A story without redemption: The Lying Life of Adults, by Elena Ferrante, reviewed

‘I don’t at all hate lies,’ Elena Ferrante explained in Frantumaglia, her manifesto for authorial anonymity. ‘I find them useful and I resort to them when necessary to shield my person, feelings, pressures.’ Shortly after writing these words, Ferrante, who refuses all interviews and keeps her identity under wraps, was accused by an investigative journalist called Claudio Gatti of lying to her readers. She had allowed us to assume, Gatti revealed, that her hugely successful Neapolitan quartet — My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay and The Story of the Lost Child — was autobiographical. But instead of being, like Lena, the quartet’s narrator, the daughter of a poor Neapolitan seamstress, Ferrante was the daughter ofa German-Jewish teacher who had escaped the Holocaust. And the reason this mattered, Gatti concluded in his cloth-eared attempt at literary criticism, is because it showed that the details in her novels were made up.

By accusing a fiction writer of writing fictions, and presenting that ‘discovery’ as a major scoop, Gatti expected to be handed a Nobel Prize; instead he was placed in the village stocks. None of Ferrante’s fans felt in the least bit deceived. Her ‘lie’ was woven into the tapestry of her novels, which were all about new names, slippery identities and clever women outsmarting smug, sub-standard men. So it was inevitable, given her love of games, that Ferrante would, in her next book, take Gatti and his lie-detector test and play with them like a cat with a ball of wool.

The Lying Life of Adults is a coming-of-age story built on Oscar Wilde’s aphorism that ‘lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art’. The novel begins with Giannì, the daughter of aspirational parents, telling us: ‘Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was ugly.’