One of the remarkable qualities of Ms. Ferrante’s work is her nuanced portrayal of class distinctions, especially among the working poor. Many American novelists, if they touch on class at all, confine themselves to the broad categories imposed by race and geography … Ms. Ferrante’s books differ greatly not only from American novels but also from most modern ones. She writes like a classical tragedian dropped into the contemporary … Essentially, this is a woman’s story told with such truthfulness that it is not so much a life observed as it is felt. The reader is ransacked and steps back into the world gingerly, with lingering questions about estrangement and belonging.
Ferrante’s Naples is in thrall to the Camorra, which determines the girls’ behavior toward their classmates (sucking up to Camorra kids), the jobs their boyfriends are allowed (maybe working as an attendant at a gas station on the stradone) and what the girls wear when they come back from a honeymoon (big sunglasses and voluminous scarves, to hide black eyes and bruises) … In these bold, gorgeous, relentless novels, Ferrante traces the deep connections between the political and the domestic. This is a new version of the way we live now — one we need, one told brilliantly, by a woman.
Ferrante’s Naples books are essentially about knowledge—its possibilities and its limits. Intellectual knowledge, sexual knowledge, political knowledge. What kind of knowledge does it take to get by in this world? How do we attain that knowledge? … To those of us fully entangled in the Ferrante universe, participants in this Greek chorus, who have come to care about these characters as much as we care about some people in our actual lives, to those of us who have come to scrutinize the world and ourselves all the more intensely for having read these unforgettable books, her latest report could not have arrived soon enough.
The truth is that Elena is no less trapped by her life than Lila is, but she is loath to admit it. Elena's husband is a pedantic bore and a terrible lover. But when Elena's first child is born after an atrocious labor, she lies to Lila, telling her that it was a wonderful experience … While Ms. Ferrante sees her characters through class war, student revolution, and clashes between communists and neo-fascists, her focus is on their interior lives. Her novels present an intimate, often startlingly frank portrait of a friendship between two women who are struggling in the face of rapidly changing sexual politics to break from the old ways and reinvent themselves on their own terms.
In Those Who Leave, most everything has already happened. It is a book of evidence, the effects of the past told, never shown, and yet it remains compelling, visceral and immediate. The past's touchstones and many characters who have appeared in the previous volumes are alluded to often, but the book stands alone, gallantly becoming for the reader what it is for Elena Greco — an exercise in remembering … At its root, Those Who Leave is a riveting examination of power...Writing is where Elena's strength lies. Only when she sees the clichés in political rhetoric and finds her subject in feminism — a shift from ‘what it meant to make your own head masculine so that it would be accepted by the culture of men’ — does she experience the power of sexual and artistic possibility.
In Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay the heroine’s exorcism of her demons becomes an interesting part of the story’s sweep, not a cute metafiction. It is now the 1960s, and student movements are beginning to sweep across Europe, meaning that while the conservatism of Naples still gnaws at Elena, universities are becoming receptive to her modern attitudes about sex and power. All the while the tale of her friend Lila lingers in her mind, even after Lila makes her promise not to tell it … Narrating in Elena’s voice, which cascades from sensual reactions to reflections and an inner intelligence, Ferrante describes the watchfulness and atavistic needs that her heroine oscillates between.
In parallel modes, each marks her way on paper, writing herself into an identity different from that she was born to. Gripping, baggy, recognizably feminist in its second wave, the novel tracks the relationships between men and women, and the conflict between working and motherhood, between workers and bosses, and always between Elena and Lila … This volume in particular is engrossing both in its richly detailed story and also in its greater concern with larger narrative issues. For one, it dramatizes that characters/identities are never essential or autonomous, but always created out of relationships with others (mothers, lovers, friends, enemies) and that they cohere, fragment, contradict one another, and change according to circumstances.
The book is centrally concerned with politics and political activism and its effects on the inner lives of the characters. Both Elena and Lila find themselves involved in the explosive events that followed Italy’s Hot Autumn of 1969 … Ferrante’s handling of this difficult material is sensitive, inward, and devoid of slogans or programmatic clichés, even at the meeting of the students’ revolutionary committee … Somehow Ferrante so thoroughly succeeds in her aim of seizing at ‘the evasive thing’ that she has stirred up something from the depths of her mind that touches and spreads through mine.
If the second volume undermines the marriage plot, the third upends the literary fairytale. The Brilliant Friend novels, as they are called in Italy, employ a retrospective first person, as Dickens did in David Copperfield, adding to the impression of autobiography … Greco’s experience of the literary life can be seen as a fictional manifesto on the miseries of publishing: the doubt, the shame, the humiliation, the insults from those one would have hoped to impress or even seduce.
Lila and Elena almost form a composite character, their disparate fates always entwined like two aspects of a single being. Each shares in the sorrows and achievements of the other … Reading Ferrante is an extraordinary experience. There’s a powerful and unsettling candor in her writing; Elena loves Lila, but she also acknowledges that on some level she wishes her friend would die. The narrator’s voice is familiar and confiding, but her gaze settles on every object with an unflinching objectivity.
In Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, the work of the novelist—especially l’écriture féminine—is dismissed as frivolous and bourgeois, at least compared to the activism and agitation of 1970s Italy … The title suggests absolutes—Those Who Leave (Elena) and Those Who Stay (Lila)—but the subtitle, ‘Middle Time,’ hints at something else. Like its narrator, the novel is less interested in obvious binaries—of language (Neapolitan/Italian), social geography (South/North), ideology (communist/fascist), gender, faith, and class—than in the mucky territory between.
Serious feminist questions spill from every page, not as tidy scholarly inquiries but as body and blood, a true, sustained cri de coeur. Elena can neither shut out men nor deny their cost (Ferrante’s women, often maddened, spend their lives responding to men who, equally maddened, pretty much run things) … Like its two predecessors, this novel’s roller coaster of anguish, advances and setbacks roars on. The miracle is that Ferrante can keep the shocks coming, against a setting whose mildest emotional ambience is already in flames.
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay covers a great swath of social and personal history and, as a result, features many messy lives that twine around and collide into one another … The novel's driving force is Elena's candor, particularly in the scenes where she makes apparent her disillusionment in the roles of wife and mother and in the powerful finale … Ferrante's women end up as single-minded and as sexually liberated as D.H. Lawrence's women in love. The more she opens their hearts and minds to us, the more her novel grips and moves us in equal measure.
