The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism (Literature Now)

by Sarah Chihaya

Though the novels are billed as tales of female friendship, friendship always skates on the edge of irony—intimacy is inseparable from violation. Lenù is the one making art out of Lila’s life, but she suspects that Lila has driven her to do it, that the pleasure she derives from writing and reading is spiked by the pain of submitting to another’s will. It is a fitting model for the relationship Ferrante’s readers have with her novels, which are universally celebrated for their addictiveness. One is pulled, sometimes dragged, along by Ferrante’s prose with an intensity that seems at once utterly singular and reassuringly dispersed. To read her novels is to feel that one is drawing on a reservoir of shared emotion—rage, disgust, pity, indignation, tenderness—to which one has somehow, secretly, contributed.

She told me she thinks collaborations between women are more difficult than collaborations between a woman and a man, whose authority a woman can either submit to or pretend to recognize while pursuing her own agenda.

I tell her that I have found myself returning to the third book in the Neapolitan Series, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, many times since having my two children. No other novel I have read captures the vicissitudes of motherhood with such precision: the power and vulnerability of caring for others, the intimacy and distance between mother and child.

The senselessness of our inner lives, and the impossibility of representing that senselessness through language, is what density registers and conceals.

As soon as Lila and Stefano leave on their honeymoon, Lenù’s misreading of the newlyweds swings wide. “She loved him,” Lenù raves internally, deludedly, “she loved him like the girls in the photonovels”1—thus proving that women have never needed Instagram to misread their friends’ lives as impossibly glamorous and full of love and to downgrade their own accordingly.