Elena continues the story of her friendship with Lila.
The first book, My Brilliant Friend, had ended with Lila’s marriage to Stefano, the wealthy grocer.

I wanted to sink back into the neighborhood, to be as I had been.
I wanted to throw away studying, the notebooks crammed with exercises.
(...) What I could become outside Lila’s shadow counted for nothing.
What was I compared to her in her wedding dress, to her in the convertible, the blue pillbox hat and the pastel suit?

This reflection of Elena’s does not halt a trajectory that leads the two young women to drift apart and continually seek each other out.
What is life without Lila for Elena?

Time settles down and the salient facts slip along the thread of the years like suitcases on an airport conveyor belt; you take them, you put them on the page, and it’s done.
(...) With her I didn't want to have real relations, just hello, generic phrases.
(...) On the one hand I said enough, on the other I grew depressed at the thought of not being part of her life, of her way of inventing it

.
Elena continues her studies, passes her classical high school exit exams with flying colors, attends the Scuola Normale in Pisa, graduates, writes a novel, becomes an author.
All this culture is nothing more than a mask:

I learned to control my voice and gestures. (...) I brought my Neapolitan accent under control as much as possible.
(...) At school I had learned to make people believe that I knew a great deal

.
And above all, Elena found herself “sterilized by study,” bringing under control her feelings, anxieties, and her very boldness.
In search of the “best disguise,” upon reading some of Lila’s notebooks she realizes that

the mask worn so well (...) was almost face.
Suddenly I became aware of that almost

.
(...) Behind the almost I seemed to see how things stood.
I was afraid

.
Beneath the apparent conquest of freedom lies hidden, for Elena, the loss of an authentic life.
For Lila, however, her unhappy marital and romantic tribulations lead to

a life full of diverse and reckless adventures

, to an effective conquest of her autonomy as an individual and a woman.
Lila realizes immediately that the marriage was a mistake: Stefano turns out to be an insensitive, vulgar, and even violent man.
The young woman tries desperately to rebel and then to accept married life, even though it is so false and devoid of love.
During a summer vacation she encounters Nino, the young intellectual with whom Elena is also infatuated.
If for the latter her love for the young man is still an adolescent crush, for Lila it is an overwhelming affair in which physical attraction is intertwined with the desire for cultural elevation.
She gets pregnant, is abandoned by Nino, and commits what is madness in the eyes of the neighborhood: running away, living on her own with her child, and working—she, once wealthy and pampered—as a laborer in a sausage factory.
Elena visits her friend at the factory, sees the sordid work environment, and is disgusted

by the stench of fat that (her friend) carried on her

.
She would like to tell her about her own success; instead, she discovers that in the evening, after putting the child to sleep, Lila studies programming languages:

they did exercises with flowcharts, they trained to strip the world of the superfluous, they schematized everyday actions according to only two values: zero and one.
Obscure words in the squalid room, whispered so as not to wake Rinuccio.
I understood that I had arrived there full of pride (...) but she (...) was reacting by effectively explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there was nothing to win, (...) and that time simply slipped away meaningless, and it was good only to see each other from time to time to hear the mad sound of one's brain echoing inside the mad sound of the other's brain".

Elena’s cultural ascent, her cultivated and artificial Italian that suppresses the dishonorable dialect of childhood, her educated and sophisticated friends act as a sort of solvent that distills the narrative; the Neapolitan milieu, the vitality of the neighborhood, the authenticity of life disappear gradually yet decisively.
It is a net loss for the narrative, all the more so because the author lingers for about 100 pages in a meticulous and long-winded account of the two girls’ summer vacation and the story of falling in love with Nino.
It is an adolescent regression, unredeemed by the final part of the book: Elena’s integration into university life in Pisa and, more broadly, into the upper-middle class; Lila’s struggle to live her love for Nino fully; Lila’s resignation and subsequent escape; and, finally, the intense closing pages.
The writing—elegant, fluid, flawless—sustains the entire narrative, which is all too often verbose and redundant.
Substance and originality are lent by the implied yet potent critique of formal education as a site of normalization and masking.

Why read it? The two protagonists captivate; the narrative style redeems a plot that is slow and at times sluggish.

The Story of a New Name