In a 2015 interview, the Italian writer Elena Ferrante used the phrase “tangled knot” to describe good literature, and she opens her latest novel, The Lying Life of Adults, with the same phrase. That interview also foreshadowed the major themes of the new novel. In it, Ferrante, the author of the internationally bestselling Neapolitan novels, argued that women understand how male writers use symbols but that men do not grasp female symbolic structures. This preoccupation with symbols is at the heart of The Lying Life of Adults and reveals a common thread connecting Ferrante’s writing style, themes, and even famous anonymity. (“Elena Ferrante” is a pen name.) Ferrante is a gnostic, and The Lying Life of Adults is a work of cold rage directed at the human condition.
The Lying Life of Adults follows a young woman contending with her adolescence as her family falls apart. Fans of Ferrante will find this familiar territory — thematically, it’s almost a combination of My Brilliant Friend and Days of Abandonment. The novel opens when the narrator, Giovanni, overhears her father calling her “very ugly.” But we soon learn that he didn’t actually say this; he instead compared his daughter to his estranged sister, Vittoria. Giovanni sets out to meet her aunt in order to see if she is ugly, but her father warns her that Vittoria will try to make her hate him because he once broke up Vittoria’s romance with a married man. Giovanni visits the mean-spirited Vittoria, who asks about a bracelet she once gave as a gift. The bracelet leads to the discovery that her father has been having a decadeslong affair. She then struggles against her parent’s divorce.
Ferrante writes in breezy, agile prose that uses impressionistic techniques to side-step descriptions. Here is Giovanni visiting the grave of Vittoria’s former lover: “[Vittoria] continued to talk … as we went in among the burial niches and monumental tombs, old and new, along paths and stairs that always went down. … I was struck by the silence, by the gray of the rust-streaked niches, by the smell of rotting earth, by certain dark cross-shaped cracks in the marble.” It’s vivid without getting mired in unnecessary description. Ferrante stays in her narrator’s thoughts and rarely uses metaphors or similes. This highlights what does get described. The human body, for instance, is always vile and grotesque.
As Giovanni goes through puberty, the novel gives us description after description of disgusting bodies: We read about her “short upper lip with a disgusting dark fuzz” and a neck like “the filament of a spider’s web.” These descriptions are not merely a reflection of Giovanni’s adolescent insecurity since they extend to all bodies and recur in every Ferrante novel. Sex is a disgusting ordeal filled with “toilet smells” and deprived of love or lust. The art critic Camille Paglia has argued that “Western woman is in an agonistic relation to her own body,” which leads female artists to explore dark and slimy aspects of nature. (Ferrante once said her own writing was like “butchering eels.”) Yet the source of Ferrante’s disgust with the body lies deeper: She always describes the body as ugly in order to distinguish it from the mind.
In Ferrante’s fiction, the body is an object separate from the person. When Giovanni gets a nickname, it “brings forth from my same body another person.” At one point, she tries to figure out why her father would leave their family for another woman. “What happened … in the world of adults, in the heads of very reasonable people, in their bodies loaded with knowledge? What reduced them to the most untrustworthy of animals, worse than reptiles?” Ferrante divides mind and body and then uses strained poetic language to describe the body in negative terms. What is the “knowledge” of the body that makes it the receptacle of negativity? The body is the source of age, injury, and passions. These things betray the will, and so humans become reptiles. This is gnosticism.
Gnosticism was an early Christian heresy predicated on the idea that the world and all matter was ruled by evil: Goodness could be found only within the spiritual realm (the world of mind or soul), and the physical world, the world of bodies, was irredeemably corrupt. When the mind is thus separated from the body, it begins to think of itself as a type of god that sits above everything. The gnostic no longer has an attitude of open curiosity toward the world, which is seen as the repository of evil, but instead thinks of everything as an opportunity to voice his or her own thoughts and interpretations. This is why Ferrante’s narrator forsakes description, similes, and metaphors. To say that A is like B is to introduce a recognizable order into the world that reduces possible interpretations. This sounds like a strained reading, but it’s explicitly addressed within The Lying Life of Adults.
The book addresses Christianity and symbols when Giovanni falls in love with a beautiful young professor named Roberto. Giovanni reads the Gospels and is disappointed to find that they feature real places and aren’t sentimental fairy tales open to interpretation. She finds God’s objectivity stifling. “What an absurdity, how could one accept such a servile condition? I hated the idea that there was a father in heaven and we children were below in the mud, in the blood.” She doesn’t view the resurrection as miraculous because Jesus returns in his “mutilated body,” and the promise of eternal life is intolerable because she would return “in a crowd,” i.e., as one among many. Ultimately, she hates that God does not do anything to “improve the human condition.” For the Christian, the world isn’t an opportunity to cast judgment but rather the place where meaning is revealed. After Giovanni meets Roberto, she begins to toy with the Christian view, describing the city in detail unusual for Ferrante. “These were moments when everything seemed to have secret depth.” These connections come to a head when Roberto describes God as a poet who uses ordinary words to reveal the extraordinary. But Giovanni rejects this because she finds pleasure in making ugly judgments, which leads her to reject the human condition entirely.
The bracelet that begins the story keeps returning, and everyone imbues it with different sentiments. It comes to be a symbol for symbolism itself. The book ends when Vittoria returns the bracelet to Giovanni and then warns her not to carelessly lose her virginity. The narrator immediately goes out and has meaningless sex, which predictably ends in blood and disgust. Giovanni discards the bracelet and declares that she will become an adult “like no other.” Symbolic meaning, whether as a bracelet with multiple interpretations or as a young woman’s virginity, is seen as a form of control: It reveals an order inherent in the world that reduces a person’s ability to create himself or herself. All meaning must be discarded so that gnosticism can achieve its ultimate goal of creating a new man.
Ferrante is a very good writer, and The Lying Life of Adults delves into the profound topics of serious literature. Yet if Ferrante truly believes that “literature is made out of tangles,” then this novel fails on her own terms because it sides so unambiguously with the gnostic view of reality. The Lying Life of Adults is not a tangled knot but something more like a religious polemic.
James McElroy is a novelist and essayist based in New York.
