What happened 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?
For anyone who has read Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels, The Lying Life of Adults will be a return to familiar territory – the Naples setting, the examination of class and culture, the fascinating conversations and thoughts that explore feminine interiority – and for anyone who was beguiled by those earlier works, as I certainly was, this is a return to that pure literary magic. I have a hard time articulating what it is that Ferrante gets so right but you can just feel that she breathes life into her pages; there's a thrumming heartbeat with which my own pulse echoes; I recognise and believe every word she writes. Magic. (Thanks to NetGalley for my ARC; passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly. The sentence was uttered under his breath, in the apartment that my parents, newly married, had bought in Rione Alto, at the top of Via San Giacomo dei Capri. Everything – the spaces of Naples, the blue light of a very cold February, those words – remained fixed. But I slipped away, and am still slipping away, within these lines that are intended to give me a story, while in fact I am nothing, nothing of my own, nothing that has really begun or really been brought to completion: only a tangled knot, and nobody, not even the one who at this moment is writing, knows if it contains the right thread for a story or is merely a snarled confusion of suffering, without redemption.As the book opens, Giovanna is thirteen years old – living in the middle class upper city of Naples in the 1990s, the only child of two loving, sophisticated, and educated parents – and when we first meet her, she's certainly still a child (sitting on her parents' laps, playful and obedient as a puppy), but as the story progresses, we watch as Giovanna grows from full child (believing her parents to be perfect and wanting to live under their protection), to starting to rebel (still a child but pushing back against her parents while hoping that they'll maintain their illusion of perfection), to becoming a full adult at sixteen (mature in mind and body and no longer in need of her parents' protective narrative; ready to start writing her own).
And the impetus for all this growth? Giovanna overhears her father whisper to her mother that if their daughter wasn't careful, she'd end up with the ugly face of his sister Vittoria. As Giovanna's father was estranged from his birth family, and she couldn't remember ever meeting this Vittoria, Giovanna insists on meeting her now; and despite his warnings that Vittoria was a mean and dangerous manipulator, he agrees to arrange the meeting. Driving down to the working class lower city of Naples for the first time, Giovanna was fascinated and repulsed to learn that her father grew up on these crowded, narrow streets, and when she meets with Vittoria, her aunt warns that it's Giovanna's father who is the manipulator – a cruel and money-grubbing charlatan whose sophisticated demeanor is all pomp and pretense. Giovanna was transfixed by this aunt – with her ugly beauty that Giovanna could recognise as her own fate, her foul mouth, her hot temper and rough friends – and as their relationship continues, Giovanna can't help but question what is authentic reality and what is illusion in the lying life of adults.
I was learning to hide from my parents what was happening to me. Or, rather, I perfected my method of lying by telling the truth. Naturally I didn't do it lightly, it pained me. When I was at home and heard them moving about the rooms with the familiar footsteps that I loved, when we had breakfast together, had lunch, dinner, my love for them prevailed, I was always on the point of crying: Papa, Mamma, you're right, Vittoria hates you, she's vengeful, she wants to take me away from you to hurt you, hold on to me, forbid me to see her. But as soon as they started with their hypercorrect sentences, with those controlled tones of theirs, as if every word concealed others, truer, from which they excluded me, I secretly called Vittoria, I made dates.There may not be anything particularly groundbreaking about a coming-of-age novel in itself, but the grit and candour of Giovanna's experience, while not my own exact experience, felt entirely truthful and relatable. And as with her earlier Neapolitan Novels, I was totally intrigued with Ferrante's exploration of Naples – the high and the low – and with a sidetrip to the university in Milan, we once again are privy to some interesting intellectual discussions that further explore the culture's prevailing ethos. Once again, magic – if this turns into another quartet of books, I'd be well pleased.
