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. [...]

Lenu's fulsome praise itself becomes -- on this understanding -- an exercise in masking.