A “road trip” across America with the Neapolitan Quartet

In January 2022, I left Britain for a solo six week post-lockdown road trip around America: mostly the West Coast, some bits further in, and a flight home from New York. This is because I spent 2021 doing two things: berating myself for not having travelled enough before the world shut down, and enjoying a fairly lucrative job with nothing apart from rent to spend it on. I was always going to catch the first flight I could. 

My actual journey made little sense. Because I don’t drive yet (and I’ll insist upon the yet), and because America is a car park in the middle of a roundabout, my “road trip” was spent on Greyhounds, Amtraks and last-minute flights. There was some backtracking to my backpacking. I arrived in San Diego ahead of schedule because Big Sur turned out to be more or less inaccessible without a car, in a way that lots of America threatens to be but actually isn't. I was charmed by San Diego but didn’t have too much to do (I don’t surf either) and so flew on a whim to Austin, Texas – only to fly back to San Diego days later to catch the flight to Arizona I’d booked out of San Diego. That sort of thing. I bailed on Vegas (surprisingly lacking for the solo traveller who doesn’t really gamble, and has a boyfriend at home, but the mob museum is great), and flew to New York early – still in the dusty sandals I’d worn for a day trip to the desert. Actually I was dropped off at the airport in a bus by a lovely tour guide who, after three hours in traffic together, was more stressed about my flight than I was. For a Type A planner back home, I was surprisingly okay. It’s one flight, they'll be more! Also, edibles! 

It was an amazing, exhausting trip: I hiked in Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon. I went to Alcatraz and thought about the prisoners, listening to parties over the water. I wine-tasted in Sonoma, California, our young tour guide giving up on his John Denver-esque playlist and blasting WAP over the speakers as we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge – as long as we swore not to mention it on TripAdvisor. I saw two Broadway shows and paid $30 for a room temperature white wine in a Funny Girl cup. I did karaoke for the first time. I chose You Oughta Know, because I can't sing but I can emote. It was dreadful. I watched a recent divorcée (I’m not speculating, we chatted) do a crushingly sincere but on-key rendition of Girl on Fire, in protest to the misogyny she’d felt in the preceding chorus of Crazy Rap. She was on her own journey, I think. I was in a bar in LA when the LA Rams won the Super Bowl, doing much more decent group karaoke to Lose Yourself. It was a musical trip, in a musical place.

The best part, though, and the bit I remember the most, is that I spent the trip reading Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet.

My first stop was San Francisco. When I finished the one book I’d taken with me (I was travelling light, and today I have no recollection of what book that was) I looked at the hostel’s little bookshelf of novels rotated by tourists. The most interesting-looking was one I’d never heard of: My Brilliant Friend. I swapped it for mine (take a book, leave a book). 

I later found out that it had been published in 2011, and would soon be voted the best book of the 21st century by The New York Times. It was a best-seller and a phenomenon. But stumbling upon it by chance in San Francisco, I felt like the first person in Camden to notice Amy Winehouse. (This self-obsession and congratulation I bracingly recognised in the novel’s narrator, Lenu). 

I read it, and was awestruck by it. I’d never seen a girlhood expressed so clearly: in all its jealousy, tenderness, cruelty, horniness, naivety and the howling unfairness of childhood. How all those issues intersected with a post-fascist Naples, left behind by the industrialising North. Mostly the novels are about the friendship between Lila and Lenu: the way they chase, bait, race, depend upon, idolise, betray and adore each other. In the infancy of my trip, I read about their childhood and early adolescence. I thought about the women I know. My secret relationships with them, and perhaps their secret relationships with me. The novel allowed so much introspection, and it took me through San Francisco, Yosemite, and into Los Angeles.

By the time I was finishing the first novel, I’d arrived in LA and was staying in a hostel off Hollywood Boulevard. I went to the hostel’s little bookshelf and sitting there innocently was the next in the series: The Story of a New Name. Nothing else of Ferrante’s, not a different book in the series, just the exact thing I needed sitting there like a magic trick. I swapped it for My Brilliant Friend (take a book, leave a book) feeling like the fairy who left it there just for me must be behind the bookshelf, giggling.

I devoured that one, too, but much more slowly. Lying on a beach in Santa Monica reading The Story of a New Name, feeling as though that particular copy had been placed there just for me, grinding sand between my toes, is maybe the greatest reading experience of my life. Settling into my post-lockdown freedom, I read as Lenu left for university and wrote a novel, as Lila dug her heels further into the neighbourhood – swapping a bad man for a good one. As they took the swings you take in your twenties, when you still think you’re trying different lives out so you can pick your favourite. When it hasn’t yet totally occurred to you that you only get one, and it's calcifying around you. I was doing the same thing.

I started in LA and read the novel through San Diego, Austin, San Diego again (see above insane itinerary) and just into Flagstaff, Arizona. As I had nothing to swap it with, I left The Story of a New Name in my motel in Flagstaff, feeling I found it in America and should leave it there. In Flagstaff I finally put my hand in my pocket and took myself to Barnes & Noble to buy Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay took me through Flagstaff, my motel at the Grand Canyon, Vegas (briefly) and into New York. The characters finally out-aged me here, and I learned from them. 

Now I always recommend the novels, but I don’t think I do them justice. I say: “they’ll teach you about friendship, about Naples, about womanhood, about family, and about fascism.” I can’t explain the alchemy of those five ingredients combined adequately, and how she makes them all one story. One relationship. Lila and Lenu. 

As I journeyed through America, I also journeyed through their interwoven lives. At the beginning I oscillated between identifying with both. I wondered if it was childish and simplistic to compare yourself to adolescents at 29, and then I realised the first novel was all about the dignity and complexity of adolescence. In Ferrante’s telling, little about it is childish. I felt like Lenu, who was allowed to go to school: studious, obedient, polite, insecure, selfish. I felt like Lila who wasn't: wild, jealous, unknowable, effervescent, cruel. The novels make the point that they are each other's mirror, and these distinctions muddy as the series progresses. Lila (the true genius) eventually becomes an influential businesswoman in the neighbourhood, and Lenu’s jealousy leads her to walk out on her children for a man. At least, in both cases, temporarily. I could be both of them, or neither of them, or anyone else – because nobody knew me here. 

I think the novels changed how I spoke to people on that trip, or at least how I internally perceived our conversations. The combination of literature and travel definitely made me more malleable, it changed the level of attention I paid to myself and others. How I introduced myself, and with what details. How I moved my body through new spaces, around strangers. I felt both intensely interior and observant. Everything felt urgent and propulsive. The world was open, and my mind was open – it was just mostly in Naples. 

In New York, I finished Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay on a bench in Central Park. In some ways Naples felt more real to me than New York City, a place I’d dreamed of visiting my entire life. On the last few days of my trip, I went again to Barnes & Noble and bought the final novel in the quartet: The Story of the Lost Child. It’s a novel about homecoming, about the inevitability of being pulled back to where you came from, and I read it as I was coming home. The only two novels I brought home were the ones I paid for. I felt the other two were only mine to borrow, which was also literally true.

Five novels (I’ll count the first I flew out with, even if I don’t remember it) over a six week trip seems pretty paltry, even for an action packed schedule. It may sound like I read very little, for a trip I remember largely through what I read. After devouring My Brilliant Friend I slowed down, I wanted to savour. I didn’t read late at night when I was too sleepy. I didn’t read when I couldn’t get comfortable enough to enjoy it. I didn’t allow my eyes to skim. I took breaks between them, something I never do reading a series. In Ferrante’s prose I had a silent, instructive and challenging friend with me at all times, and she commanded the pace.

The Neapolitan Quartet and America are inextricably linked in my mind, and hold the same kind of emotion for me now. I’ll never be in wonderful, immense, perplexing America for the first time again, and I’ll never read my favourite novels for the first time again.

I’d recommend the HBO adaptation, all four seasons of which are simply called My Brilliant Friend. It’s brilliant, weaponising voiceover to achieve some of the novel’s profound insights. The writing, casting and art direction is fantastic. Overall it’s not as good as the books, of course, but still brilliant. Elena Ferrante co-wrote the scripts.

At some point I Googled the author, as you do. Famously “Elena Ferrante” is a pseudonym, even her masterful translator Ann Goldstein claims not to have met her (or be her).  The greatest compliment I can give her genius is that I’m not overly interested in uncovering her mystery. The internet thinks they’ve figured it out. Personally I don’t think it matters what her real name is, what she looks like, where she went to school, and definitely not who she's married to; we already know who she is. She’s shown us her soul, if not her face. Perhaps, like Lila finally leaving the childhood dolls she'd claimed were stolen as girls at Lenu’s apartment, and walking out of her life, she reveals herself most clearly in the freedom of absence. 

She was my brilliant friend for six weeks of total freedom. Even without a car, poorer than I left, and stubbornly bringing home my $30 Funny Girl cup.