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What it argues
The Story of a New Name is the second volume of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels, continuing the story of Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo from roughly 1960 through the late 1960s. At the start of the novel, Lila has just married Stefano Carracci, the grocer's son whose money she expected would give her control of her own life. It has not. Within the opening chapters, her new husband has already betrayed her in a specific, humiliating way, and the novel follows her attempt to survive a marriage she cannot legally or practically leave while Elena advances through school and begins to move toward the larger world beyond the rione.
The novel's central subject is the different forms that female entrapment takes, and the different strategies women use to resist them. Lila's resistance is internal, ferocious, and often self-destructive. Elena's resistance is social mobility — school, university, ultimately publication — but Ferrante is clear-eyed about the costs and compromises that route requires. Neither strategy is presented as clean or successful. Both women are running from the same neighborhood and the same set of structural conditions, and the novel tracks the divergence of their paths with an almost clinical attention to class, ambition, and the specific ways that women in mid-century Naples were constrained.
What it gets right
- 1.
Lila's marriage is not a failure of character or judgment. It is the operation of a system that offered women property-based security as the only available form of power, then denied them control of it.
- 2.
Elena's path through education is also a form of escape, but it requires becoming someone other than who she was — and the cost of that transformation is not named cleanly in this volume.
- 3.
The rione is not just a setting. It is a social logic, a set of rules about what women can and cannot do, and the novel tracks the force of those rules with great precision.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Elena Ferrante is the pseudonym of an Italian author whose identity has been the subject of sustained journalistic investigation but who has maintained anonymity since her debut in 1992. Her novels include the four-volume Neapolitan series — My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child — as well as The Days of Abandonment and Troubling Love. The Neapolitan novels, translated into English by Ann Goldstein, became an international literary phenomenon, selling millions of copies and generating intense critical and popular attention. She has published essays about her process and views in the collection Frantumaglia.
