What is The Story of a New Name about?

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.

The prose — as translated by Ann Goldstein — has a quality Ferrante's readers find addictive and her skeptics find excessive: a relentless forward momentum, an accumulation of psychological detail, a willingness to stay in the same social world across hundreds of pages without relief. The novel is longer than My Brilliant Friend and moves more slowly in places, but it also contains some of the series' most devastating scenes — Lila's marriage, Lila's summer by the sea, Elena's growing realization of what she has and hasn't escaped.

This is the second of four volumes and cannot be read without the first. Readers who come to it having loved My Brilliant Friend will find it deepens the series' concerns; readers who found the first book slow may not find the second rewarding enough to continue. But for readers who are inside the Ferrante project, The Story of a New Name is where the emotional stakes become clear and the series' central argument — about what female intelligence costs, and what it costs to squander it — begins to crystallize.