Warwick's Reviews > The Story of a New Name

I tore through this in a kind of furious curiosity, annoyed with myself for being so involved and annoyed with Ferrante for taking so long to do what she does. The plot, heavy on frustrated emotion, is drawn out with intense internal monologues and telenovela miscommunications – and yet the actual characters are so real, built with such psychological verisimilitude, that you are fascinated despite yourself. The effect is as though Doris Lessing spent a season guest-writing for Days of our Lives.

I personally find Ferrante's writing unexciting; there is something a little laborious about the way she assembles her story, something flat about the way narrative events are introduced. ‘The day went smoothly, apart from two episodes that apparently had no repercussions,’ she'll write. ‘Here's the first.’ Clunk, clunk. Sometimes the translation does not help, either:

I got mad, I said, “You are both mistaken: it's I who do what Lina wants, not the opposite.”

This just sounds so strange, so formal, especially for someone who's supposed to be angry. That ‘it's I who do’ is one of those weird artefacts of translationese where rigid grammatical correctness is placed above any sense of naturalism. When I hit a line like this, I drop out of the story until I've rewritten it in my head (You're both wrong: I'm the one doing what Lina wants, not the other way round). But despite all this, the characterisation is excellent: you just believe everything she says about these people. It's a talent some musicians have, too. Tom Waits can sing ‘Sha la la la la la la la’ and make it sound like an insight. Lenù and Lina are insightful, three-dimensional people, however bland I sometimes find the prose.

The characters' lifelikeness is perhaps the more surprising for how tightly constrained all their behaviour is by codes of convention. This is particularly true of the men, whose social obligations to be aggressive gave me faint but nevertheless exhausting flashbacks to the stupid expectations that groups of boys have about getting angry, about hitting people. And my upbringing was, by comparison, a ludicrously comfortable and middle-class one. Whereas in the Naples suburbi, the most innocuous comment about your sister or girlfriend can necessitate the extreme and immediate application of violence, thanks to what Ferrante describes as ‘the incredibly detailed male regulations’ dictating their lives.

It almost feels against the grain to talk about how men are treated in Ferrante, but I found it fascinating. She's not in the least censorious about their propensity for violence; she depicts it very organically as something imposed on them by an external – social – force. When Stefano is beating his wife, Ferrante describes him as

trying to assimilate fully an order that was coming to him from very far away, perhaps even from before he was born. The order was: be a man, Ste'…

And she is punctilious about showing how these imperatives are fostered by the women just as much as by the other men. ‘That was what we said, we girls, when someone didn't care much about us: that he wasn't a man.’ When Lila explains away her bruises by saying that she fell, Ferrante's understanding of the scene is exquisite:

She had used, in telling that lie, a sarcastic tone and they had all sarcastically believed her, especially the women, who knew what had to be said when the men who loved them and whom they loved beat them severely. Besides, there was no one in the neighborhood, especially of the female sex, who did not think that she had needed a good thrashing for a long time. So the beatings did not cause outrage, and in fact sympathy and respect for [her husband] increased—there was someone who knew how to be a man.

The curious thing about that passage is that she ascribes to Lila a command of irony that she, Ferrante, does not display herself. It's interesting in light of a line from a review in The Australian which has been splashed all over the covers of these novels: ‘Imagine if Jane Austen got angry’. This has the air of someone reaching for the only famous female novelist they can think of; but anyway, my point is that Austen would not have needed to explain that Lila's tone or her friends' belief was ironic, because for Austen the irony was embedded in the narrative voice itself – and was the more deadly for it.

In spite of all that stuff, let the record show that I have immediately started reading book three and that I hate myself.