Say Hello To My Brilliant Friend

There's a point in Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, the first in a series of novels about two women from Naples, where the male characters either become huge caricatures or they kind of melt into the background, and you either get why this is or you don't. This bothered Goober, and I noticed it, but it took Jen to knock sense into us: the story is about the friendship between the two women.

I know, a kind of an idiotic thing to say. After all, the book is titled My Brilliant Friend and not These Sort Of Morons That Inhabit Our World And, Oh Yeah, My Brilliant Friend or My Brilliant Friend, Other Friends, And Then The Absent Parents Of All These Friends. I was starting to speculate about what the disconnect could be and circled back to this once, which obviously means it's a brilliant insight: with the exception of men in battle, I wonder if male relationships aren't this intense or big. As soon as I type this it seems absurd, so I don't even want to back it up with any examples. Still, there seemed like a fundamental divide here that seems worth digging into, just unsure where it begins.

This all came into relief when Jen and I watched Unreal and (spoiler alert, even though this happened several weeks ago) in the final scene of the end of the first season when Rachel tells her boss Quinn "I love you." When it happened Jen sort of gasped "yes" while I was like, "what the fuck?" In my mind, Rachel hated her boss, hated the whole milieu and resented being sucked back into it. Jen set me straight: the meaningful relationship on the show had nothing to do with the dudes circling around Rachel but rather this symbiotic professional relationship between Rachel and Quinn. Suffice it to say, I did not perceive that at all, though I appreciated the take.

On the one hand, I'm happy to have my expectations turned upside down — I think most agree that it's one of the goals of good art — but that said, isn't there something a little bit concerning about art that is mostly incomprehensible to people of the opposite sex? And yet that said, I thought I sort of "understood" what Fight Club was "about," but after reading more, clearly I have no fucking clue.

Ultimately, it shouldn't matter. What does matter, as far as Brilliant is concerned, is that it's immediately engaging, provocative in how it punctures the well-trod perception of relationships between females (or brilliant in how it portrays them in a meaningful, true way) and evocative in telling the story of this time and place in Italy (her prose makes you feel the humidity and heat and fear the vermin).

A strange disturbing bit of speculation is that Ferrante is actually a man. It was addressed recently (see here) but the notion is and should remain disturbing: unpacking this notion quickly devolves into something nasty and upsetting and frankly ridiculous: there is no fucking way a man wrote this. And even if one did, civilized society would want to neutralize the psychopath who pulled it of.

The only — only! — legitimate criticism about Friend is the "to be continued" tag at the novel's end. Don't get me wrong — I've read many "to be continued" endings and been disappointed by them, but most are at least somewhat self-contained stories. Hunger Games jumps out at me for some reason: Katniss Everdeen (spoiler alert) wins the Hunger Games in the first book, which is a satisfying enough ending, but they also leave some storylines for the next installment. I'd prefer books/stories to be entirely self-contained, but whatever. The thing is, with My, the ending drops so precipitously and immediately that you're just pissed after finishing the book. This book literally stops mid-scene, which is asinine. There are four books in the Neapolitan Novels. Jen read three out of four and got the fourth in the mail today. She confirmed that the first two have absurd cliffhanging endings. My point: if you want to write a 1600-page novel, by all means, do so. But you can't just stop after 331 pages and start up again. I mean you can if you want, but fuckin' A, dude, seriously?

And the sad thing is that I'm very interested in how the story ends. Just not to the point of committing myself to 1,000 more pages of text.