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The Story of the Lost Child
Admirers of the Italian writer Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels will be both delighted and dismayed by The Story of the Lost Child: The Fourth and Final Neapolitan Novel. Dismayed only by the word final. For with it Ferrante promises to break the narrative spell first cast in My Brilliant Friend when a child in postwar Naples, climbing a dark stairway, reaches back for her companion’s hand. “This gesture changed everything between us forever,” Elena Greco recalls of Lila Cerullo. From that moment, the reader, too, is held fast. Through four novels that span six decades of poverty, violence, political turmoil, death, birth, passion, and betrayal, we remain tethered to Lila and Elena as their lives diverge and re-converge — yet never sunder.
Readers new to Ferrante, on the other hand, enter The Story of the Lost Child as detached observers; to them the index of characters will be merely a list of colorful strangers (“Manuela Solara, wife of Silvio, moneylender . . . killed in the doorway of her house” and so on.) Within a few pages, however, the sense of intimacy and urgency that Ferrante creates – with such deceptive ease — immerses the newcomer not only in the tumultuous present (of Elena’s adulterous flight and subsequent heartbreak) but also, inevitably, in the clotted past. “What time is now, what time was then” is not a question for the adult Elena but a realization: the distinction between our past and present selves is a comforting fiction.
Now a mother and a writer, Elena trades a dull marriage for a raging passion — The Story of the Lost Child picks up where the preceding novel left off with her departure from Florence – but in doing so is swept back to Naples. Soon betrayed by the awful Nino Sarratore, one of literature’s prize narcissists, Elena even returns with their baby and her two adolescent daughters to live in the childhood neighborhood that Lila has never left. “Lila would advise me,” she knows. “You’ve already made a big enough mistake, spit in their faces and get out . . . ” After all, Lila knows Nino. Their affair was at the heart of Ferrante’s second Neapolitan novel, The Story of a New Name.
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Here once again, Ferrante masterfully conveys the queasiness of love curdling into disdain, the headlong lurch from suspicion to fury. Having caught Nino cheating and feeling ” . . . a revulsion not different from what I would have felt if I had seen two lizards coupling . . . ,” Elena could be Anna Karenina, hyper-aware in her frenzied pain of every mundane detail. The shadow of Emma Bovary, too, falls on these pages. In its breadth and sweep, Ferrante’s series has also been compared to the work of Balzac and Dickens. But her affinity with such writers is most evident in the depth of Ferrante’s psychological insight; the creation of interior lives so vivid that we seem to breathe along with her characters, from moment to moment. Lila, for example, chills our blood when, at the age of fifteen, she rejects the marriage proposal of crime boss Marcello Solara, confronting his death threats with ” . . . get your brother, your father to do it, some friend, maybe they’re capable. But make it clear to all of them that you had better kill me first. Because if you touch anyone else while I’m alive, I will kill you, and you know I will . . . ” In another writer’s hands this would be inspirational melodrama — but Ferrante’s portrait of Lila, from the age of eight to her final act, is so textured and mutable that we see past her courage to her recklessness, her violence, and we dread what may follow.
For something always follows. As The Story of the Lost Child chillingly proves, this is a saga not only of entwined lives but also of crime and retribution. In the 1950s, Don Achille, the wartime black market dealer and loan shark, is murdered; gradually the Solara crime family ascends; the aged Solara matriarch is killed; then the Solara brothers . . . well, wait and see. In daily life, men beat women and each other and occasionally kill. “Lila is right,” Elena concedes, “the beauty of things is a trick, the sky is the throne of fear . . .” This teenage epiphany (how well Ferrante captures the self-dramatization of those years) arrives in the second novel, which ends with Elena’s apparent liberation — through academic success and a good marriage — from her impoverished past. But Ferrante’s series, though chronological, makes nonsense of the idea of progress, of a steady climb from then to now. When Elena’s mother, for example, asks, ” . . . do you remember when I was young?” the full weight — and fragility — of a hard life is suddenly felt, then subsumed in the business of dying.
There are many such erasures. The most shocking, at the heart of The Story of the Lost Child, seems to stop time. Yet all the while, fueled by love and hate, churning up memories and revelations, on moves the story. From 1958 to 2009, guided by Elena but held equally by Lila, we inhabit lives — and a city — in constant flux: ” . . . a permanent stream of splendors and miseries,” as Lila sees her home, “a cyclical Naples where everything was marvelous and everything became gray and irrational and everything sparkled again, as when a cloud passes over the sun and the sun appears to flee . . .” Fascism. Communism. Feminism. Each big idea is made flesh here, made smaller, and self-delusion lethally punished. When Elena, in love and ensconced by Nino in an airy apartment, tells Lila, “It has a view of the sea,” Lila responds, “What’s the sea from up there? A bit of color. Better if you’re closer, that way you notice that there’s filth, mud, piss, polluted water.” Closer is where Ferrante takes us — to the heart as well as to this world — with realism that is neither punishing nor redemptive. Aged and alone but successful, Elena finally asks, “What is the point of all these pages, then? I intended to capture her, to have her beside me again . . . ” But there will be no restoration. Instead the final link in this Neapolitan chain closes the circle by looping back to where it all began. How else could it end?