The story of the friendship between Elena and Lila continues, its conclusion offering us the meaning of this long narrative: in vain do we attempt to bring clarity to the disorderly flow of events and feelings.
In the previous book, we left Elena fleeing with Nino, abandoning a prosaic bourgeois life.
For many pages—too many, even—Elena remains at the center: a separated mother and, above all, a mistress.
To be close to Nino, Elena returns to Naples, dragging her two daughters along with her.
She moves into a sunlit apartment on Via Tasso, far from the neighborhood, which she nonetheless frequents often.
She fails to

recapture Lila immediately along with all the complications she brings with her or, worse, I allow myself to be caught up in the events of my own life because I dash them off with greater ease

.
Nino proves to be an evanescent man; with barefaced brazenness he refuses to leave his wife for Elena; he is selfish, vain, wildly ambitious, a natural-born betrayer.
Can an intelligent, educated woman accept being the concubine of a scoundrel?

The more I traveled toward Milan, the more I discovered that, once Lila was set aside, I did not know how to give myself solidity except by modeling myself on Nino.
I was incapable of being my own model.
Without him, I no longer had a core from which to expand beyond the neighborhood and into the world; I was a heap of debris

.
The spell breaks; Elena catches Nino in a sordid embrace with the maid—the most bourgeois of betrayals.
And she discovers that Nino is “nothing alien, then, but rather much that is foul.”
She leaves the man and the bright home behind to go live in the neighborhood, right above Lila’s apartment.
The narrative develops the friendship between the two women within an unusual context, that of family: both of their careers (Elena’s often taking her far away), five children, two of whom—Tina and Imma—are young girls of the same age, the former Lila’s daughter, the latter Elena’s, fathered by Nino.
The story proceeds slowly, steeped in neighborhood affairs, petty domestic conflicts, and the conflicting emotions of the two friends, until suddenly a dramatic turn occurs: Tina vanishes.
The “lost child” brings us back to My Brilliant Friend: Lila is once again at the center, and with her, Naples.
It is not as one might expect.
Lila’s grief remains ever in the background.
It is true

Tina had become encysted inside her.
(...) A way had to be found to set the child’s story flowing again

.
Yet Lila does so in her own way, setting out to discover Naples: putrefaction and splendor all at once.
In what other city has a church (San Giovanni a Carbonara) been built over a ditch known as the Carbonara because the rotting corpses and severed limbs of men and beasts were dumped there?

I often had the impression that Lila used the past to normalize the present (...).
In the Neapolitan things she recounted, there was always something ugly at the origin, something fractured, which later assumed the shape of a handsome building, a street, a monument, only to lose its memory and meaning, worsening, improving, worsening again, according to a flow inherently unpredictable, composed entirely of swells, dead calms, sudden downpours, waterfalls

.
Is life not, after all, a perpetual “dissolving of margins,”

a melting down of heterogeneous matter, a blurring and reshuffling

? Why, then, be surprised by Lila’s vanishing, by her decision to depart leaving behind no trace of herself, save for two fifty-year-old dolls sent to Elena one day? To be sure, Elena is left with the impression of having been deceived, of having been dragged wherever Lila wished.

All her life she had narrated a story of redemption, using my living body and my existence.
(...) I have been writing for too long and I am weary; it grows ever harder to keep the thread of the narrative taut amid the chaos of the years, of events great and small, of moods.
(...) Unlike in stories, real life, once past, leans out not toward clarity, but toward darkness.

Once again, the author lingers far too long over a trite tale of betrayals, domestic trivialities, and social relationships.
She seeks to delve into Elena’s soul to probe the reasons behind her submissiveness toward an overtly unfaithful lover, yet the narrative ends up bland, superficial, and dull.
There is the life of the neighborhood; dramatic events unfold in succession, such as the earthquake, yet it all feels pasted on, devoid of any sociological analysis.
There are Elena’s daughters, astonishingly adaptive to new environments and life changes, yet it defies belief that they could pass through childhood and adolescence entirely impervious to the domestic turmoil, to a mother perpetually occupied elsewhere, and to the neighborhood's endemic violence.
The novel takes flight only when Naples enters the scene.
It feels then as though one were reading Matilde Serao or Anna Maria Ortese—the great Neapolitan women writers. The credit belongs to Lila, a character capable of taking on a life of her own whenever she is not eclipsed by the excessively bourgeois and predictable Elena.

Why read it? It is somewhat tedious, but it is worth reading to see how the grand saga ends.

The Story of the Lost Child