On the NYT’s Top 100 books of the 21st century and the curious case of “Elena Ferrante”

The New York Times just released their list of the best 100 books from the 21st century, compiled via survey of a few hundred literary “luminaries” (Jenna Bush Hager? I guess), each of whom was asked to pick the 10 best books published since January 1st, Y2K. 

Lists like these are fun, at times, and almost inherently unsatisfying, being littered with choices that affirm one’s tastes (W.G. Sebald - Top 10!) as well as those which so thoroughly baffle you, it’s hard to take the project seriously (George Saunders has three books on the list? Claudia Rankine’s Citizen is better than Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and Annie Ernoux’s The Years? Yeah, ok). 

The list is predictably “politically correct” in the way you’d expect the New York Times to be. (The exclusion of Michel Houellebecq is enough to make that clear, and I would bet most of these “luminaries” don’t even know who Peter Handke is, despite him winning the Nobel Prize in 2019. Hint: controversial!)

As an aside, the funniest little nugget has to be that Stephen King voted one of his own books in the Top 10, and then voluntarily chose to publicize his list. (I like to imagine he went back and forth on which book to include.) None of his works made the final Top 100. Sorry, Steve.

Some part of me recoils at the very idea of listing books (especially in this very unserious way, in which there’s no injunction that these are books you need to read, as would have been the case in earlier eras, when a familiarity with the canon was a requirement of the educated, whereas here, there’s a built-in check box system that lets you mindlessly tally the books that you’ve read, as if this was all just another consumerist exercise), but then another part of me thinks, you just can't take it so seriously (and because of that, if you read to the end, I’ll tell you how many out of the 100 I’ve read).

Of course, I can’t resist making my own list of 10, though I’d insist these are only my favorites from this century, rather than the “best.” In no particular order: 

Interestingly, only two Americans made my list (McCarthy and Robinson). I initially included Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, before realizing it came out in the ‘90s, hence the two Bolaño books.

Gilead, The Years and The Copenhagen Trilogy all made the NYT’s final list.

The No. 1 book on that list? Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, the first of her four Neapolitan novels. The last book in the series also makes the list, as does Ferrante’s brilliant stand-alone novel, The Days of Abandonment.

The Ferrante phenomenon is fascinating to me, in part because it doesn’t seem fascinating to anyone else (at least not in America). But her coronation gives me open invitation to share some reflections I’ve been harboring for some time.

Namely, because, in case you didn’t know — no one actually knows who Elena Ferrante is. 

“Elena Ferrante” is an Italian novelist whose Neapolitan Novels have long been regarded as one of the most universally-acclaimed works of “serious” fiction published this past quarter century. (This was true long before the NYT’s list.)

Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym. The actual author’s identity is unknown. For most American readers, this is all they know and all they need to know. Even then, I’ve talked to friends who are fans of Ferrante and don’t even know it’s a pseudonym — it’s never mentioned in the standard author bio printed in her books. Those that do know it’s a pseudonym assume it’s a classic case of an author who just prefers to maintain her sense of privacy. 

In Italy, the situation is a bit more complicated.

In the beginning, no one knew who Elena Ferrante was, and blissful ignorance reigned. Then, in 2016, based on financial records unearthed by an inquisitive journalist, it was reported that “Ferrante” was probably Anita Raja, a literary translator who was born in Naples and raised in Rome. This was a happy conclusion (even if there was some uproar over the fact that Raja had been doxed). 

This happiness couldn’t last, however, for Raja is married to Domenico Starnone, a well-known Italian novelist who – drumroll, please – has previously been accused of being Ferrante himself. 

The Starnone-Ferrante accusations stem from the fact that he happens to write a lot like Ferrante, and often about the same topics and places. (A team of academics compared Ferrante’s works to 39 other Italian authors and found that only Starnone bore “clear-cut and consistent similarities with Ferrante,” including a common use of phrases found in no one else’s books.) 

Starnone, for his part, has denied the claims, and the question of Ferrante’s identity officially remains a mystery. And yet, just about anyone who has bothered to look into the matter has walked away saying that at worst (or at best?), Starnone must have played some role in writing these books, and that furthermore, there is a strong possibility he wrote them all himself. 

(The consensus in Italy today seems to be that they were co-written by Raja and Starnone. Having read both Starnone and Ferrante, I personally think Raja dictated the story to him, for reasons I’ll chalk up to writerly intuition.) 

Maybe everyone is wrong, though, and neither Starnone or Raja have anything to do with “Elena Ferrante.” Even then, this is juicy stuff – surely something that would tickle the fancy of a gossip-obsessed country like the United States. Right?

And yet, though it’s caused much commotion in Italy (dating back to 2006, when Starnone was first accused of being Ferrante), the mystery of Ferrante’s identity goes relentlessly – and curiously – unmentioned in American coverage. The NYT’s entry for My Brilliant Friend on their list of this century’s greatest novels doesn’t mention the issue at all.

This is all we’re told: 

Notice anything fishy? It’s somehow “impossible” to know just how much of this book draws from Ferrante’s life, and yet it’s a “premier example” of autofiction (short for autobiographical fiction)… which the NYT knows how exactly? Because they think this book does, in fact, track the author’s life? But didn’t they just say that’s impossible? 

The NYT is telling themselves (and their readers) the story they want to believe: That we don’t know who “she” is, but “she” definitely wrote these books, and “she” definitely wrote them about her own life. No mention at all that in her home country, “she” is widely believed to be either the work of a husband and wife, or perhaps just the husband. 

In other contexts (or eras), I wouldn’t consider either this readerly ignorance or editorial fantasizing all that strange. But we live in a time when, in almost every other instance, the American literati insists that we cannot separate the art from the artist, and that a person’s personal life is of paramount importance when judging their work. (The NYT even hints at this when they note the dominance of autofiction in today’s literary scene.) 

Of course, the “personal” aspect of an artist’s life becomes especially of interest when they do something wrong. (See: the ongoing revision of Alice Munro’s once-impeccable legacy after it was revealed, just last week, that she chose to stay with her second husband even after she learned that he had molested her 9-year-old daughter.) There are countless other cases in which the work of [insert famous dead person here] has been “re-evaluated,” “re-considered,” or simply flat out “canceled” over something the person did in their personal lives. (Philosophy departments still don’t know what to do with the fact that Heidegger was a Nazi, and while the Beatles remain as popular as ever, fans still don’t like to talk about the fact that John Lennon maybe wasn’t the nicest guy. “Imagine” that.) 

It’s not the specifics of any individual case or even the broader sweep of “cancel culture” that matters – it’s the unspoken presumption that of course we can’t judge a work outside the context of its maker.

In writing, this is compounded by the question of writing beyond one’s experience (i.e., demographics). It’s considered taboo to write across the census, especially in America today. (Do you think if “Ferrante” was a woman of color, and it was widely suspected that a white Upper West Side couple was responsible for her work, the NYT wouldn’t have said something?) 

People want to know the person behind the work — and want to judge the work by what they know of the person — except, it seems, in the case of Ferrante, where esteemed publications like the New York Times have no interest in either doing their own research, or simply reporting on what’s out there.

It’s easy to imagine a cultural right-winger blaming this on a “woke” literary world, which 1) really wants to say that a woman (Girl Boss!) is the best writer alive, and 2) really doesn’t want to consider even the faintest possibility that this woman may turn out to be an old Italian man. And to some degree, I think that’s true. People don’t want to see the man behind the curtain.

But in the case of Ferrante, something else is at work. Namely, the novels are just that good. And by good, I mean: convincing. 

Anecdotally, I know of no other books in the last 20 years that have moved as many female friends of mine as Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels have. (And there’s plenty of online writing that says they’re not alone.) 

It’s not that these women simply like the book more than others – rather, they insist that it depicts female friendship in a way that’s simply never been done before, and in a way that feels painfully beautiful and true. They insist, as is often the case with the best literature, that the specifics of Ferrante’s story bear universal resonance, such that it gives readers the feeling that they are reading about themselves.

Simply put, female readers feel seen by these books, and it’s this feeling of being seen which makes it impossible for them to consider that these pages were born in the mind of a man. 

It says something about our time that the more convincing a book is, the less likely we are to believe it’s a work of fiction, and the more likely we are to insist that it came from someone’s life.

This is an inversion of the postmodern intellectual era that came before, when everything — from restaurant menus to history books — was considered a narrative, such that when it came to books (and language more broadly), there really was no such thing as non-fiction. Now, the mere feeling of truth is enough to convince us that something is real, that it comes from reality and was born in this world, that it wasn’t made up by some guy at his desk. And it’s this feeling, I believe — this inner conviction — that prevents most (American) readers of Ferrante from wanting to ask, who really wrote these books? Because there’s an answer to that question that just doesn’t feel right.  

For my own part, I think it’s a testament to Ferrante’s genius, and to the power of literature more broadly. If fiction isn’t the only way, it’s certainly the most pleasurable and beautiful way, of sharing such truths that we forget about the truth, of giving us such rich access to our own immediate reality, that we not only forget about facts — we don’t know what they’re for. 

NYT score: 22 out of 100 books. That’s about as many as I would have guessed in advance?