Life Is Grand III (You Slept with my Husband You Whore I’ll Smash Your Face In)

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay Book III, the Neapolitan Novels, Middle Time by Elena Ferrante.  Europa Editions.  418 pp.  $18.00.

In some ways this is the most aptly titled of the three novels I’ve read in Ferrante’s brilliant quartet.  Really there is only one person who has left, at least semi-permanently, and that is Elena.  It was her great good fortune to go to college in Pisa, meet a different kind of people (in light of whom her Neapolitan friends seem incredibly parochial), in particular to have met the family of her fiancé, Pietro Airota.  Pietro’s mother Adele works for the publisher who has just published Elena’s first novel, and his sister Mariarosa is one of the book’s great champions; if Elena hadn’t stumbled across these people she wouldn’t have a book out, because she wrote it on a whim with no idea of publishing.

When she is giving her first reading, and an older professor attacks it, the man who stands to defend it—a tall, bearded, charismatic professor—is none other than Nino Sarratore, the love and obsession of Elena’s young life, and the man whom Lila later ran off with.  He’s the other candidate for someone who has left, though by the end of the book he will have made his way back to Naples.  But he lives in that larger world.  He’s extracted himself from parochial Naples.

Elena is the author of a sexually revelatory novel, a situation with which I can definitely sympathize.  But she is a woman, a young woman, living in Italy in the Sixties, so the reactions to her book are heightened compared to what I experienced as a man in 1990.  Many women are grateful for what she has revealed, speak to her warmly.  Others think she has written a dirty book, and people are particularly nasty—with some exceptions—when she returns to the old neighborhood.  It’s as if she thinks she’s better than they are.

Lila in the meantime is at a low point.  Having run from her marriage to be with the great love of her life—an adventure that lasted all of 27 days—she has abandoned all her resources.  Her husband, fortunately, had strayed as well, had a woman he wanted to shack up with; otherwise he might have killed her.  But Lila was on the streets, and found work at the sausage factory of Bruno Soccavo, the friend who had accompanied Nino to the beach back when Nino and Lila got together.  Sausage making, at least in Italy in the Sixties, is brutally hard work (having now read about it at close hand, I won’t be eating Italian sausage anytime soon).  It isn’t long before Lila, a natural leader, has gotten involved with the labor movement that is trying to improve working conditions (and keep Bruno from thinking he has a right to sleep with all the young women workers).

I’m familiar with the politics.  I was in the United States in the Sixties, rather than Italy, and I was a few years younger, but the attitudes of the leftists and rightists, the way that adventurous college students tend to side with—and sleep with—the left, all sounds familiar.  But in Italy the words fascist and communist go way back.  And when the fascists come to break up the labor rally, they bring clubs and chains.

Lila’s situation seems hopeless.  I thought that that adventurous, brilliant little girl, who stubbornly went her own way, had finally run into a situation that was too much for her.  But Elena comes to her rescue.  It was because she was one of Those Who Leave, because she knew the Airotas and other people of influence, that she could help.  There is poetic justice in the fact that she has surpassed her brilliant old friend, and is able to help her.

In the meantime, we’re halfway into the novel and she hasn’t married Pietro.  They also haven’t slept with each other.  She’s had her sexual adventures, but not with him, and by the time they get married the whole thing is—pardon the expression—an anti-climax.  He’s a true gentleman, from gentlemanly stock.  He charms her family and everyone he meets back in Naples; it’s as if a worldly sophisticated guy has come to the sticks and wowed them.  But in some weird way, though she cares for him, she doesn’t really know him.  She understands that he’s devoted to his work, but doesn’t know he’s so devoted that, on their wedding night, he’ll consummate the marriage—an event that seems to take forever—and go back to his work desk.  He’s the son of a renowned professor, trying to live up to that man’s achievements, but it isn’t clear he has the talent.  He seems a plodding scholar rather than an inspired one.  Elena wants to use birth control so she can work on a second book, but he wants a family immediately (not that he wants to help with the children). Elena has had two daughters before she resolves that argument.  At that point it’s a little late.

So: the life of a young author who has just published a racy novel, violent Sixties politics, rescuing a friend who was in deep distress, starting a new marriage and having children, discovering who your husband really is and what the landscape of your life looks like, floundering around looking for the subject of a second book, actually writing that book and finding that no one likes it.  Does that seem enough for one novel?

The fact is that the major event of this novel comes after all of that, and completely upsets the applecart.  It is an utter surprise and completely predictable; I couldn’t believe I didn’t see it coming.  In a way it is the event that all three volumes were preparing us for, if this is Elena’s story, and not Lila’s, as we first thought.  I’m honestly not clear whose story it is.  At times it seems the story of a whole Naples neighborhood, all the people listed at the beginning of each volume.

Elena Ferrante, without being terribly explicit, is honest about sex in a way that I’ve seldom known an author to be, male or female.  I find the sexual revelations startling, I, who have been reading about sex all my life.  And toward the end of the book she gets into the sexual politics of her time, the way women are forced to be subservient to the men, not just Lila, who had to tow the line to her fascist bosses in the sausage factory, but also Elena, who despite the fact that she has written a novel that has done well, despite the fact that she seems smarter than her plodding husband, is still shunted aside when the intellectual discussions begin.  It’s the men who say the “important” things.  Elena has a theory about all that, which has become the subject of the second book she’ll actually publish.  We look forward to hearing more of that.  In the meantime it’s overshadowed by her turbulent personal life, which has entered the realm of grand opera.