles of women in the second half of the Twentieth Century.   It is made deeper and more masterful by Ferrante’s creative ability to show off Lila’s consciousness while maintain Elena’s position as narrator.  This becomes trickier in this volume as Lila burned all her diaries at the end of Book 2.  It is through Elena’s use of Lila’s ranting about the labor conditions in the factory and later the arrival of the telephone as a common mode of communication that Lila’s voice maintains its importance.  

The class divide that was introduced and which I expected would only widen in previous volumes has been muddied and muted by Lila’s mastery of computers and Elena’s fall into housewifery.  The emotional roles have also been reversed – Lina is no longer the emotionally impulsive one whom Elena preaches to about rational calm.  It is impressive that this last switch (to Elena as passionate impulsive and Lina as voice of reason) is made so seamlessly and completely in the last 50 pages of what is now a thousand page story.  

There were times towards the end when I skimmed – usually the sections where Elena is declaring that either Lina is a terrible influence who has grown too far apart and must be cut her out of her life all together or that Lina is the one person who really understands her soul and who she must stay in contact with forever.  That tennis match is wearing thin for me.  But I will miss these women and the various characters that wander around them for a few weeks, until I start Book 4.