The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante

The infant moved in my belly like rolling waters, I touched Lila's stomach, hers was moving, too. Everything was moving: the sea of fire under the crust of the earth, and the furnaces of the stars, and the planets, and the universes, and the light within the darkness and the silence in the cold. But, even now as I pondered the wave of Lila's distraught words, I felt that in me fear could not put down roots, and even the lava, the fiery stream of melting matter that I imagined inside the earthly globe, and the fear it provoked in me, settled in my mind in orderly sentences, in harmonious images, became a pavement of black stones like the streets of Naples, a pavement where I was always and no matter what the center.

At the end of Those Who Leave And Those Who Stay, the narrator Elena Greco has left her husband and two children to be with Nino Sarratore, the man with whom she has been in love since grade school. That third novel ends with upheaval, and the business of the fourth and final novel, at least at first, is to put the pieces back together: the painful separation with her husband Pietro, the sorting of their two young girls, Elsa and Dede, the making of a life with Nino. Nino, as any literate person has known since the first novel in the series, is an odious shit: he proclaims his love for Elena but refuses to break off fully from his wife, keeping Elena and her daughters in an apartment in the well-heeled district of Naples and visiting them from time to time. Elena doesn't even know that Nino is still with his wife for months, and when she finds out it is the first of several debilitating shocks. Another comes when she walks in on Nino fucking the housekeeper. Is it any surprise that later in life, as we are told in the book's latter half, becomes a successful politician?

Elena has a powerful realization: the Nino she loved is really the Nino of her grade school years, a person whose identity and being were interrupted when, years ago, he fell in love with her friend Lila. The Nino of today is quite different: "To whom, then, was I bound, and whom did I still love today?" This idea--the way personalities slip and change, the permeability of boundaries, the old question of the Argo--haunts the novel, and Lila especially. For Elena, the question is liberating; she can finally let Nino go. But we learn that for Lila this idea has always been a terror. A devastating earthquake brings it to the surface, and she admits to Elena how she has always feared the possibility of boundaries dissolving: "And so if she didn't stay alert, if she didn't pay attention, the waters would break through, a flood would rise, carrying everything off in clots of menstrual blood, in cancerous polyps, in bits of yellowish fiber."

Once things with Nino fall apart, Elena acquiesces to Lila and moves back to the old neighborhood, taking an apartment literally above her old friend. "Never had so little space separated Lila and me, not even when we were children," she writes. Of course, it's easy to see how the narrative has been leading us here, full circle, back to the entanglement with Lila that was the crucible of Elena's formative years. And the two become very tangled; Elena becomes pregnant with Nino's child at the same time that Lila becomes pregnant with the child of her longtime lover and protector, Enzo. The two girls, Imma and Tina, seem almost to reproduce the relationship between the young Elena and Lila: Tina is brilliant and charismatic while Imma is paler somehow, and utterly dependent on her friend. The two mothers become so enmeshed that the two girls seem to have two mothers; when a photographer comes to profile Elena for a magazine the caption erroneously reads: Greco with her daughter Tina. Ferrante finds a thousand other ways to smash the two families together, as when Elena's eldest daughter Dede, then her middle daughter Elsa, fall madly in love with Lila's dull son Rino.

The social world of the series, too, comes full circle: Lila has become a powerful entrepreneur in the computer business, and has used her influence to attack the stranglehold held on the neighborhood by the mafioso Solara brothers. Now that she's back in the neighborhood, Elena becomes conscripted into this conflict. She publishes exposes, at Lila's encouragement, about the brothers; they in turn gin up lawsuits against her. We are headed, we feel, for a final showdown, one that will capture the changing nature of Naples at the turn of the millennium and close the series with a grand gesture.

But it doesn't happen. Instead--spoiler alert!--avviso di spoliatore!--the trajectory of the novel is completely upended when Lila's daughter Tina disappears mysteriously off the street and is never found. Perhaps it was the Solaras; perhaps it was a bungled ransom attempt targeted at either Lila or Elena, but whatever it is, it throws a wrench into everything: the neighborhood war, the relationship between the two main characters, everything. It is Lila's fear of slippage, of disappearance, of vanishing, come true. The neighborhood war peters out with a whimper, and the focus of the novel becomes once again the relationship between the two women, but needless to say, a relationship that has been completely upended and reassembled.

I'm in awe of these novels, honestly. In my limited writing experience, creating the impression of a character who is consistent on the page is one of the most difficult things to do. The demands of plot always push people in the wrong direction. And yet here's a 1,200 page novel, essentially, where the characters are constantly surprising you, and each other, but doing it in ways that seem wholly in keeping with their personality and identity. Just as a feat of writing, it's incredible. But there's nothing else like these novels, since at least the 19th century, that so perfectly balances big and small, the social context and the individual character, nothing else that understands what it's like to be a small wheel in a big machine. Almost certainly these books are the masterpiece of the century so far.