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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 review, about how good they are can be found here.

I am, I realize, pissing into the wind here, but someone has to do it. Ferrante deserves much of the praise, but, like any serious author, she also deserves criticism, because these are some deeply, deeply flawed novels.

In Story of the Lost Child, Elena publishes an MS that she'd written some years before; Lila was unimpressed, so she'd just shoved it in a drawer. Now, her editor is very impressed, because she's given him something he didn't expect from her: pure, narrative pleasure. And it must be said that Ferrante is capable of delivering that, just as Elena was.

The problems start when you pay even a little attention to the narrative machinery groaning under the two thousand pages of the novel. Consider one of the major scenes in Story, when Lila and Elena are (again) arguing. This is a bad argument, a very bad one, and just as it reaches its climax, an earthquake strikes, destroying much of the city.

Really? Yes, really, Naples has been hit by earthquakes. But conjoining an earthquake with (another) personal disagreement between the protagonists of your novel is i) insensitive and disrespectful to the quake's victims, and ii) the kind of narrative move that Hollywood film makers dismiss as 'too obvious.'

This is one of the two major flaws in these novels: they are, far too often, ridiculously melodramatic. Leaving aside the earthquake argument, Story in particular devolves into bad country song territory, as everything that could possibly go wrong does go wrong, and all the meta-narrative "unlike in fiction, in real life things just happen, you can't predict them, there isn't always a reason for bad things" stuff at the end, constantly torturing your characters for no reason isn't real life, it's bad art. There are only so many times someone can be interested to learn that a man is unfaithful, or a thug, or a woman is mentally unstable, or unfaithful. How many arguments can two friends have before an onlooker realizes that there isn't anything new in any given argument? Not 2000 pages worth of arguments, that's how many.

This repetitiveness also works at the sentence level, where Ferrante, for some reason, has chosen to make 19th century novels look like masterworks of concision. The arguments and incidents of unfaithfulness would be much more striking, I imagine, if they were narrated with a bit more panache; instead, we get the proverbial "I went out shopping, I bought the groceries, here's how I bought them, I had this conversation with the counter woman, we laughed, we talked about person y, I walked home, it was raining, but it was a pleasant day for all that, I opened the door, I put away the groceries, I made myself a cup of coffee, I went to the bathroom where I found my partner schtupping the cleaning woman, I ran out of the bathroom, I went to my friend's house, we had a bottle of wine, I cried because I was sad, then we made dinner, we had pasta and some bread, it was nice, I was sad so I cried, then I went for a walk..." ad infinitum.

In nuce: things could have been done more quickly, and more effectively, not just in the melodramatic moments, but throughout the novel. This constant attention to minor, irrelevant details can't but bring Knausgaard's Struggle to mind (I, too, grow weary of the comparison). Because nothing much happens in Kok's books, his shopping for and frying a piece of fish don't get in the way of anything. Of course, that nothing much happens really is a pretty major flaw in his books, and, like Ferrante, he often descends into melodrama.

The most interesting comparison, though, is between the prose styles (NB: I don't read Italian at all well, or Norwegian at all, so this means "styles as mediated by their respective translators", which might not be accurate). While both narrate far too much, it's somehow more off putting in Ferrante because Elena's style is so classically controlled. Knausgaard is free to wheel off into all kinds of baroque bathos, whereas the clear style of the Neapolitan Novels makes it very hard to tell the difference between, e.g., doing the shopping on the one hand, and finding your partner in flagrante with someone else, on the other. For any given 400 page volume, that's fine, I like clarity, and I can roll with it. For 2000 pages, however, Elena's style is like an extremely rational jackhammer, and I hope very much that Ferrante's example doesn't influence other writers.

The other reason to compare them is that they're both being feted as novel or interesting or sophisticated, when in fact they are none of those things. Instead, they are ambitious and entertaining. This is a conjunction almost unheard of in the English-speaking reading republic, and I suspect that critics have let their surprise get the better of them. Both projects are worth reading, both are enjoyable, both are ambitious--but what they're doing has certainly been done before, what they're doing will probably be considered interesting in a period-piece way, rather than in an artistic or intellectual way, and their apparent sophistication is the result of both of them disclaiming any wish to be sophisticated.

I'm glad to have both of them, and it is not their fault that the English speaking world doesn't have better critics.