“Why have Elena Ferrante’s four Neapolitan novels—My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child—become such a phenomenon with American and British readers?” asks Fernanda Moore. “The prose, in Ann Goldstein’s translation, is artless, repetitive, and stale. There are too many characters to keep track of, and much of the quartet’s cultural nuance . . . whizzes right over non-Italian heads.” Plus the stories don’t remind us of the beautiful, romantic Italy we’ve seen in many movies.

Moore doesn’t see it. She doesn’t see the fuel behind #Ferrantefever. She doesn’t get the appeal of overly long novels with vague backdrops and confusing, if not actually confused, details.

Alan Jacobs, on the other hand, finds them “utterly compelling.” “I had been telling myself for some time that I simply no longer have the tolerance for contemporary realistic fiction. Then I started this story and thought: Oh. I just haven’t come across anything this masterful in a while.” He sees the four novels as a single long novel, and not about friendship, but profound hatred. (via Prufrock)