[1] In an interview in Harper's Magazine, Elena Ferrante has stated that she considers the four books to be "a single novel" published serially for reasons of length and duration.
The novel begins in the 1950s, in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, where the narrator Elena meets Lila, her best friend, her mirror, and at times her fiercest critic.
Lila, married at sixteen, now has a young son; she has left her husband and the comforts her marriage brought and now works in awful conditions in a factory in Naples.
The story is told from Lenù’s point of view, but the two friends understand one another on such a deep and complex level that the reader is often privy to Lila's perceived inner thoughts.
One reviewer insists they are a Faustian pair, with Lila as the “genius demon.” But the real astonishment of this long, digressive, unclassifiable narrative is its portrayal of the dynamic experience of a close female friendship.
Here in the United States, the working-class dimensions of Ferrante's work tend to get elided, ignored, or attenuated into something charming and “primitive” that the literary coterie—who, for the most part, are middle- or upper-class born—can admire from a distance.
As Katherine Hill writes in the Paris Review: "Most autofiction trades on the understanding that the author is just playing, or just theorizing, and not really revealing herself, but Ferrante's work invites the opposite reading.
"[14] In addition, the story of becoming an author is entangled for Lenu with the two previous points: with her friendship with Lila, because it's her goal to compete with the friend, to prove herself worthy, that fuels her writing.
And with class struggle because writing a successful novel was how the two of them dreamed, as little girls, of making money and escaping the neighborhood, and, in fact, how Lenu finally achieves that.
Rutgers University Associate Professor Paola Gambarota has linked this portrayal of Naples to the issues the city experienced after being bombed during World War II.
As Pasha Malla wrote for Slate: "She [Elena] never fully identifies with Naples and its brutality, yet she remains an impostor among refined Northerners, 'the daughter of the porter with the dialect cadence of the South,' who is only 'playing the part of the cultured writer'.
Emily Harnett wrote for The Atlantic: "On Twitter and beyond, readers have described Ferrante's covers as “horrible,” “atrocious,” “utterly hideous,” and as a “disservice” to her novels.
"[29] The publishers have however defended the choice in an interview to Slate, claiming that "We also had the feeling that many people didn't understand the game we were playing, that of, let's say, dressing an extremely refined story with a touch of vulgarity.
"[30] (the neighborhood's mafia, they own a bar as well as several other businesses, legal or not) My Brilliant Friend, a two-part, five-and-a-half-hour stage adaptation of the Neapolitan Novels, opened at the Rose Theatre, Kingston in March 2017.
[31] A 32-part television series The Neapolitan Novels is also in the works and will be co-produced by the Italian producer Wildside for Fandango Productions, with screenwriting led by the writer Francesco Piccolo.