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This is a two part review of the Neapolitan Novels as a whole: one about how good they are, the other about the series' very deep flaws. The other one, about their problems, can be found here.

There are, of course, lots of reasons to love these books, but unfortunately for me, I miss out on the big one: the relationship between Lila and Elena. Perhaps it's just that if I find myself in a tempestuous, unpredictable friendship, it usually doesn't last very long; give me solid, predictable, comforting. Perhaps there's a big difference between male/male friendships and female/female friendships. Perhaps (insert cliche about fiery Mediterranean and cold-fish northern Europeans here). But in any case, I can't complain about that focus of the book. It's just not for me.

The two great things about the NN, from my very restricted perspective, are i) Elena's life story, and, ii) the way Ferrante brings in the post-war history of Italy, which is surely among the most fascinating stories of post-war Europe, provided you didn't have to live through it.

Elena's up from grimy Naples narrative is the less interesting of these two, but I'm a sucker for a good intellectual biography, and hers is great: the pull of the hometown, the pull of the wider world, the disgust at the provinces, the discovery that things are mostly better in the metropole, but far from perfect, the struggles of a professional writer... this is just good stuff.

But the attempt (not entirely successful) to combine this with the catastrophes of the country as a whole is far more interesting. wrote about politics in the first three novels, suggesting that American leftists were wrong to read them as revolutionary--rather, he argued, they emphasize "a form of politics, and of thinking, that is skeptical not only of critical theory’s vocabulary but also of its utopian aspirations." Abstract ideas can't always be applied to concrete circumstances, which is not a reason to ignore abstract ideas--but there will be give and take between idea and circumstance.

This argument is more or less confirmed by The Story of the Lost Child, in which the ideologies are all revealed as irrelevant to the liberal capitalist twenty-first century and, even more damningly, often seem like little more than a way for Elena to become a successful writer: she goes through a leftist phase, a feminist phase, a radical feminist phase, only to settle into an uncomfortable liberalism. Of immediate relevance to the internet-left, too, is Elena's discomfort with the language-policing of the Italian communists, and the self-righteousness of the country's intellectuals, most of whom end up to have taken bribes. This is not a plot spoiler if you know much about Italy.

Anyway, I think my friend is half right, but his argument doesn't take into account Italian history. In a strange way, even he falls into the trap of applying abstract ideas to a concrete circumstance--in this case, the move of literary critics, writers and intellectuals who like to stress the irreducibility of the concrete. That is not, I think, an idea that can be applied to Italy in the second half of the twentieth century, where the ideas and the concrete weren't as opposed as they are in contemporary, liberal America: in Italy, and in Ferrante's novels, the ideas were real, they were embodied, whether in fascist authorities or terrorist leftists. To suggest that the novels make the "irreducibility" move, then, ignores, well, the irreducability of history.

Anyway: it's glorious that Ferrante even tries to include such a huge swathe of difficult history into these books, from the fascist/communist hatreds of the early post-war period, through the proliferation of political perspectives, the economic boom, the years of lead, and the endless scandals. Is it entirely successful? I don't think so, because we never get an understanding of this history outside Elena's own perspective on it: first person narrative is not particularly well suited to broad political situations.

One final, impressive part of the series: the conclusion. While other authors of extremely long novels or sequences struggle to conclude (consider the disaster that is the end of Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time, though perhaps that was forced on him by the 'sixties), Ferrante wraps it up perfectly. I wasn't that interested with the second half of volume four, but I slowed down for the last section. That's no mean feat over however many thousand pages.