I was in college when I first read My Brilliant Friend, the first volume in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. It was a sleepy month between winter break and the beginning of the spring semester, and I read maniacally, all day, without reservation. At the time, I’d been perturbed by what I perceived as a problem in the discussions of my school’s feminist club. I thought there was too wide a gap between what we talked about and how we applied concepts to our lives. When push came to shove, how could we make something real out of what we believed?
The Story of the Lost Child, the fourth and final book in the quartet and the source material for the last season of HBO’s excellent adaptation of Ferrante’s series, is, at first, all about this question; in fact, to varying degrees, the story of Lila and Lenù’s friendship is. When we left them last season, Lenù had finally written a second book and left her husband for Nino Sarratore. Her book, which she researched at Nino’s encouragement and wrote while she waited for him to come back into her life, is about “men’s invention of woman†— Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, Eve, and how the models for womanhood had all been designed by men, in men’s image.
In the aftermath of writing a book about women’s liberation, Lenù liberated herself. When “The Separation†opens, Lenù — now played by Alba Rohrwacher, in the first change of cast since the very first season — is still with Nino in Montpellier, where they’ve gone to solidify their commitment to one another. She calls Pietro, hoping to talk to her daughters, to no avail. Besides the whirlwind of her affair with Nino, the success of her book keeps Lenù busy: Her French publishers want her to do more events in Paris, which contributes to the delay in her return to Florence. But even Nino, who is talking on the phone when Lenù makes it back to their hotel room, harps on the urgency of their going back: Isolating themselves in other countries won’t do. In order for their life together to start taking shape, they need to go back and face their spouses and children. Lenù is suspicious that Nino has been talking on the phone with his wife, Eleonora, but he denies it.
Nino Sarratore, I’d like to say right off the bat, is a textbook case of an esquerdomacho, which is an expression we have in Brazilian Portuguese to describe men who use the political language of the left to manipulate women. This is probably in my top three most despised types of men, probably even above a proud misogynist like Michele Solara, because of all their sleazy posturing. Nino infuriates me beyond reason. Seeing him last season, eating lunch at Lenù and Pietro’s house, playing sweetly with their children, needling Pietro that he needed to assume a bigger share of the housework so Lenù could have time to write and think, and now seeing him absconded in hotel rooms with her while taking suspicious phone calls, drives me up the wall.
But Lenù loves him, though she knows there’s something deeply wrong with him — even her dreams warn her of his unreliability. When she makes it back to her old apartment in Florence, it’s empty. A Christmas tree glows sadly forgotten in a corner; she looks for her daughters in every room. On the phone, she learns from Mariarosa that Adele, her mother-in-law, took them so Pietro and Lenù could talk things through. It upsets Lenù that plans were changed behind her back, not that she kept those plans in the first place: She was supposed to have Christmas dinner with her family, but she only made it home at 3 a.m. The only thing waiting for her in Florence was a series of aggravated messages from Lila, the “where the hell are you†type.
Not that what ultimately comes to pass is her fault, but when Lenù sees Pietro in the kitchen in the morning, she leads with a bad strategy. She demands to know why she hadn’t been consulted about the girls’ Christmas plans. Not unreasonably, she argues that they need to make some kind of agreement about how to move forward. She proposes to live with the girls in a separate apartment and have Pietro come to visit them on weekends; when she floats the idea of living in Naples, Pietro loses it. He punches a cabinet, drawing blood and scaring Lenù, screaming that he doesn’t want his daughters to grow up in Naples. He lets Lenù wrap his wound — to be fair, though his outburst is unjustifiably violent, Pietro looks pretty scared, too. Scared enough that he called Immacolata, who needs to be picked up from the train station, to perhaps talk some sense into Lenù.
The fact that Pietro calls Immacolata to resolve a conflict shows how out of touch he is with Lenù’s family and upbringing. At first, Immacolata gives it the old playground try: Say you’re sorry and that you love each other. But Lenù won’t change her mind, and it drives Immacolata into a rage. She attacks Lenù, beating and cursing her, calling her a slut, saying Lila is better than her, that she hopes Nino will give her syphilis and the clap, that this whole time she’d been thinking Lila was the bad influence when Lila became a good person in the absence of Lenù. Trying to protect herself, Lenù shoves her mother back, and she falls with a thud on the floor. “You’re not my daughter anymore,†she says before asking the Lord to take her. It’s a striking scene, brutal to watch. Later, through a closed door, Pietro tells Lenù: “It’s too much. Even you don’t deserve it.â€
If Immacolata is disowning her unequivocally, Lenù hopes at first to find maternal leniency in Adele. “A separated woman with two daughters and your ambitions has to face reality and decide what to give up,†Adele advises, in a twisted manipulation of feminine solidarity. It’s true that Lenù will have to sacrifice something, but to sacrifice her daughters to Adele in the name of freedom is to succumb to the image of her the Airotas have started to conjure. Not that Lenù has this clarity of vision at this point: She needs the girls to stay there while she is in Milan with Mariarosa for a book event, anyway. There, she talks about the tragedies of the neighborhood’s wives and mothers; she speaks often of Lila, though she doesn’t utter her name. Someone wants to know what Lenù herself is guilty of. “Of learning the language of males to have more success with your books?†This is a question that preoccupies Ferrante, who on occasion has spoken about her own wrestling with the notion that women writers have to imitate a male sensibility in literature.
At Mariarosa’s, Lenù finds out that Franco and Silvia, who have been invited for a catch-up dinner, got a lot milder since recovering from the awful incident with a group of fascists that blinded Franco and brutalized Silvia. Franco thinks words are losing their meaning, which is the definitive break between his vision of the world and Lenù’s — for her, the world has never been so rich. Nino calls her and gives her all that classic Nino talk: He’s going to die without her, doesn’t she need him anymore, can’t she tell how much he misses her, blah blah blah. He wants her to meet him at a seaside town the next day before the school year starts and their schedules get busy, and Lenù postpones picking up her daughters again in order to be with him. I’d be moved by their run-toward-each-other embrace at the train station if I didn’t hate this guy’s guts so intensely.
A weekend turns into a month, a year, a year and a half. A black and white montage of real footage of demonstrations and upheavals of Italian political life from the time serves as the background to Lenù’s summary of what happened during that time — observing, learning, participating, and above all, committing to each other, Lenù and Nino felt like their “true life had begun.†They beam with the invincibility of new love, their optimism seeping into the way they carry themselves. At a conference, Nino speaks openly against his comrades — it doesn’t even shake him when they boo him out of the room, enraged at his criticism of the Italian politician and premier Aldo Moro. The light warms on them as they … frolic, I think is the best word to describe it, around town.
Lenù begins to get a feeling that it’s time for her and Nino to move in together, to make their union an active part of their children’s lives. She feels affirmed in her instinct that she can trust him completely when, in bed one morning, Nino admits to her that he was always jealous of her intelligence. When they were teenagers, he’d commissioned an article from her for the student newspaper, a pivotal moment in their adolescence and an early disappointment. Nino never ran the essay; Lenù thought that it was because he didn’t think it was good enough. As it turns out, he was intimidated by her, too envious of her ability to make it widely known. To Lenù, his confession feels like a confirmation of their mutual trust: They can be frank with each other, even about their ugly feelings.
Just as she is about to ask him to move in together, the phone rings. Pietro is in the hospital, his head bandaged and his temper softened. A group of fascists jumped him, dealing blows to his head with a stick. By his bedside is a nice woman named Doriana, and when Adele arrives with the girls, Lenù is hit with the painful realization that in her absence, life went on. She is excluded from the family unit: Dede in particular can barely look at her. It’s Pietro who comforts them, Adele who allows them to have a soda. Though he is in the hospital, Pietro’s strength is striking: Bolstered by his happiness with Doriana and the satisfaction of fatherhood, his tranquility makes Lenù sound and look like a teenager. When she tells him she wants to move back to Naples with Nino and the girls, he doesn’t argue. Smiling at her, pushing away a strand of her hair, he seems moved by an almost paternal tenderness.
But not all of the Airotas are experiencing the same kind of pity. When, home later that night, Lenù starts to tell her daughters about their imminent move to Naples, she is intercepted by Adele, who makes it clear that she won’t allow the girls to grow up in violent, gritty Naples, particularly not under the eyes of someone who is “too taken with [herself] to care for them.†Even the ever implacable and composed Adele starts to raise her voice at Lenù, who is fortified by the realization that she doesn’t have to take shit from Adele anymore. “My mother is better than you,†she tells her mother-in-law, who was as important as anyone else in Lenù’s development as a writer and her move away from Naples. But Adele won’t be rattled. She could’ve only taken Lenù’s comment as an insult, but to her it’s all the same. They’ll eat when Guido, her husband, and the girl’s grandfather, gets home. Also, Lila called one million times.
We haven’t seen or heard much from Guido in the span of Lenù’s relationship with Pietro — mostly, his reputation served as the emblem of the life Lenù was choosing for herself when she decided to marry into the family. To remind her that what she is sacrificing is not only familial, but social and professional, he turns a nasty trick: he has Dede and Elsa say what their last name is — Airota, like him, like Pietro. Lenù’s last name? Greco, a name with “no tradition,†just like Nino’s, who, by the way, in Guido’s estimation, is losing all ground as a writer. “An intelligence without tradition,†Adele explains, means that Nino, like Lenù, will do anything to become someone. Not that Adele and Lenù say anything nice to one another, but the frankness of their conversation is a glimmer of the old mutual respect that initially brought them together. I thought I could detect sadness in Adele when she explained: “The pact is broken, and it all changes.â€
Their talk actually gets through to Lenù, who remembers Lila’s old warnings about Nino and his singular capacity for ruining a woman’s entire life. But Lenù doubles down. She finally asks Nino to move in with her in Naples. They are running after each other, naked, like kids, when she does. He agrees ecstatically; it almost looks like she just told him she’s pregnant or something. Nino also tells her that he’s met with Lila, who wouldn’t stop calling, going as far as calling Eleonora. She wants to speak with Lenù urgently.
Lila is not the only person from the neighborhood who is trying to get in touch with Lenù. Carmen wants to see her, too; she is, as ever, worried about her brother Pasquale, who we last saw running around and avoiding the police with Nadia Galiani. Carmen hopes that Lenù can speak with Mrs. Galiani and get some news of her brother, whose whereabouts are unknown. Still avoiding Lila, Lenù agrees to meet with Carmen for coffee. In Lenù’s absence, and with her new affluence, Lila has become a kind of fairy godmother to the people in the neighborhood. Lenù agrees to speak to Mrs. Galiani, but she’s taken aback when Carmen admits she’s invited Lila to their date, and it’s imperative that Lenù waits for her because Lila has something really important to say. When Lila arrives, she tells Lenù she had Antonio follow Nino. This is what she learned: “Nino never left his wife. He’s still living with her. They’ve just made him a director of an important bank research institute under the patronage of his father-in-law.†Lila is not scared of confirming all of this face-to-face with Nino either, but that won’t be necessary. Lenù believes her. She loses her words, her breath. And then she leaves.
In Più
• After three seasons with Margherita Mazzucco as Lenù and Gaia Girace as Lila, it’s striking to see new faces portraying the girls. I’m already heads over heels with Alba Rohrwacher’s performance — she brings a brittle maturity to the role, oscillating between hardened resolve and volatile insecurity. We’ll see more of Irene Maiorino as Lila in the upcoming weeks, but it’s truly uncanny how much she looks like a grown up version of Girace.
• I thought the use of real news footage from the political happenings in Italy during the seventies was very well placed here — the context of the time period is imperative to Ferrante’s world building, and I loved seeing how the direction of the show tackled that kind of expansion creatively.
• Since the last season, the phone has become an almost active character in the story. In prose, phone conversations can sometimes feel indistinguishable from regular dialogue, given the absence of cadence and gesturing clues to the reader. It’s a great tool: The ringing sound, the way Lenù will cross her arms in front of her chest as she speaks, Nino’s hushed tones, it all comes together to make the telephone an object charged with meaning.