By Barry McCrea

There are signs that Europe’s Generation X, those squeezed between the post-war Boomers who came of age in 1968 and the Millennials of the mobile age, are finally, after a long silence having their say. In nowhere more than Italy, the life story of the 1968ers lends itself to novelistic plotting: the dizzying rise from rags to riches, the sudden flourishing of middle-class life-styles, the clash of grand ideologies. This is part of what gives Elena Ferrante’s writing so much of its narrative force. The experience of Generation X, children of politically driven, eternally youthful parents, is harder to novelize; Enrica Ferrara is one of the writers who has managed to capture the essence of this generation, its in-betweenness, its sense that the world they inhabited was built by and for their parents.

The title of this novel, Mia madre aveva una cinquecento gialla (My Mother Drove a Yellow Fiat 500), is an immediate, bright flash of unmistakeable period detail. Colour is used in fairytales because colours are an effective mechanism for generating memory. The colour and the car have a similar function in this novel, a vivid, fully preserved slice of the past, making the forgotten emotional and cultural currents of the past suddenly tangible again. This is the great force of Enrica Ferrara’s début novel: bringing to life the full emotional reality of a historical moment – not explaining what this moment was or what it would come to mean, but what it felt like to be embedded in it at the time.

The novel tells the story of Gina Carafa, a middle-class Neapolitan girl who is ten in 1980 when her father, Mario suddenly has to go into hiding. His wife and two daughters briefly follow him, under assumed names. For the next seven years, Gina’s life is punctuated by the father’s occasional reappearances, sometimes clandestine, sometimes more open, and its rhythms are shaped by her attempt to understand the reasons for his going on the run.

In this sense it is a political novel, or a novel of political history. But it is also a Bildungsroman, and deftly enacts the dictum that the personal is political: inextricably woven through Gina’s discovery of friendship, menstruation, sexuality, and smoking are a series of parallel discoveries – organized crime, political factions, embezzlement, judicial processes, terrorism. As Gina gradually assembles fragments of information from the adult world that enable her to understand her father’s disappearance, the reader begins to perceive the outline of the political and intellectual landscape of 1970s and 80s Italy. But only dimly: just as Gina struggles to use her childish tools to understand the great currents and flows which determine the fate of her family life, so the reader has work to see her story in its broader context. Names from this decisive period in Italian history and culture – Pasolini, Lucio Dalla, Andreotti, Aldo Moro – float through the story along with those of Gina’s friends, teachers, beach playmates on a summer camping holiday. Like the yellow Fiat of the title, these names situate us in a world that is simultaneously a known historical moment and the particular universe of a child; the novel does not differentiate, which has the effect of plunging the reader fully into Gina’s world.

Gina’s education in Italian politics does not come through school or reading but through the intimate circumstances of her family and friends. Parents, as in any narrative of childhood, play a key role – her own, and those of her friends. But in this novel, the idea of the parent constantly shifts between that of a literal father or mother – who shape the character and destiny of the child – and that of political “parents,” powerful actors who curate the life of the society in which the child’s life will unfold. The novel is also a Künstlerroman, a narrative of the emergence of an artist. The false name that Gina is given so that she and her family can travel without compromising the safety of her fugitive father, Enrica Coffey, gradually becomes a literary alter ego, an idea of her future self as an accomplished novelist, someone who will eventually have the tools to tell this story.

This quiet undertow running throughout the novel is in part revealed by an ongoing dialogue with the literary tradition, especially with other Neapolitan novels authored by women. Mia madre explicitly acknowledges its forebears and stakes out its place in the literary tradition, helps us to read and understand its elusive world more fully. This intertextuality also adds a thickness to the novel’s texture and guides us as to its key preoccupations. Readers of Elena Ferrante, for example, will see many nods throughout the text to L’amica geniale, which give force to the through-line in the novel depicting the trajectory of the writer, gives a sense the portrait of the twenty-first-century adult artist which will emerge from all of this 1980s prepubescent confusion.

A more subtle but for me even more powerful intertext is Elsa Morante’s L’isola di Arturo which haunts the novel from the beginning right through to the final scene which takes place on Procida, the eponymous island of Morante’s title. This intertext draws our attention to the core of Ferrara’s universe, the story of a father who sporadically appears and disappears, the longing for whom provides the emotional architecture of the novel. The novel is indeed a vivid recapturing of Italian life in the 1980s, but more than that it engages, and beautifully captures, the universal mystery of each person’s origins – in a specific place and time, in a social caste, and, most of all, from a set of parents – and evokes the loneliness of that insoluble mystery. Even when all of the pieces of information are available, even when we have the names and the tapes, as it were, there is always some key element of what came before and produced us – our ancestors, our society, our collective history – that we will never fully grasp.

Ferrara, Enrica. Mia madre aveva una cinquecento gialla. Fazi, 2024.

Barry McCrea is the author of three books: a novel and two monographs, most recently, Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in Twentieth-Century Ireland and Europe, winner of the 2016 René Wellek prize. He holds the Keough Family Chair at the University of Notre Dame, where he teaches comparative literature on its campuses in the US, Ireland, and Italy.