Before Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend appeared in English, no one thought it would be a smash hit. The novel and its three sequels, collectively known as the Neapolitan Quartet, follow two women, Lila and Elena, through a tempestuous, competitive, and emotionally intense friendship that doubles as a history of postwar feminism and postwar Italy. Although the books, like Ferrante’s earlier work, were critically acclaimed in the original Italian, editors elsewhere were skeptical that their readers would be interested. In fact, Ferrante’s Italian publisher had opened an American imprint in order to give stateside readers “the possibility of encountering firsthand a major talent like Elena Ferrante.”
Thirteen years after My Brilliant Friend’s U.S. publication, the Neapolitan novels, in Ann Goldstein’s translation, are among the works of literary fiction that contemporary American readers love most: When The New York Times asked some 500 writers last year to vote on the 21st century’s best books, My Brilliant Friend was the winner. Devotees of the novel series have described how intensely connected they felt to Elena, the writer who made it out of her neighborhood in Naples, and her best friend and subject, Lila—the titular “brilliant friend” who, in middle age, has vanished without a trace. In one tribute, Meghan O’Rourke quoted an email that the novelist Claire Messud had written to her: “When you write to me and say you love her work,” Messud said of Ferrante, “I have a moment where I think, ‘But … Elena is my friend! My private relationship with her, so intense and so true, is one that nobody else can fully know!’” Without context, you’d be forgiven for assuming that the Elena in question was not another author’s creation, but Messud’s own.
It is only natural that books so beloved by writers would influence the literature that comes after them—and this seems to have been the case with Ferrante. Female friendship has been a significant literary subject for as long as women have been able to publish their work, but the past 10 years have seen more and more novels about prickly, intellectual, and conflictedly maternal women like Elena, as well as gifted and charismatic yet abrasive ones like Lila. Ferrante fever has also moved beyond the conventional bounds of literary appreciation: Her novels have gotten adapted into an HBO series and graphic novels; tributes abound on TikTok and Reddit; and to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the last Neapolitan novel’s publication, its U.S. publisher, Europa Editions, is rereleasing the full quartet in a special cloth-hardcover edition.
Perhaps most striking, the success of the Neapolitan novels seems to have begun to influence breezier genres of fiction. When I began the celebrity-book-club-beloved writer Ella Berman’s third book, L.A. Women, published by the commercial imprint Berkley, I was startled to discover that, in plot terms, I seemed to be reading a 1970s–Laurel Canyon version of My Brilliant Friend. L.A. Women opens with Lane, a nationally successful writer, learning that her friend Gala has vanished without a trace. Gala, also a writer, never achieved the literary fame that Lane knows she deserves. The women have been out of touch since Gala’s life took a turn toward the tragic, but even before the disappearance, Lane was writing about Gala—a book that “wasn’t a biography, but wasn’t exactly a novel either.” Many have speculated that this is precisely what Ferrante, who writes under a pseudonym and whose identity is unknown, does in the Neapolitan Quartet.
As L.A. Women continues, its narrative diverges from Ferrante’s. The reading experience is different, too: Where Ferrante uses long, intricate sentences to delve into her characters’ tangled histories and emotions, Berman’s prose moves swiftly forward, not asking the reader to linger on complex syntax or motivations that require decoding. Still, the novel continues to seem like an homage to the Neapolitan novels, and not only because Lane and Gala repeatedly express envy of each other’s writing by using the word brilliant. Like Ferrante’s protagonists, the two women share a friendship that is both cemented and doomed by their unusual intelligence. Although it is their fundamental point of connection, it too often puts them in competition. Lane, who is relentlessly serious and ambitious, gets complimented for being more grounded and intellectual than Gala. The Marilyn Monroe–loving Gala dates a rock star and earns admiration for having the warmth and joie de vivre that Lane lacks. While hosting a party, Lane overhears a guest praising Gala’s writing for balancing “tenderness and wit”—an innocuous comment until the guest turns it into a backhanded dig at Lane. In their male-centered milieu, a woman can succeed only at another’s expense.
For these themes, ideas, and tensions to appear in a commercial novel is, of course, not simply the My Brilliant Friend effect; it would do Berman and other writers in her genre a disservice to say so. Yet it’s telling that a novel that’s clearly meant to be entertaining also engages so intensely with some of feminism’s intractable questions. Its approach suggests that in the years since Ferrante first made her way into American readers’ hands, the status of feminist writing has seen a true shift. Maybe it’s Ferrante; maybe it’s Barbie. But feminist art is getting fun.
L.A. Women doesn’t begin as an ode to the value of pleasure. At the start of the novel, Lane’s seriousness appears to have served her well. After all, she’s the one with the marriage and career, not the one being gossiped about for disappearing. Lane is the only person actively looking for Gala, a search Berman unfurls with growing urgency, powering the reader through the book. At the same time, she uses chapters set in the past to trace Lane and Gala’s relationship and shift readers’ empathy and investment toward Gala. This isn’t hard to do: Gala isn’t written with enough detail to stick in a reader’s head the way that Ferrante’s characters did in Claire Messud’s, but she’s got both pathos and glitz. She’s Eve Babitz to Lane’s Joan Didion, although Lane is much less stylish than Didion was. Gala’s disappearance is the reason L.A. Women is propulsive, and her character is the reason it’s enjoyable.
In addition to representing fun, Gala is also L.A. Women’s representation of feminism, which is newly prominent nationally in the years when the novel takes place. (In fact, that prominence seems to be why Berman set L.A. Women in the ’70s: Otherwise, it could easily be in the present day.) Gala bonds readily with other women and likes the thought of sisterhood. She loves men but doesn’t need their approval. Lane, in contrast, is devastated when an angry man snarls at her, “You think you’re smarter than me,” She does think so, but she also wants men to praise her for her intelligence. She rejects the feminist movement entirely, claiming that it squashes “women not into individuals with needs and wants and requirements, but into a vague, out-of-focus mass.” Often, she treats her fellow women as scapegoats, even telling herself that she struggles with motherhood not because she had a very difficult relationship with her own mother, but because it makes her feel too much like “every other woman in the country.” Lane and Gala’s friendship, because of their opposing views, is full of intriguing conversations about misogyny: Both of them experience it, but Lane espouses it too.
Berman embeds these views in her heroines’ discussions about writing, which are the way their friendship grows. Lane is proud of her masculinely “short, stark sentences with few adjectives and even less emotion.” Gala, meanwhile, is a funny, charming writer who prefers books that don’t resist interiority. On reading a draft of Lane’s debut novel, she warns Lane that the book as it stands is so lacking in feeling and detail that it’s “impossible for anyone to ever know” the protagonist. (Thanks to Gala’s advice, the book becomes a nationwide hit.) “Or maybe,” Gala adds, “the problem is that you don’t want them to. You haven’t even given her a name.”
Unknowable, anhedonic, and frequently nameless female protagonists are abundant in the literary fiction of the 21st century, in works by Danzy Senna, Katie Kitamura, Christine Smallwood, Claire-Louise Bennett, and others (many of which are quite good). These books can feel obstinate in their refusal of pleasure—an approach that does not seem to interest Berman in the slightest. (One thing that L.A. Women does have in common with these novels is the uselessness of its men. All of them are stock figures, which keeps the readers’ focus on Lane and Gala’s relationship.)
By the end of the novel, it is clear that Lane needs to find Gala far more than Gala needs to be found. Lane is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Missing her best friend, estranged from her mother, and disconnected from other women, she feels like she is unable to love. She’s also aware, finally, that she needs female friendship and solidarity. If Gala stands in for both feminism and fun, Lane’s realization suggests a growing understanding that women—and everyone else, presumably—need both in order to be whole.
I’m inclined to agree. Paying attention to how people enjoy themselves is a way of paying attention to their humanity; not for nothing did John Ruskin write, “Tell me what you like and I’ll tell you what you are.” Making room for levity is, then, a way of admitting the human—not through the granular and intimate detail that lends Ferrante’s novels their power but through a broader concession to nature. Not many of us can be serious all of the time, and L.A. Women’s existence, like Ferrante fever, speaks to an appetite among American readers for works that, in a variety of ways and tones, dig into the misogyny that remains culturally rooted among men and women alike. It’s Lane, after all, who hates the very thought of being like other women—of being seen as the very thing she is. L.A. Women demands, from its title on, that readers do to Lane what she fears, and understand the political value of doing so. Not bad work, I’d say, for any kind of novel to do.
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