In Italy, this observation has been crucial to the literary culture of postwar feminism as articulated by Luisa Muraro, one of Ferrante's influences, and the Milan Woman's Bookstore Collective. As Rebecca Falkoff has suggested, Muraro's theory of affidamento, "a practice of 'putting faith in' or 'entrusting' between women ... would be the basis for a new symbolic order to counter patriarchy."' Second-wave calls for sisterhood relied on two premises: an equal rights platform that denied the specificity of sexual difference between women and men, and the fantasy of unity and consensus among women. In contrast, affidamento imagined that women could build relations independent of men, modeled on the ties between mothers and daughters. These relations did not always entail alignment. Nonalignment was key to figuring the idea of the political as an assortment of individuals rather than a falsely single voice.

Friendship and reading take time, but I tend to be pushy with both. I'm a voracious, perhaps violent reader of novels, and a voracious (hopefully not violent) cultivator of new friendships; I blaze through books in single sittings and similarly crave those day-into-night, coffee-into-beer conversations where you learn everything about a person in one heady rush. This isn't necessarily a good thing. Both of these impulses are surely born out of a brutish impatience to reach some certain knowledge of what will happen, to get to the end. It's hard to force myself to slow down and relish the meandering pleasures of getting to know a person or a novel.

I devoured these books the first time, the way I remember devouring books as a kid, the way Lila does, according to Lend. It was that old feeling, the excitement of having a mind to which another mind is speaking from the page. Rereading them has been remarkably slow—and not just because Sarah encouraged it. Part of me is trying and failing to memorize the sentences, which build rapidly and by association—comma, clause, comma, clause—like the inveterately booming, inveterately corrupt city of Naples. The next part is trying to decipher what has happened here, how this book was made, why I have forced it on every woman I care about with little more than a lame jacket copy summary. Italy. Friendship. Their whole lives. No wonder so many of those women looked at me with blank hopefulness, wishing I would say something intelligent, give them a good reason, or even just a few more words.

"Just trust me," I have to tell them, inadequately. "You'll love it." And the fact is, everyone does.

Why?

Mostly, I think, because it is a book about deciphering that which is present and has always been around us: life, these people, our parents and neighbors, the world into which we are born, our maddening friends. It's all there already, our material, we just have to put it in order. So, in going back to the beginning, for the slow, searching reread, I can't help but think about the arrangement of this material—the order in which Lend, who is writing it, presents it to us—which seems to be the order in which it presents itself to her.

Yet while The Great Gatsby or A Separate Peace or On the Road—these bro-love tales of masculine exceptionalism—suggest to us that bright-burning human fireworks like this might actually exist somewhere, Ferrante's brilliant friend[s] show[s] us the opposite. Rather, I wonder if Ferrante's point is to highlight the fact that all friendships—especially real, deep, true ones—are, on some level, built on fantastic projections. We don't get to know the real Lila (Lina to everyone else in the neighborhood) and can't ever, really. For as long as Lend is our narrator, we'll be blinded by the too-bright blaze of her particular and singular understanding of Lila as her enigmatic and brilliant friend, her opposite, her better half. It's a weird depiction of friendship that offers a frightening revelation: that to some extent, perhaps all our friends are imaginary ones. But even if our friends are somehow unreal to us, it doesn't mean that friendship, and friend-love, aren't real or true. And even if this sounds shifty and makes me seem like something of a sociopath, I don't honestly think it's a bad thing. It's also kind of a beautiful thing—it's what lets us see our close companions through the bifocals of friendship (critical on top, rose-colored on bottom), to describe them in that particular nonerotic language of love that Jill evoked. It's the imaginary, malleable quality of our friends that allows us to shape them into desirable and aspirational definites, visions of personhood clearer than our own uncomfortable partial views of our misshapen, amorphous selves. Thus, a large part of Lila's magnetic draw is in the specificity of her depiction. [...]

Solidarity to Lenu is both a dream and a nightmare; she wants to join in, but she is too afraid to relinquish her unique self to give in to the triumphal we that Jill highlighted in Balestrini. To her, that “we” is irreconcilable with the solitude of independent being or, more specifically, the desired solitude of the autonomous female being. For increasingly, as she walks through the mass of protesters looking for a familiar face or name (her own), Lent finds it particularly hard to articulate the women from the mass or from each other. She sees men in passing and notes them individually as “handsome, ugly, well-dressed, scruffy, violent, frightened, amused,” yet the women she sees “stayed close together ... they shouted together, laughed together, and if they were separated by even a few meters they kept an eye on each other so as not to get lost” (TWL, 69). Only a few individuals “by themselves or at most in pairs,” move amongst the groups of men, and they are marked by their hard-won distinction from the other women: “they seemed to me the happiest, the most aggressive, the proudest.” It is 1968 and while Lent struggles to absorb “the lesson from France,” she is deeply terrified by the idea of losing the distinctly singular, female self she has worked so hard (albeit confusedly) to keep cleanly defined and bounded, in order to join the massed bodies of implicitly male solidarity.

[...] Lila is the most clearly defined character at various points, yet she is also the most willing to embrace phase changes and transformations, at once the most and least solid of forms. Thus, both her magical changeability and her lifelong nightmare of slowly dissolving margins—perhaps migraine or madness or something more mystical—might both be incomplete, primitive stages on the way to her ultimate desire and destiny, the sudden “elimination without a trace.” Maybe her proximity to the void is what makes Lila at once the most empathetic character (who feels other minds; around whom others dissolve) and the most remote one, that distant figure nobody can comprehend or touch, she who refuses to leave traces for anyone to hold onto (“I’ll come look in your computer, I’ll read your files, I'll erase them” [TWL, 29]).

When the four of us began this whole enterprise, we met in person to talk about our projections and anxieties about writing together. Over pasta and wine, we worried about the idea of reading books together, long-term: What if we all came up with the same ideas? How would we distinguish our voices as writers? What if we weren't original enough? It turned out that none of these concerns came to anything, though of course we all fell into certain patterns of reading and even raised the same questions or terms or ideas. We never thought the same things or repeated each other. It seems so obvious now: of course we wouldn’t, we are different people. And yet, that anxiety was so strongly felt. Why?

These are, of course, the very same fears that Lila and Lent express in their different ways—the fears of pollution and codependence that inevitably accompany intimacy of any kind. Considering Lila and Len, considering us, considering this venture and the novels it springs from, I wonder if there is a way to be confident in solidarity—in a personal way (and in a political one too, I think) but not subsume each other; to experience an intellectual and emotional togetherness that feels the giddiness of being overwhelmed with feeling but does not itself overwhelm. If there is a way to truly be with one another, and infiltrate one another, and communicate deeply, but not get lost in other minds. If there is a way to both be your friend and be yourself and not betray either. If there is a way to dissolve margins but not give in to the seductions of madness or self-obliteration. Perhaps that is the most defiant challenge of these novels to their characters and to their readers.

The Story of the Lost Child is no manifesto. Who would want it to be? It is the story that an imposter might write, knowing herself to be one. An upstart’s novel, of bad mothers and bad feminists, bad politicos, of the kind of self-regard necessary to close oneself off in a room of one’s own and write away the day. Or better, it is a story of the trade-offs that went into the making of Elena Greco, the novelist. Maybe it is better to say that my disappointment lies with the realism of the novels that is so like this world, where there is no purely good choice, no correct answer in choosing between mother, friend, feminist, radical, writer, lover.

But I don’t think that these superficial delights, redolent though they are of the standard practices and conventions of what some critics might brush off as mere pleasure reading, are at all the things that generate the most intense pleasure in reading Ferrante—at least, not for me. No, the strange, disturbing, confusing, magnetic, compulsive, and often horribly ecstatic pleasure of reading Ferrante’s fiction is in fact situated in the ungraspable nature of its perturbations. The clearly defined aspects of structural convergences, descriptive writing, character work—these small formal satisfactions drift limply atop the vast, seething unknowability of the real real that strains to break through these artificial constraints, the irrepressible and irresistible disorder that Ferrante calls frantumaglia that churns under the shaky scaffolding of the knowable or sayable. To me, it becomes increasingly clear that the dangerous height of my pleasure in reading Ferrante is the feeling that she, and we with her, are on the cusp of disintegration of the safely contained forms of fiction and of life. To give yourself over to the Neapolitan novels is to feel at once like you are wholly enclosed within the world of the books (both within their surprising unities of place, action, and time, and within their luxuriant, multivolume bulk) and like that entire, encompassing world is always on the brink of utter rupture and dissolution.

The pleasure one finds in the supposed perfection of novelistic form, in the precise and proportional lineaments of a world made by, say, Henry James, is the very opposite of the visceral pleasure-unpleasure I find in Ferrante’s writing, where “everything take[s] shape and then loses its shape.” Like the relationships and the disorderly city it depicts, the Neapolitan Quartet is caught up in an endless struggle between the desire to inhabit a singular, stable form and the impartially cruel impossibility of that desire—the undeniable multidirectional tide of the frantumaglia, the hectic but irresistible activity of unforming and being unformed that undoes any progress that the busy work of form might accomplish.