ARE WE ALL BEING PLAYED?
The Cult of Elena Ferrante
A lesson of the blockbuster ‘My Brilliant Friend’ is that an air of mystery can be great publicity for writers
Late in 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit my New Jersey suburb, knocking out power in most of the town for five days and leading to cheers in the streets when out-of-state utility trucks rolled in to help restore our electricity.
I didn’t know it, but another storm was brewing, this one in book publishing.
Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend had just come out in the U.S., and the future blockbuster had underwhelmed early reviewers with its soap-operatic saga of two female friends growing up in crime-infested postwar Naples, Italy.
Among the major prepublication review outlets, Kirkus ignored the novel and Publishers Weekly gave it an unstarred review. The New York Times Book Review gave the novel only a paragraph in a roundup of five books. The Wall Street Journal didn’t do a full-length review until two years later.
The literary winds began to shift after James Wood praised My Brilliant Friend, the first novel in Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, in The New Yorker in 2013. His review gave the book an intellectual cachet. Or, depending on your view, a…
