Book One, My Brilliant Friend

Elena Greco and Lila Cerrullo are two girls growing up in 1950s working-class Naples, friends as intensely loyal to each other as they are competitive. Elena’s family allows her to continue school beyond the fifth grade; the parents of Lila, the “brilliant friend” of the title, declare her schooling is over. This divergence in their paths determines their fates. As they grow into adolescence, Lila seemingly accepts her lot, despite the fact that she has a brilliant mind and knows it. She becomes determined to raise her shoemaker father and her family out of poverty and obscurity with her design of a pair of men’s shoes. At the same time, Lila shows increasingly less interest in the world beyond her family and neighborhood, and instead attempts to reap all the benefits that accrue to a large fish in a small pond. Meanwhile Elena develops as a young scholar and writer and, as she gains the respect of her teachers and two young men who are her peers, slowly accepts that she’s ready to leave her neighborhood in order to lead a life of the mind.

The book opens with Elena, now somewhere in her sixties and the book’s narrator, receiving a Naples-to-Turin phone call from Lila’s son: Lila’s been missing for two weeks, he’s looked everywhere, even gone to the hospitals and the police. On top of that Lila hasn’t left a trace. All her clothes, papers, photos, her computer, everything’s gone, swept away as if burglars had cleaned her out. No, Elena responds, no one would have any interest in that stuff. She thinks: “So, she’s finally gone and done it . . . “ Because once, thirty years earlier, Lila told Elena that someday she’d disappear and not leave a trace. Okay, Elena thinks, “This time we’ll see who wins.” She fires up her computer, determined to write the story of their friendship in as many details as she can recall. If Lila’s decided to erase her life story, a story that’s informed the greater part of Elena’s own life—well, Elena would do the very opposite.

Elena Ferrante is a pen name, the author’s identity a mystery to her growing audience. Perhaps such a degree of privacy is necessary, given that the novel bursts with baroque verisimilitude, the personalities and events of the Neapolitan neighborhood in which it’s set dramatically depicted in details so precise, and larger-than-life that, given my familiarity with Southern Italian culture, I’d say they’re not products solely of the imagination. My Brilliant Friend has all the elements of verismo opera—La Cavalleria Rusticana, I Pagliacci, Tosca—would that someone please write the score. A brute who’s murdered from behind, by a knife to the throat, in his own kitchen. A pair of handmade shoes Lila dreams will someday enrich her poor family and transform the Cerrullo name into a brand. The philandering poet whose lover falls into madness when he abandons her. The nefarious Solara brothers in their Millecento, prowling for girls in the dark narrow streets. A copper cooking pot that bursts into pieces for no detectable reason other than to mark a prophetic moment. Lines ready-made for chorus and arias: “Greco—do you know what a commoner is? You know what riffraff means?” “A city without love goes from good to evil . . . ”

Both girls dream of becoming writers and of co-authoring a book. In the fifth grade, they read a battered copy of Little Women several times over, and fantasize that someday they'll write a novel that will make them rich. But Lila doesn’t wait. While Elena attends tutoring sessions to prepare for the admissions exam to middle school, Lila dives into writing the novel. Disappointed but proud of her friend, Elena shows the book, entitled The Blue Fairy, to their teacher, La Oliviera. We never actually learn what the novel’s about; we can guess from the girls’ daydreams that it involves finding a treasure chest. What we do read about is La Oliviera’s reproach when Elena asks her opinion of Lila’s work. “Greco,” La Oliviera says, “do you know what a commoner is? You understand what riffraff means? If someone never wants to leave the riffraff, then he, and his kids, and his grandkids don’t deserve a thing. So forget about Cerrullo, and focus on yourself.” Precisely what Elena Greco can’t and won’t ever do.

At times Elena adopts aspects of Lila’s braggadocio, asking herself What would Lila do in this situation? The most memorable of these events is when Elena takes a few boys up on their offer of a few lire, enough for a gelato, if she would show them her breasts in an abandoned building not far from school, as proof that her large breasts aren’t fake. Elena afterwards reflects upon what she’s done, and realizes that had Lila been at her side, she herself would have urged that they run away, knowing that Lila would have wanted to stay and take up the dare. But without Lila at her side: “At first I hesitated, then I put myself in her place, no actually, I placed her inside myself. . . and mimicked her tone and her way of moving . . . and I was happy.”

When Elena goes off to middle school, and Lila begins work in her father’s shoemaking shop, Lila attempts to stay abreast of Elena’s schooling. She single-handedly teaches herself Latin, even clueing Elena into the best technique for translating a Latin sentence. She teaches herself Greek. She reads The Aeneid in its entirety before Elena does, and talks to her at length about Dido, sharing this thought: “Without love, life withers not only for the individual, but for the city too.” That thought strikes a deep chord within Elena, reflecting, it seems to her, the nature of their neighborhood, with all its violence and squalor. Later, Elena develops that same thought in an essay— “ . . . when love is exiled from a city, the city changes in nature from benevolent to evil . . . examples being Italy under Fascism, Germany under Nazism”—earning praise from her teachers. Ultimately, Elena feels intense guilt for having taken credit for an idea that originated with the “brilliant” Lila, and an intense loneliness, since by then Lila has abandoned her reading (or so she claims) to pursue her family’s shoemaking business.

During the summer they’re fifteen, Elena lives and works in an inn on the island of Ischia and writes religiously to Lila. When, finally, Lila returns the favor, with a densely inscribed letter of five pages, Elena is humbled by Lila’s eloquence, embarrassed by what she considers her own childish scribblings. She notes that the tone Lila struck in her letter-writing was familiar—in fact, Elena was hearing the same voice she’d heard years ago in The Blue Fairy: “Lila knew how to speak through writing; so different from my way . . . she expresses herself with phrases so well-honed, and without error even though she’d stopped her studies, more so there wasn’t a trace of the unnatural, nothing artificial in what she wrote . . . I read and I saw her, I heard her . . even more than when, face to face, we spoke.”

Towards the end of the book, on Lila’s wedding day, Lila invites Elena into her bedroom, so that they can be alone, so that Elena can help bathe Lila and dress her in her wedding gown. Before Lila disrobes, and Elena sees her friend in the nude for the first time, they have this conversation:

L: “Whatever happens, you have to continue your studies.”

E: “Two more years. Then I get my license and I’m finished.”

L: “No, don’t you ever finish: I will give you the money, you need to go on studying.”

E: “Thanks, but school does end after a point.”

L: “Not for you: You are my brilliant friend, you must become the best of all, of men and women.”

And so we witness an unexpected reversal: Elena Greco has inherited the title of Elena Ferrante’s novel, has gained the respect of the friend she most loves and of the writer she wishes to emulate.