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.