books

The opening volume of Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet, is a coming-of-age story that refuses every soft consolation the genre usually offers. My Brilliant Friend begins, in the present, with a phone call: Raffaella Cerullo, known as Lila, has vanished. Not run away, not died, but deliberately erased herself, removing her clothes, her photographs, every trace of her existence. The narrator, Elena Greco, responds to this disappearance by writing it all down, and the novel becomes her act of refusal, a way of pinning a friend who has spent a lifetime slipping out of reach.

What follows is the story of two girls growing up in a poor, violent neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples in the years after the war. Elena is studious and quietly determined; Lila is bold, sharp-tongued, and dangerously gifted. Their friendship runs on rivalry, the kind that pushes each toward feats neither would attempt alone, and Ferrante is unsentimental about its costs. This is friendship that includes envy, competition, and the small cruelties two people inflict when one is forever measuring herself against the other. Loving a friend this fiercely, the book suggests, can make you a little monstrous, and Ferrante never pretends otherwise.

The Naples she renders is a closed world of porters and shoemakers, of debts and grudges that calcify into violence across generations. Around the two girls she assembles a vast cast and lets the neighborhood's pressures do their work: classism, poverty, sexism, domestic abuse, and the long shadow of fascism all bear down on the choices available to two clever girls. The cruelest of these is also the quietest. Elena's parents permit her to continue her schooling; Lila's do not. From that single divergence, the whole tragedy of the book unspools, and by its close those environmental accidents have begun to set two lives on courses that will never fully reconverge.

Ferrante's prose, carried into English with admirable clarity by Ann Goldstein's translation, is the engine of all this. It is plain and propulsive rather than showy, marrying simple language to genuinely complex emotional terrain. The writing has a hypnotic, addictive quality that pulls you forward even when little is happening on the surface, and the famous "dissolving margins," those moments when fear or desire blurs the edges of Elena's reality, give the realism an undertow of something stranger and more unsettling.

It would be dishonest to call the book effortless to read. It is slow, particularly through its first half, which unfolds with the unhurried rhythm of childhood itself, accumulating small incidents whose stakes only declare themselves later. The cast is large and the names blur together; the index of characters at the front is there for a reason, and the narrative habitually doubles back to explain how this scenario or that alliance came to be. Readers who want constant momentum will need to recalibrate, and not all of them will. There is a strain of dissent worth taking seriously, from people who found the central friendship oddly shallow, the daily texture monotonous, and the whole enterprise inflated by its own hype into something it cannot quite sustain. The complaint is not unreasonable: a reader unwilling to keep notes and trust that the minutiae are load-bearing may simply find the experience dull.

The case for patience is that the slowness is the point. By the time the novel arrives at its long, dread-soaked climax, Lila's wedding, the accumulated detail pays off in a single devastating image that retroactively sharpens everything before it. The marriage that was meant to be Lila's escape reveals itself, in one gesture, as a betrayal and a trap, and the structure suddenly snaps into focus. So too does the title, the book's largest reversal. The phrase "my brilliant friend" lands not where you expect it to, and that small reassignment forces a complete rethinking of who has been watching whom, and who is destined to get out.

This is a bildungsroman in mono rather than stereo, a portrait of a friendship told entirely from inside one consciousness, with all the partiality that implies. It is not flawless and not for every temperament. But it captures the ache of being shaped by another person, of measuring your one life against the unrealized lives you might have had, with a precision that justifies the obsession it provoked. It ends abruptly, by design, and the only honest response is to reach for the second volume.