The Limits of Friendship
A consuming childhood friendship allows two young women to imagine, but not attain, a future beyond their impoverished Italian neighborhood.
Review by Maria Copeland
Earlier this year, I re-read Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey with a selection of my students. This time through, I was especially drawn to the ways the novel, like many of Austen’s works, offers a study in female friendship. Catherine Morland—young, unsophisticated, sincere—finds herself in social circles with two pairs of siblings: John and Isabella Thorpe, who overwhelm Catherine with welcome, and Henry and Eleanor Tilney, who appear respectively critical and distant.
As it turns out, however, Isabella Thorpe has befriended Catherine shallowly and strictly for self-gain, while Eleanor Tilney earnestly desires Catherine’s friendship, even after Catherine’s failure of judgment comes to light. In an Austenian view, the people we choose for our friends, especially when we are young and trying to make sense of ourselves and the world, are rarely what we initially take them to be. Austen demonstrates the deep value in finding one’s true friends and reminds us that a friendship constructed from competing motives probably doesn’t qualify.
In her 2011 novel My Brilliant Friend, Italian author Elena Ferrante gives us a portrait of female friendship that looks very unlike a model Austen would affirm. The plot follows two girls as they grow up together in a poor neighborhood outside of Naples, Italy, just after WWII. Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo meet in first grade and develop a complicated friendship that carries on throughout their coming-of-age. My Brilliant Friend has been received as one of the best modern books on the nature of female friendship. Recently, it scored the top spot on the New York Times’ list of the best 100 books of the century.
I devoured the book in two days and have been thinking about it ever since. In considering Ferrante’s extraordinary depiction of friendship, I am struck by the honesty of her approach: Elena and Lila are unmistakably friends, their girlhood and growing-up woven together by both chance and choice, but they are rivals equally as often. Envy and admiration, revelation and concealment of one’s true self, all intertwine to the point of being rarely distinguishable—and Ferrante deliberately offers no editorializing of these faults. We could read this book as a vision of the characteristics friendship can embody, attentive to the full range of relational interaction. I think, though, that it is primarily about the limits of friendship—the expansive possibility for goodness friendship holds, but also the powers it does not.
My Brilliant Friend finds its beginning in Elena and Lila’s mob-ruled neighborhood, a place introduced to us as a character in its own right. “I feel no nostalgia for our childhood; it was full of violence,” Elena the adult writes, matter-of-factly listing dangers made mundane to her: illness and infection, children hurling rocks and women raging at one another, wartime and post-war injury, the terror of one neighbor thought of as a monster and the tragedy caused by another who drives a woman to madness. The girls’ friendship takes on a characteristic shape after a foray into the dark deepness of a neighbor’s cellar, initiated when Lila tosses Elena’s doll into it on a whim. Elena’s only sense of how to respond is to do the same with Lila’s doll. They must go down together into the cellar to hunt for their lost possessions, which is a significant starting point for their relationship. Even more significant is what Elena tells Lila, with uninhibited childish bluntness: “What you do, I do.”
Elena is a diligent student, respectful, and a people-pleaser by nature. When she meets six-year-old Lila, she describes Lila as a “bad girl” —not occasionally ill-behaved, like the other students, but habitually contrarian. Daring, desired by others, clever and competitive in the classroom, Lila thrills the less courageous, less popular Elena. The girls share a love for literary and intellectual pursuits; they read Little Women together and come up with plans for Lila, the more talented writer, to write her own novels. Elena herself studies harder than Lila, and indeed makes much more progress in formal education. But she is less extraordinary than Lila, and she cannot forget it. Their relationship grows progressively more fraught as the girls move from childhood to adolescence.
Friendship is far from straightforward, even at its best, and the same is true for growing up.
At its best, as Elena and Lila discover together all the plot points of coming-of-age—the physical and emotional changes of growing into womanhood, flirtations and flings with neighborhood boys, existential and relational crises alike—their friendship is no mere function of social circumstances. It is an intentional, creative collaboration that results in the sharpening, the elevating of one another. However, much of this friendship is also deeply unhealthy. Lila acts alternately as Elena’s Eleanor Tilney—generous, self-giving—and her Isabella Thorpe—sophisticated, self-interested. Even as the girls’ lives and dreams diverge, and it becomes clear that they are no longer striving for the same things, Elena continues to feel that she is always competing against Lila. And yet, she is also fascinated by her friend, even obsessed with her.
What are we meant to make of such a friendship? As I read, I felt torn between compulsions to echo it and to condemn it. It feels evasive to examine this situation and call it “complex” when what we might actually mean is “toxic.” But although we have here only Elena’s side of the story and so perhaps any confessional writing is categorically suspect, I am impressed with the honesty with which it is given. The elderly Elena, in narrating, makes no attempts at self-justification, whether softening her younger self’s feelings of rivalry and resentment, or beyond that, rendering less seriously her own use of Lila for her self-gain. This account of a relationship feels very real to me, even as it leads me to wonder whether the relationship is rightly ordered.
Ferrante masterfully handles the question of how we ought to interpret this friendship by expanding our perspective of it. Even as Ferrante constructs for us the wide-ranging, all-consuming image of an important friendship, she shows that, for better or worse, it is just not as powerful as Elena believes it to be. The moment Elena moves from childhood to adulthood is the same one in which she realizes two things: first, she experiences and must endure her own private grief over a disappointment she does not share with and cannot articulate to Lila. Second, she realizes that both she and Lila are helpless against much larger forces than that of their friendship. Through these forces, much more power is at play than Elena could possibly grant to Lila, or Lila to Elena.
The genius of this book lies in Ferrante’s ability to show us simultaneously the development of Elena Greco the high-schooler and Elena Greco who narrates in hindsight. This is the account of a friendship considered by a narrator much more mature than the character whose growth she draws out for us, the fully realized picture of an immature relationship that only the older narrator can recognize for what it is. The older narrator does not try to absolve her younger self, but neither does she present her as a victim—of Lila, or of the extreme poverty of her childhood, the neighborhood and all the ways in which it limits her ability to hope. She asks for neither forgiveness nor pity. I think, though, that she asks for grace. Certainly, she gives it to her younger self, and also to her brilliant friend.
And this is perhaps the central truth this book can offer us: in our friendships, we ought to be generous, toward each other and toward ourselves. Looking at My Brilliant Friend alone, at what we have so far of Lila and Elena’s friendship, this relationship should probably not serve as a working model for replication. (This is the first book of a four-novel series, for one thing; there is much more to the story.) But as I read, though I noted the flaws of the relationship and its failures of reciprocity, I felt that the book gave an ultimately gracious account, not a bitter or resentful one. Friendship is far from straightforward, even at its best, and the same is true for growing up. We ought to order and to remember our experiences by grace.
Maria Copelandteaches writing and literature at a classical school near Washington, D.C. She is an Assistant Editor for the Marginalia Review of Books.
My Brilliant Friend was originally published on October 19, 2011. An English translation was published by Europa Editions on September 25, 2012. You can purchase a copy from the publisher here.
