[...] In Frantumaglia, Ferrante writes that, “We are heterogeneous fragments that, thanks to impressions of unity—elegant figures, beautiful form— stay together despite their arbitrary and contradictory nature” (FR, 368). The truly marvelous unpleasure of reading Ferrante has to do with the fact that she forcibly reveals those fragments that always hide under the mask of beautiful form in a text (or in a person) whether we want to see them or not. In so doing, we might look inwards and see our own rough, unfinished seams, not completely stitched together, perhaps already in the midst of falling apart. Through reading the stories of Lila and Lent and how they read each other over the years, I am given a strange and agonizing lesson in how to read myself—not in the way that one might initially read a formative text (as a kind of knitting pattern, a design for the garment of personality) but as its opposite, a text that demands that you brutally rip away the garment of beautiful form and reveal the raw-edged fragments beneath. Not in the manner of Roland Barthes’s coy textual striptease (texte de plaisir) or in his evocative but rather bloodless “cut” or “gape” (texte de jouissance), but rather, with a bodily urgency and violence. Reading Ferrante fills me with a dangerous abandon and wild disregard for disciplined self-containment. More than anything, she makes me want to write as she writes—viscerally, bloodily, “like butchering eels”—and in so doing to somehow know, like Lila rework- ing the portrait, that ecstasy and clarity of vision that comes with making-by-unmaking one’s own form, to be both Orpheus and the frenzied Maenads.

Where Ferrante’s guidance seems most apparent is in Costanzo’s attempt to make the depth and disorder of a character’s consciousness visible, a technique he and Ferrante both refer to as “acquiring density.” Density works by cutting against psychological realism, casting off deterministic explanations for why characters do what they do: a girl defies her father because of her nascent feminist sensibilities; a father beats his child because he believes women must be kept in their place. These interpretations may be true, but they are too abstract, too neat—they have little to do with how a reader experiences a character’s actions as real. “What decides the success of a character is often half a sentence, a noun, an adjective that jams the psychological machine like a wrench thrown into the works and produces an effect that is no longer that of a well-regulated device, but of flesh and blood, of genuine life, and therefore incoherent and unpredictable,” Ferrante writes to me. “It’s the moment when the psychological framework breaks and the character acquires density.”

What first got me hooked on the Neapolitan novels, almost from the start of My Brilliant Friend, was the way in which the many things Lenu and Lila fervently desire—books, money, power, knowledge, experience, boys, sex, beautiful objects, political change, respect, escape, superiority, each other—refuse to arrange themselves into a fixed hierarchy. Any of these, in the girls’ cosmology, may act in the service of any other at any given moment; all may be means and all may be ends. Which are which shift so frequently that the desires consistently catch the desirers themselves off guard.

I fell in love with something similar when I started reading Doris Lessing a couple of years ago; it was, in fact, a friend on whom I'd pushed Lessing, in longstanding feminist tradition, who pushed Ferrante on me. Lessing is a progenitor of what Sarah described as Ferrante’s fever dream realism, and much of her work is similarly devoted to acidly representing the sexual politics of the postwar global Left. I had never read anyone else who better captured the vexed intersection of communism and boys until I read Ferrante or grasped why that obscure crossing is so terribly important to understand. [...]

Sometimes the way we get turned on to politics is to get turned on. From Plato’s Symposium through Wilhelm Reich and his sexualrevolutionary heirs, a compelling line of thought holds that if you want people to develop a political consciousness, it’s not a bad idea to begin with the erotic—sex, wine, a party. I suppose I’m saying that I hope one answer to the question, “Why is Nino there?” is that he is a dialectically necessary stage Lent must pass through on her way from being Lila’s minder to her own emancipation, intellectual, political, and otherwise. Have I given the novel exactly the kind of telos I said earlier I enjoyed it not having? Well, I contradict myself. I’ll admit it: I desperately want true political consciousness for Lenu. I really, really want her to discover feminism. I want it for her like you want Sherlock to solve the mystery. I’m not holding my breath for Ferrante to give me what I want. But she has certainly nurtured the fantasy. Lenu needs feminism and feminism needs her. [...]