Elena Ferrante’s new Neapolitan novel

With a story of innocence and experience, Elena Ferrante returns

The further one gets from one’s own adolescence — the dreams, the heartaches, the haircuts — the harder it is to see it as anything other than mildly ridiculous. Why did you dedicate reams of dreary diary entries to a monosyllabic teenaged boy with curtains who never so much as glanced at you (hi there, Joe Collinson!), or spend hours in front of the mirror scrutinising the many faults of your face (spoiler alert: they get worse!). You know absolutely that it all seemed gravely important at the time, but the feelings, as the years pass, become cloudy and far away.

It is novelists who stand the best chance of getting us back there, to the age of euphoria and narcissism, when the world revolved around and in us. And it’s perhaps only novelists who can attempt to do so with a straight face. The success of Sally Rooney’s Normal People is testament to the potency of portrayals of this difficult age — although her knack and penchant for sex scenes probably help. (See also, in a private moment, the recent BBC adaptation of that novel.)

The accurate and evocative depiction of adolescence is also a significant factor in the fierce devotion inspired by the works of the Italian writer Elena Ferrante and in particular My Brilliant Friend, the first book of her Neapolitan Quartet, one of the out-and-out literary sensations of recent times. Ferrante’s young people experience emotions at supernatural pitch; there is no slight that is not devastating, no passion that is not allconsuming, no betrayal that doesn’t ricochet for decades. Never have the travails of adolescence been so eloquently legitimised.

For her newest novel — which prompted overnight queues when it was published in Italy last year, and is out here in September — Ferrante is back on this fruitfully unstable ground. The Lying Life of Adults opens with the narrator, Giovanna, recounting a pivotal moment in her early life: one that appears as initially slight to the reader as it is reportedly meaningful to her. One night, she overhears her father telling her mother that Giovanna is “getting the face of Vittoria”, his estranged sister, a wicked aunt whose malign influence Giovanna has been thus far spared. But the mysteries of Aunt Vittoria — the woman her father despises so much, the woman the teenage Giovanna feels she is destined to resemble, and not just facially — is too much. Vittoria becomes an obsession for Giovanna, and then, a quest.

Readers of Ferrante’s work will not be surprised to learn that Giovanna’s pursuit of her aunt is also a descent, both geographical and Dantean, from her usual territory in the “highest part of Naples”, which extends only as far