Back when I read The Story of a New Name, I described that book somewhat glibly as a novel of change, if not necessarily one about change. As Lila trades her family name for another, and the course of her life explodes into increasing stress and violence, the prose of the book follows suit. It is a novel of ever-morphing personal judgements and psychological states, with characters changing their minds page to page, sentence to sentence.
The Story of the Lost Child returns to this ‘theme’, but with the hardened grimness of maturity and old age. The great tension running throughout Ferrante’s work is the conflict between the endless permutations of a person’s character, and the stubborn stagnation of their life as a whole. This is flagged to us early on in the novel, when a previously radical revolutionary lays out the state of the country in defeatist terms, bemoaning that things can never really develop in Italy, and that the political sphere is fated to rattle and shake within the confines of a rigid set of expectations. He might as well be talking directly to us: letting us know that this is not a story of radical reinvention, of characters escaping their fate, but a question of how much change it is possible for Elena and Lila to affect within the binds of motherhood, friendship and femininity.
A lot of these fatalistic paths are quite clear, and none so much as with Lila. A wunderkind, initially scripted for astonishing accomplishments, she instead becomes entrenched within the world of the neighborhood. She is provocative, domineering, and balances the rhythm of the streets on her little finger, but she remains defined by her margins. Elena’s mother - another equally landlocked character - holds her in high esteem throughout this book in particular, citing her accomplishments and rising stature within Naples, but such praise comes with a grim qualifier: that Elena’s mother can barely conceive of the world beyond her doorstep, and that Lila’s achievements therefore only stretch so far. Her influence is small, not just geographically, but sociologically, and even her greatest provocation - her ability to keep the neighborhood mafioso hanging on her every word - has its limits. By the time she disappears at the age of 60, most of the people are content to forget she ever existed.
Likewise, the seeds of Elena’s destiny were planted in the reader's mind long ago. Way back in My Brilliant Friend, she indicated that her biggest fear lay within her mother’s gait - that Elena would one day come to embody all the ugliness and misery personified by that limp and transform into her, the way so many children sink into doomed facsimiles of their parents. When the first glimpses of this development are finally seen in Book 3, through Elena’s disjointed, aggressive attitude towards her own children, we recognise it as a sad inevitability gaining form. By the time The Story of the Lost Child comes around, the parallels are no longer alarming, but normalised to us - just another part of the thread of Elena’s life.
All of these predetermined narratives are rooted in a number of prevalent themes: motherhood, femininity, misogyny; all concepts that seem to dictate the lives of these characters. But if these are the pillars of fate in Ferrante’s world, then Naples is the crucible. There’s an old adage that a person can never go home again; for Ferrante, home is a place you can never really leave Instead, it is revealed to have followed these characters their whole life, its tendrils latching onto their shoulders, shaping their social standing (as seen by the way that Elena struggles to adapt her Napolean dialect to fit in with Northern Italy). Through Elena’s emotional affairs and Lila’s abusive work conditions, the darkness of the neighborhood hangs over them like a curse. The difference between them is in how actively they try to escape it, with self-loathing Elena leaving Naples for an international career, whilst the vivacious Lila shores up her standing at home.
At first glance, this reads like an ironic tragedy, but after spending so much time with these characters, a subtler picture arises. Because, for all that Lila is constrained by the margins of the neighbourhood, it seems to be a prison of her own choosing. Much is made by Elena throughout the series of the gulf between her own intelligence and Lila’s shining brilliance, but in the end this contrast in character is worthless in the face of another: that Elena is focused and disciplined with her intellect, where Lila is distracted and impetuous. It’s what keeps Elena on the move, and what keeps Lila bound to the stradone, circling the same streets out of a fear of change. Change, after all, is often a violent act, and Lila’s own abusive upbringing is surely a contributing factor in her desire to keep things the same. It’s perhaps not a coincidence that her moments of derealisation are described so memorably as “dissolving boundaries”, where the edges that keep the world solid melt away, leaving a shapeless terror in their wake. It’s even less a coincidence that these episodes of derealisation occur only at moments of violence, from the firework attack in Book One, to the earthquake that rocks Naples halfway through The Lost Child.
And so, for much of this last story, events follow their predetermined route. Indeed, for all that I adored the book, one of the only complaints I have is how much the story revolves around watching characters flounder in a situation, waiting for them to make a move. This is most keenly felt in the Nino subplot - a withering tale of Elena’s relationship with a man that has informed her sense of romance since she was a child, but who is now clearly an adulterous lech. Throughout this stretch, we wait for Elena to fight back against Nino’s pithy excuses and toxic choices, and it feels all too often like circling the drain. Ferrante is skilled enough to make this issue feel like a necessary evil - an accurate reflection of life’s futility - but it's an evil nonetheless. Much of the book is like this - watching these characters that we love get caught in the spokes of a wheel, and we wonder: how will any of them break the cycle in a story that is all about how vicious these cycles can be.
The answer is simple: you escape the story altogether.
Major spoilers follow
The disappearance of Tina - Lila’s uncommonly bright daughter - marks a tipping point, not just in this novel, but in the series as a whole. Her exit from the book (it’s cruelly never stated whether she is dead or alive) is almost a klaxon call that gives the signal for every person in the series to entropy - to suddenly accelerate towards their end point. Death follows in her wake: Rino (Lila’s brother) is found dead of an overdose, whilst the neighborhood villains, the Solaras brothers, are shot dead in the streets. Lila’s relationship with Enzo rots. Her own son resents her, as she does him. Eventually, even her friendship with Elena is severed, as our narrator publishes a novel about Lila’s life against her wishes. Shortly after, Lila vanishes, never to be seen again.
To say that this section of the story is the emotional apex of Ferrante’s series would be an understatement. It is gutting, riveting work. The lives of these women were not particularly happy, but there was happiness within, and the loss of Tina feels like a savage punchline: that Lila will continue to struggle, and that only in death was Tina spared the same life-cycle as her mother.
In death, the cycle is broken.
Except, not quite.
When Tina disappears, a lot is made about the lack of a body. With no body, Lila has nothing to mourn over, and no way of knowing if her grief is to be directed at a dead child or a living one. There’s a visceral horror in how Tina no longer has a corporeal presence that we can affix her destiny to. She isn’t dead. She simply ‘isn’t’.
At the end of the novel, Lila also disappears, presumably hurt and betrayed by Elena’s decision to publish Tina’s story in print. Once she is gone, Elena never hears from her again. Her whereabouts are unknown. Her circumstances are unknown. There is no presence to affix a destiny to. She isn’t dead. She simply ‘isn’t’.
Lila’s disappearance is a clear mimic of Tina’s but it is also so much more than that. Tina was a child, subjected to things outside of her control. This is not the case with Lila, who instead makes a firm, conscious decision to vanish into thin air. And it hurts - it leaves Elena with a hole so deep that these four books came tumbling out - but there’s also something powerful about it. If Elena and Lila’s lives are constricted and predetermined by a cultural narrative, then Lila’s decision is nothing less than a means to escape that narrative. In doing so, she inverts Tina’s tragedy into her own victory.
I’ve previously bandied around my thoughts about how Lila fits within the building blocks of these novels. She is the deuteragonist - by definition not the main character - and yet she so clearly commands the thoughts of the narrator, such that she exerts a tremendous narrative pressure. From the start, Elena has been writing in an attempt not just to preserve Lila, but to understand her. It’s what makes the books so interesting to think about, and when I look back at my own work regarding these novels, I see that I write about them with a different kind of focus than I do to other works, like I am somehow participating in Elena’s attempt to interrogate and understand her friend. I love the prose of these books - the way that Ferrante seeps tension into every sentence is sublime - but this whole story is an act of understanding first, and a linguistic display second. It represents Elena’s attempt to confine Lila within a narrative framework.
And it doesn’t work.
Lila escapes Elena’s narrative. Her whereabouts are unknown. Her thoughts and struggles are unknown. We’ve spent so much of this series observing Lila’s authority over the narrative, oscillating between being in awe of her magnetism, and pitying her decline, but here, at the end, her command over this story is solidified.
In the epilogue, she sends Elena two childhood dolls, long thought missing since the opening of My Brilliant Friend. Their reappearance demonstrates something powerful: that Lila may not be around, but she still has the ability to affect the story, and will haunt it as and when she sees fit. Her last message is a show of mercy - a sign to Elena that she is still alive, and that she is closing the circle of their friendship once and for all. In doing this, and in escaping the story, I think she finds something close to peace.
And so, in a final act of understanding, Elena herself offers her own mercy in return. She stops trying to contain her friend. She stops writing.
She lets Lila go.
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