Review: Recreating a vanished friend through words

In My Brilliant Friend, the opening volume of Italian author Elena Ferrante’s series of Neapolitan novels, everything starts with a phone call. Thee middle-aged son of a friend Elena Greco has known since elementary school calls to tell her his mother has been missing for two weeks. He’s searched everywhere for her. Could she possibly be staying in Turin with her friend Elena, he asks, although he knows as well as Elena does that his mother has never left the city of Naples where she was born.

“Please, for once behave as she would like: don’t look for her,” Elena advises him.

The son is stunned. And though at first Elena’s lack of interest in searching for the lost friend she calls Lila seems as strange to a reader as it did to the son, Elena knows Lila’s deepest secret.

“It’s been at least three decades since she told me that she wanted to disappear without leaving a trace. . . (s)he never had in many any sort of flight, a change of identity, the dream of making a new life somewhere else. And she never thought of suicide. . . She wanted not only to disappear herself, now, at the age of sixty-six, but also to eliminate the entire life that she had left behind.”

Despite her advice to Lila’s son, Elena isn’t willing to lose her friend so easily. But rather than find her bodily, Elena will recreate in words, with Proustian detail, almost every moment of their friendship, their life together.

By the way, don’t let the lovely wedding picture on the book’s cover mislead you, as it did me and some of my book group friends, into thinking this is a romance. Or a travelogue. The sexuality in My Brilliant Friend, even when it ditches the cringe-worthy awkwardness of a teenage diary, is often creepy, often brutal, and always exploitive. Neither do the characters show much interest in the scenic wonders of southern Italy. Ferrante’s novel is brutally honest, not beautiful.

As the first volume of her four-volume (to date) Neapolitan novel series, My Brilliant Friend recreates the life of Lila and Elena as girls growing up in a desperately impoverished neighborhood of Naples in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Elena Greco is the oldest child of a porter at the city hall and his wife. Her friend Raffaella Cerullo (called Lila only by Elena) is the daughter of a shoemaker.

Elena is a pretty child with blonde curls, well-behaved and eager to please everyone. Especially her teacher. She terms herself the smartest member of their elementary school class, just learning to read. The smartest, that is, until the teacher discovers that Lila – “that small dark-haired, dark-eyed child,” the disruptive member of their class who is perpetually getting into trouble -- has already taught herself to read.

As the two girls go through their childhoods, it is Elena who becomes the devoted follower, Lila the leader, the one who seems destined to be the “brilliant friend” of the story’s title.

Both finish elementary school brilliantly and, at a point when most of their classmates leave school to help support their families, both seem destined for the higher levels of education that may allow them to escape the poverty of their surroundings. But although Lila’s family seems the (comparatively) more affluent, her parents refuse to let her advance beyond elementary school, while Elena eventually enters a prestigious classical high school.

It is now Lila who becomes the beauty of the pair. Desperate to shun the unwanted attention of a son of the local mafiosa, she plots marriage to another young man of their neighborhood. It looks like an alliance destined to trap her forever in the violent, ignorant neighborhood of her childhood. But wait – there’s more to the story – three more volumes, in fact: The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child – all now available in English translation.

Lila isn’t the only woman missing from these volumes. Her creator, Elena Ferrante, is possibly the world’s most notoriously missing author. She writes under a pseudonym, has never been photographed (at least, not as Elena Ferrante) and makes no personal appearances. “I believe,” she wrote to her editor, “that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t.” And so, like Lila, she disappears. . . into her books.

Review: A mother’s anguish, a small town’s deadly secrets

Review of: Seven Wings to Glory

Author: Kathleen M. Rodgers

Publisher: Camel Press

Source: Purchase, Barnes & Noble

Grade: B

For young Cade Kitchen, becoming a soldier fulfilled a long-held dream. For his parents, sending a son to war halfway around the world from their peaceful small town of Portion, Texas, was a long-dreaded nightmare. Cade’s mother Johnnie’s father died in Vietnam when she was barely old enough to remember him, but she has lived the decades since in the shadow of her mother’s grief. And with each news report from Afghanistan, with each time she passes the war memorial on the main square of her picture-perfect small town, she fears reliving that earlier tragedy.

But not until the memorial becomes the site of a racist attack on Whit, Johnnie’s African-American best friend, does she realize that terror also hides behind the outwardly sunny façade of her hometown. Johnnie will struggle with the impact of the two wars, one outer, one internal, in the course of Kathleen M. Rodgers’ latest novel, Seven Wings to Glory.

This is the second of Rodgers’ novels featuring the Kitchen family – wife Johnnie, husband Dale, and their children Cade, B.J., and Callie Ann. Johnnie, a recovering bulimic, has only recently reconnected with her mother, who disappeared more than 20 years earlier, leaving her young daughter to be raised by grandparents. In the interim between the first Kitchen family story, Johnnie Come Lately, and Seven Wings to Glory, Johnnie’s beloved grandmother, Opal Grubbs, has died, leaving Johnnie to deal with her grandparents’ house full of memories.

Kathleen M. Rodgers

Among these is a picture of five-year-old Johnnie with her father, taken shortly before his death. Johnnie’s parents had never married. She knows little about her father except his name. She has never heard from his family. Are they still alive? Do they even know of Johnnie’s existence?

Under less fraught circumstances, Johnnie might have tried to locate these missing grandparents, but she already has more than enough personal drama to deal with. Besides her recent enrollment at a nearby community college and part time work as columnist for the local newspaper, there’s a house, husband, and her youngest child, daughter Callie Ann, still in high school. It’s almost – but not quite -- enough to push even her ever-simmering fear about son safety into the background.

Rodgers also dealt with military issues in her previous books, The Final Salute, as well as Johnnie Come Lately. In her latest, Seven Wings to Glory, she adds both spiritual elements and concerns with racial injustice, as one of Johnnie Kitchen’s newspaper columns acts as a catalyst, bringing to light incidents of horrific violence in her town’s past, incidents that still trouble the town’s outwardly placid surface decades later.

Although I applaud her efforts, I’ll admit having qualms about the “magical Negro” effect of some of her otherwise delightful new characters.

However, the newcomers, both white and black, are as varied, as flawed and wounded as the Kitchen family itself. There’s enough warmth, heart string tugging and heartbreak in Rodgers’ blend of an imminently lovable protagonist, a postcard pretty small town, and a cast of quirky townsfolk to give fans of the Kitchen family hope for more adventures to come.