As a devotee of Elena Ferrante, I eagerly purchased her latest release on the day it came out. My Brilliant Friend is still one of my favorite books of all time. Ferrante’s keen eye is unyielding in its honesty. Over quarantine, my mother (who I convinced to read MBF after I read it) and I watched the Italian-language HBO adaptation of MBF. We really enjoyed it. I’m currently finishing the fourth and final Neapolitan Novel, the Story of the Lost Child, but that is another review.
I enjoyed the Lying Life of Adults, but it wasn’t my favorite of Ferrante’s books. I cannot speak to her works like the Days of Abandonment or Troubling Love (though that title in particular is on my to-be-read list), but the Neapolitan Novels were breathtaking in their portrayal of female friendships.
The Lying Life of Adults, like My Brilliant Friend, is a coming-of-age novel. They also share the setting of Naples. But that is really where the similarities end. Giovanna is an adolescent in the 1990’s, the only child of academics. Her father’s infidelity is a crushing blow to the family, but even more so is the family that he has deprived Giovanna from knowing due to his own complicated rejection of his upbringing.
Giovanna is an astute observer, both perceptive and blind to the people around her. She is intelligent but snarky in the way teenagers are. Ferrante’s prose is, as always, surprising and visceral. There’s a certain repulsiveness to the coarse language and leering gazes of the men in this book. Ferrante never tries to make Gianni necessarily likeable. She doesn’t try and tint adolescence with a sickly sweet rose-colored sentimentality. Ferrante embraces the chaos of that age.
I am always astounded by the rich interior worlds that Ferrante constructs. This novel is no different in that regard and that richness imbues the story with a nuance that many fictions centering around adolescence tend to lack. The Marisa Tomei-Narrated audiobook was very well done and I highly recommend it.
