Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

Elena's marriage to Pietro Airota gives her exactly the life her education was engineered to produce, a respectable Florentine household, a published author's name, a husband from the country's intellectual aristocracy, and Ferrante spends much of the volume documenting how thoroughly unsatisfying that correctness turns out to be. A second novel fails, motherhood arrives without the fulfillment Elena expected of it, and the neighborhood she worked so hard to leave keeps reasserting itself as the only place she has ever felt fully legible, even from a comfortable distance.

Lila, meanwhile, is grinding through brutal shifts at Bruno Soccavo's sausage factory, packed meat in freezing rooms, harassment from supervisors, and finds in the era's labor unrest, alongside Pasquale and the increasingly radicalized Nadia, an outlet for the intelligence marriage and motherhood had no use for. The two women's storylines run in open contrast, Elena's respectable unhappiness against Lila's dangerous, politically charged one, and Ferrante refuses to rank them, each woman watching the other's life from a position that looks, at a distance, like the freedom she herself is missing.

The novel alternates between Elena's Florence, all seminars and dinner parties, and Lila's neighborhood, now radicalized by factory politics and street violence, and the structure itself argues that leaving and staying are both incomplete strategies: Elena's departure buys her safety at the cost of belonging, while Lila's presence buys her belonging at the cost of nearly everything else. Neither woman gets to keep both, and the title's flat binary turns out to describe a choice Ferrante does not think either of them was ever really given.

Years after Ischia, Nino resurfaces in Elena's adult life at a political conference, now married, professionally accomplished, and just as instantly persuasive as he was as a teenager, and Ferrante lets the reader watch Elena's carefully built adult self dissolve in real time in his company. The reunion arrives with none of the excuse of youth this time, Elena is a wife and mother making an adult choice with her eyes open, which is exactly what makes the volume's slide toward the affair feel less like romance than like a relapse she has been braced for the whole book.