The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante – Book Review

The finale to Ferrante’s four-part Neapolitan Novels chronicling the lives and complicated friendship between Elena and Lila didn’t disappoint and it’s hard to think of a series equally as rewarding and consistently fantastic. It’s impossible to convey, in a review, what makes Ferrante’s writing so extraordinary. On the surface, if you tried to describe the story, it sounds just like any domestic drama – lives of two women as they mature from girlhood into adulthood, going through various highs and lows, grappling with motherhood, making ends meet, becoming successful, growing old. But their experiences and everyday lives are just so incredibly well-drawn, with such degree of richness, texture and psychological insight, in prose that’s so crystal and powerful.

Because I left a bigger gap between reading this book and the rest, I actually forgot the premise of the first novel, where, in the present day, Elena decides to write the story of her 60-year-old friendship with Lila after Lila herself disappears without a trace. And there’s a sense of the story coming full circle, in a few respects. After years of trying to escape her old neighbourhood in Naples, in this novel Elena comes back to the city with her two young daughters after the break-up of her marriage, and eventually moves into an apartment directly above Lila’s. Her writing career is thriving, while Lila and her partner Enzo have a successful business and Lila becomes entangled in the murky underworld politics of the neighbourhood. The two friends become pregnant at the same time, and Elena observes the traits and dynamics in the relationship between their daughters that strangely resemble her own and Lila’s (Lila’s daughter is bright and precocious, while Elena’s Imma is more ordinary and submissive). Other long-running story strands, like Elena’s obsession with Nino, her love since childhood, thankfully come to an end (Nino has become one of my least favourite fictional characters and it’s a relief when Elena finally gets over him).

While Elena is a character who breaks with the traditions that bind the women of her time, becoming an academic and a writer, getting involved in feminism, leaving behind Naples and her family in both geographical and emotional sense, the story of her rebellion is still a fairly conventional one. Lila however defies any easy categorisation and, in the end, remains one of the great literary enigmas. After reading the first novel, I felt that Lila’s opaqueness made her a somewhat unsatisfying character, but after finishing the series it’s clear that mystery is at the core of her character, and that Elena puts their story in writing partly in order to figure out her friend who has shadowed her life for decades and never really left despite the long stretches of separation.

In this book, Lila remains the same fascinating figure, the “terrible, dazzling girl”: cruel yet kind, manipulative yet honest, charismatic, capricious, submissive to no one, a constant source of feelings of inferiority in Elena despite the success she’s achieved. Her presence in Elena’s life is both toxic and indispensable. At the same time, Elena comes to realise that Lila lacks the solid centre she herself possesses, particularly when her friend, in a rare unguarded moment, talks about the terrifying episodes of dissociation she describes as “dissolving boundaries”. One of the things Ferrante captures really well is the way any strong emotion in her characters has an underbelly and nothing can be described as simply love, hate, happiness, envy etc. My own feelings about the two main characters are similarly divided: while Lila is a much more compelling character, Elena with her frank admissions and insecurities is easier to identify with.

Some of the descriptions can get old over the course of the series – how many times can Lila narrow her eyes, already? But in the end, I don’t think I’ve ever read an account of a complicated female friendship so intricately and intimately portrayed.