Chabon vs. Ferrante



Telegraph Avenue



I was an early enthusiast of Michael Chabon, starting with The Mysteries of Pittsburg and continuing through A Model World, Wonder Boys, Werewolves in Their Youth and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, but after that he seemed to grow absorbed in family life, writing for youngsters, and ruminations on Jewish identity and, despite my admiration for his ability to compose marvelous sentences, I lost interest.  But then his latest, Telegraph Avenue, fell out of my Christmas stocking, so I took a stab at it.  To my dismay I found it tough going.  The compositional facility was still there, with a fresh angle of attack on nearly every sentence, yet the characters remained dead on the page, lifeless tokens you never believed in or cared about, and the situations never gelled into a story with any propulsive force.  The style is mannered, artificial, contrived, tarted-up, gimmicky, a disguise for the lack of anything of substance or import to say.  It’s so self-consciously clever that it becomes a barrier to experiencing anything beyond itself.  Despite being initially amusing, at some point it just becomes tedious.  I had to push myself through the book by an effort of will and, after the third section (p. 250), a single sentence that ran on for 12 pages, my progress ground to a halt.  I just had no desire to continue.

That was around Valentine’s Day, when Frieda gave me a novel called My Brilliant Friend by an Italian writer named Elena Ferrante.  Just to satisfy my curiosity, I read the 4 page Prologue, wherein the son of the narrator’s childhood best friend calls to tell her that his mother has disappeared: her clothes, her jewelry, her pictures, all her belongings, gone.  She has erased herself.  The narrator, a woman in her 60s, vows not to let her get away with it, but to thwart her wishes by recording everything she knows about her, the story of their friendship.  She will create an homage that is, at the same time, an attack, an act of revenge.  It’s a vow that sets the tone for the ambiguous and tense relationship the book describes, one that both feeds and depletes, between friends who both love and compete with one another.  I was hooked. 

Naples

Over the next 48 hours I managed to put it down on a number of occasions, but I didn’t want to, and was alert for any opportunity to pick it up again, until I finished all 331 pages.  Its plain style, in contrast with Chabon, doesn’t call attention to itself, but instead brings the characters and their poor suburb of Naples in the late 50s to life.  I felt I was living the narrator’s life with her, knew her friends and their families, and cared what happened to them.  That’s because the characters are not only fully formed, they are alive, they change, they discover things about themselves and others, the circumstances of their lives are in constant flux and it alters them.  You peer into their depths.  Ferrante’s work is intensely, intimately personal, she digs into the roots of personality with an exceptional candor and honesty.  Her characters remain true to themselves, authentic, even while changing.  When she describes adolescence, she nails what it’s like to be a passenger in a body that is out of control, and she describes it without letting any distortions of vanity creep in.  At the same time the story carries you; you forget that you are reading, you feel you are experiencing. 

Ferrante’s book is the story of a deep and complex friendship that begins in 1st grade.  The narrator, Elena, is attracted to Lila because Lila is bad.  She is prone to nasty pranks, and defiant of authority.  Yet she is a brilliant student, brimming with potential.  She is a model of courage and assertiveness who pushes Elena to exceed what she would be able to accomplish on her own.  In the beginning, Elena worships Lila, but over the course of the novel the power gradually shifts, the pivot being when Elena goes on to middle school while Lila is held back by her ignorant, plebian father, until by the end, when the 2 girls are 16, it is Elena who has become Lila’s brilliant friend who will conquer the larger world as Lila sinks back into the morass of her origins.  Appropriately for an author trained in the classics, there is a whiff of Greek tragedy in the book, the tragedy of unfulfilled promise. 

Apparently her earlier novels, The Days of Abandonment, Troubling Love, and The Lost Daughter, are all darker, less serene, lacking the joy that occasionally breaks forth in this book, so I’m not sure if I want to go there.  But My Brilliant Friend is supposed to be the 1^st of a trilogy, and I finished it eager to learn more about the lives of the people I met in it, so I’m awaiting the sequel with keen anticipation.