My Brilliant Friend
I’ve always been fascinated by objects that speak a secret language – things that transmit meaning so whisper-quiet that only some people pick up on it.
Unbranded luxury clothing is like that – a declaration of taste and values so subtle that most people miss it. My sneakerhead friends and watch-collecting colleagues say the same thing about Jordans and Rolexes. And books are like that, too. Every day, I see people bent over books by Roxane Gay or Ann Patchett and think “Now that’s my kind of person.” Of course the opposite is also true. For every moment of reading-material kinship, every nod exchanged between two people reading the same issue of The New Yorker in a café, there are times when books speak volumes of a different sort (Jordan Peterson readers – I see you).
That’s what makes Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend so confounding as a physical object. It looks like a Harlequin romance. It’s pastel-hued, serif-fonted, wedding-themed. I began reading it in December, and felt vaguely queasy the first few times I pulled it out in public. When, for the first time in years, someone tried to chat me up on the subway, our conversation faltered not when I told him I’m married, but when he amiably asked me what I was reading. I stammered and flushed from the pressure to explain the trashy-looking tome cradled in my hands.
But then, something changed. In parks, at restaurants, and on subway platforms, women started giving me the we’re-reading-the-same-New-Yorker nod when they saw me absorbed in My Brilliant Friend. “Love that book,” one said as she passed me at Gregory’s Coffee. “Oh you’re so lucky, you have three more novels to look forward to,” said another. “I wish I could go back in time and read them all for the first time again,” added her friend.
My Brilliant Friend is a phenomenon, and not in a down-market Big Little Lies or Confessions of a Shopaholic sort of way. Like Joan Didion and Insecure, Byredo and Abbot Kinney, it’s quickly become cultural shorthand – one of those magical things that speak a secret language to just the right people (and all while fooling everyone else with its red herring exterior!) This book is the subject of about a million breathless reviews, podcast episodes, and has recently been turned into both a play and an HBO series.
Even more impressively, it’s done all this against long odds. Beyond the dismal cover, My Brilliant Friend has several strikes against it. It’s written under a pen name by an unknown writer. It’s published by Europa, perhaps the world’s least buzzy major press. It’s translated from Italian. And it’s the first of four ‘Neapolitan Novels,’ yet targets an audience that probably hasn’t read a series since The Babysitters’ Club.
The success of this book is proof that, ultimately, all that matters are the words on the page. And My Brilliant Friend’s words are so clear, so lovely, and so generous. This is the story of class, of place, and of two friends growing from girls into young women. Striving and obedient Lenu narrates, and her counterpart is the intense and gifted Lila, a girl who “even by first grade was beyond any possible competition.” Of Lila, Lenu observes:
“Her quickness of mind was like a hiss, a dart, a lethal bite. And there was nothing in her appearance that acted as a corrective. She was disheveled, dirty, on her knees and elbows she always had scabs from cuts and scrapes that never had time to heal. Her large, bright eyes could become cracks behind which, before every brilliant response, there was a gaze that appeared not very childlike and perhaps not even human. Every one of her movements said that to harm her would be pointless because, whatever happened, she would find a way of doing worse to you.”
My Brilliant Friend is as true a representation of female friendship as I’ve ever read. Rather than gloss over the dark side of a deeply-felt connection – the envy, the pettiness, and the vulnerability – Ferrante turns those feelings into the makings of a book. When Lenu outpaces Lila in school despite Lila’s incredible intellect, we see Lenu ricochet between feelings of superiority and its inverse – the 1950s Italian equivalent of imposter syndrome. And when teenaged Lila marries, leaving Lenu behind in the old neighborhood, we watch Lenu wrestle with a peculiar mix of happiness and jealousy. From the beginning to end of My Brilliant Friend, Ferrante shows us how a friend can at once be your idol, your competitor, and your greatest source of solace. How you suffer not only when they suffer but also when they shine the light of their love elsewhere. And she captures, in such pretty prose, that us-against-the-world feeling of a truly great friend:
“We were twelve years old, but we walked along the hot streets of the neighborhood, amid the dust and flies that the occasional old trucks stirred up as they passed, like two old ladies taking the measure of lives of disappointment, clinging tightly to each other. No one understood us, only we two—I thought—understood one another.”
My Brilliant Friend is also a book about Naples, Italy’s unlovable, ungovernable city. Lenu and Lila spend all their young lives in the postwar apartment blocks of a neighborhood that Ann Mah of the New York Times describes as “dangerous, dirty and seductive, the place everyone yearns to leave behind, and the place they can’t shake.”
One day, the two girls venture beyond the confines of their neighborhood, walking with determination in the direction of the sea. Though their plans are foiled by pounding rain and Lila’s crumbling resolve, the experience is formative for Lenu:
“On the road, I felt far from everything and everyone, and distance – I discovered for the first time – extinguished in me every time and every worry; Lila had abruptly repented of her own plan, she had given up the sea, she had wanted to return to the confines of the neighborhood. I couldn’t figure it out.”
Years later, when Lenu, Lila, and a few friends finally leave their neighborhood to visit the shopping district Via Chiaia, they discover a whole other world:
“It was like crossing a border. I remember a dense crowd and a sort of humiliating difference. I looked not at the boys but at the girls, the women: they were absolutely different from us. They seemed to have breathed another air, to have eaten other food, to have dressed on some other planet, to have learned to walk on wisps of wind. I was astonished ... they passed by without seeming to see me. They didn’t see any of the five of us. We were not perceptible .... we felt uneasy and yet fascinated, ugly but also impelled to imagine what we would become if we had some way to re-educate ourselves and dress and put in makeup and adorn ourselves properly.”
Walking on wisps of wind aside, it’s the edgy and rundown parts of Naples, not its fancy squares, that have captured readers’ imaginations. In a Vox article, Aditi Shrikant writes:
“While many books experience sweeping popularity, Ferrante’s novels are part of a subgroup of pop culture that compels people to travel. Tour groups like Looking for Lila and Ferrante Fever Naples have popped up across Naples, where the series is set, and travelers report being amazed and delighted by their experiences. Unlike Rome, Florence, or Venice, Naples’s crime-ridden reputation has kept it from being in the rotation of cities that tourist frequent. But the Ferrante books are changing that.”
And according to Shrikant, Naples isn’t the lone beneficiary of these literary travel tours:
“These tours marry two trends, one being book-and film-based travel. When Crazy Rich Asians premiered in August, searches for flights to Singapore spiked on Kayak and Orbitz. New Zealand capitalized on Lord of the Rings mania by making hobbit-themed planes on Air New Zealand and a Lord of the Rings–inspired airplane safety video. Eat, Pray, Love drove travelers not only to the infamous Napoli pizza place, but to Bali, where the number of tourists swelled.”
Though the three months I once spent travelling through Europe on a bus full of Australians might indicate otherwise, I’m not much of a tour person. I’m a go-it-alone gal – allergic to guides with fluorescent vests and flags held high. Still, I find the existence of these tours so thrilling. They’re proof of the power a great book has to spark action. And they’re the ultimate – if pre-packaged – combination of reading and roaming.
With My Brilliant Friend behind me, you might expect that I’d be halfway through The Story of a New Name by now. And believe me, I’m tempted. But I’m trying to learn from that girl at the coffee shop and take it slow, rationing my reading of Neapolitan Novels. I already know I’ll miss Lila and Lenu when this series is done – why hasten the hard goodbye? Plus maybe if I wait long enough, they’ll release new editions with better covers?