The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante

Thanks to the side panels of the mirror, I saw the two halves of my face separately, far apart, and I was drawn first by my right profile, then the left. They were both completely unfamiliar to me, normally I didn't use the side panels, I recognized myself only in the image reflected by the big mirror. Now I tried to arrange the mirrors so that I could see from the side and from the front. There is no technical means of reproduction that, up to now, has managed to surpass the mirror and the dream. Look at me, I said to the glass in a whisper, a breath. The mirror was summing up my situation. If the frontal image reassured me, saying to me that I was Olga and that perhaps I would arrive at the end of the day successfully, my two profiles warned me that it was not so. They showed me my neck, the ugly living ears, the lightly arched nose that I had never liked, the chin, the high cheekbones and the taut skin of the cheeks, like a white page. I felt that there, over those two half portions, Olga had scant control, she was not very resistant, not very persistent. What did she have to do with those images.

One day, Olga's husband, Mario, announces that he no longer wants to be with her. She expects him to return--after all, they have two young children and a dog, and he's had similar episodes in the past--but the break seems to be a permanent one. Being abandoned throws her into a severe mental crisis: Who is she if she is not Mario's wife? She's haunted by the image of the poverella, the poor woman, a neighbor from her Neapolitan upbringing who was perfectly normal until, she, too, was abandoned, becoming a physical and mental ruin of her former self. This crisis reaches a head when, having had to replace the locks on her apartment door, Olga finds one day she's unable to turn the keys to get out. Her phone and computer are broken; her son and dog are critically sick. She tries to keep the mounting crisis from her young, resentful daughter, but she's beginning to see visions of the poverella sitting in her apartment; she's beginning to crack.

The Days of Abandonment is totally unlike the sweeping, Dickensian social vision of the Neapolitan novels. It begins from a very simple premise: what happens to a woman when she is abandoned? It's funny, by locking Olga in the apartment, the novel's central episode seems to refuse to let in the larger world at all. And yet, it's unmistakably Ferrante. Perhaps no one is better able to put onto the page the psychology of a woman in a world shaped by male cruelty. (For this reason the rumors you hear now and then about Ferrante being a pseudonym for a male writer to be ridiculous.) The revelations that Olga comes to her about her husband are almost banal in their familiarity: she was the one whose labor kept the household, and thus the relationship, operational, and yet he's the one whose freedom and agency permits him to abandon all that in favor of a younger woman. But these are familiar dynamics for a reason, and Ferrante imbues them with the specificity of a single psychology. No one cracks in exactly the same way, and the sight of Olga collapsing--all while still trying to be a caretaker to her family and to the poor German shepherd, Otto--is something I could barely tear myself away from. Throughout her ordeal, Olga tries to steady herself by leaning on the qualities of pragmatism and patience that she feels define her, and yet the very fabric of reality begins to slip around her.

The Days of Abandonment is a nasty novel. One of my friends told me she loathed it, and I imagine many people--even those who enjoyed the Neapolitan novels--must have picked it up expecting something different, and felt the same. It's filled with scenes of even physical revulsion: the son's vomit, the blood from the wound caused by the little girl stabbing Olga with a paper cutter--a task given to her by Olga, to prick her when she descends too far into her own tortured mind--the ants that invade the apartment, the secretive and secrete-ive failed sexual dalliance with the downstairs neighbor. I was surprised that it ends on a note of healing and reconciliation. The first time he left, the time that didn't take, Mario described his actions as a "brief absence of sense." Finally confronting one another (a violent attack by Olga on Mario in the street notwithstanding), Olga tells Mario that she, not he, knows what it's like to experience a brief absence of sense. The embrace that ends the book is surprisingly tender, and the paragraph it's in is such a bravura passage I'd love to quote it, but I don't want to spoil it. It may be that after all that, The Days of Abandonment is Ferrante's most hopeful novel.