Review: The Lying Life of Adults

The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Lying Life of Adults is Elena Ferrante's first novel in five years and has been heavily anticipated as the first novel since the completion of the Neapolitan Quartet that is currently being adapted by HBO and the Italian broadcast company Rai. Given the immense popularity of the quartet, expectations were high for this novel. Reviews since its release have been rather mixed.

I have a really complicated set of feelings about this book that can be summed up as "I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it, either." I've read some reviews in which the character of Giovanna is compared to a combination of Lénu and Lila from My Brilliant Friend but that comparison feels wrong to me. Giovanna comes from a far more privileged background and is less motivated to excel than either Lénu or Lila. She struggles with her adolescence, and with her burgeoning sexuality, and her voluptuousness. While Lila used her body as a weapon and Lénu used her intellectual prowess spurred by Lila, as a route out of poverty, Giovanna is continually uncertain of her path, her desires, her aegis to control her situation. Her situation, so much more privileged, still spurs dissatisfaction and restlessness, but with less direction.

I felt the change of era from the Naples of the Quartet novels versus The Lying Life of Adults. Sexism and classism still reign but they feel less ubiquitous than they did in the Quartet novels. The shock of an explosive physical assault on a young woman by a young man, three-quarters of the way through the book, provides a marked contrast to the commonplace domestic abuse wound through the novels of the Quartet. This book is largely about growing up and seeing the fragility of your parents' lives and the lies they build to get by, and how you forgive them their frailty. However, overall, I just didn't care as much for Giovanna as I did for Lénu and/or Lila. She was unlikable in the way many teenage girls can be unlikeable, yet without the complexity of showing promise to become so much more than her circumstances. To be honest, I felt a bit of disappointment in this novel.

I listened to the audiobook, beautifully narrated by Marisa Tomei, whose voicing, honestly, sometimes seems better than the material.

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