The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante

How was it possible that my father and Costanza loved each other for so long--even before my birth--without either my mother or Mariano knowing? And how had my father fallen in love with the wife of his best friend not as the victim of a fleeting infatuation but--I said to myself--in a deliberate ways, to that his love still endured? And Costanza, so refined, so well brought up, so affectionate, a visitor in our house as long as I could remember, how had she been able to hold on to my mother's husband for fifteen years right before her eyes? And why had Mariano, who had known my mother forever, only in recent times squeezed her ankle between his under the table, and--as by now was clear, my mother swore to me over and over--without her consent? What happened, in other words, in the world of adults, in the heads of very reasonable people, in their bodies loaded with knowledge? What reduced them to the most untrustworthy animals, worse than reptiles?

"Lies, lies," writes Giovanna, the narrator of Elena Ferrante's The Lying Life of Adults, "adults forbid them and yet they tell so many." For Giovanna, her entrance in to the world of lies and adult intrigue begins with a shocking comment: she overhears her father tell her mother that she, Giovanna, looks like Vittoria, his estranged sister. For Giovanna, this is equivalent to hearing that her father thinks she is extraordinarily ugly, as Vittoria exists in the conversation of their family as a kind of hideous demonic figure who long ago separated Giovanna's father from the rest of their family. Giovanna, obsessing over her father's comment, decides she must get to know her aunt, and seeks her out in the lower class section of Naples her father has left behind. This is the first in a series of events that will not only disturb Giovanna's understanding of her parents--she quickly discovers that Vittoria has a point about her father's mendacity and pride--but her parents' marriage.

It's hard, coming off of Ferrante's blockbuster Neapolitan novels, not to wonder simply: Can she do it again? And at first blush, it seems that the wonder of The Lying Life of Adults lies in the way it takes the most compelling elements of the quartet and reconstitutes them with a few snips and stitches. Easy to see in Giovanna the tumultuous adolescence of Elena, haunted by the development of her body and obsessed with the belief in her own inadequacy. And larger-than-life Vittoria, with her brazen honesty and quick temper, might be seen as an aged-up Lila.

But both Giovanna and Vittoria have a vulgarity that is never quite admitted in the Neapolitan books. Though they, too, are about the anxiety of emerging from a lower-class neighborhood, Lying Life offers a more powerful sense of the sordidness that entails, and the way one's belief in their own rotten roots can lead them to do sordid things. I found Giovanna's growing antipathy toward herself genuinely upsetting, and I won't easily forget her description of the "toilet stink" of a neighborhood boy's penis when she fondles it in a back alley. Vittoria, too, has Lila's brazenness but none of her intelligence; her inability, actually, to understand why she angers and alienates people is deeply sad. Lying Life exposes the hypocrisy and fraudulence with which social climbers distance themselves from their roots, but it also--better, perhaps, than the Neapolitan books--portrays the frightening belief that the old neighborhood is something that lives in your genes, and waits, like an inherited tumor, to metastasize within you.

Eventually, Giovanna finds a way out of her depression when she meets Roberto, a pious and well-spoken man whose esteem she craves. The ambivalence of her feelings toward Roberto--both deliriously horny and fearful that such horniness would despoil that esteem--allow her to develop a sense of self apart from the mirror-images of her father, of her aunt Vittoria. Roberto's presence adds a texture to the novel, a final piece that allows it to move from a simple psychological drama to a complex one. As he introduces a new element in Giovanna's life that unsettles the cage outlined by those three elements, so he adds a new element to the book that gives it new shape.

Lying Life doesn't compare to the Neapolitan books, but honestly, I wonder if the only difference is one of scale; four books about Giovanna and Vittoria, each in their way as compelling as Elena and Lila, might feel just as monumental. I appreciated how much raunchier this book was, how much more morbidly sex-obsessed Giovanna is. In the Neapolitan novels, Elena describes a kind of crippling sex-obsession that comes upon her in waves (if I'm remembering correctly), but she remains sort of a goody two-shoes; Giovanna's sex obsession is ruder, darker. And Lying Life explores same-sex attraction in ways that the Neapolitan novels leave folded into the margins. It doesn't, and can't, imitate the Dickensian sweep of those books, but it reimagines them as something more purely psychological, and even more unsettling.