THE FRIENDSHIP CHALLENGE

How envy destroyed the perfect connection between two teen-age girls.

- MARY GAITSIILL

“I don’t really know how competitive I am by nature, because if you can’t consciously acknowledge something you can’t see where you are in relation to it.” I wrote this sentence to an acquaintance with whom I was having a long e-mail exchange about Elena Ferrante’s novel “My Brilliant Friend,” which follows the early phase of an intense, lifelong, and highly competitive relationship between two Neapolitan girls in postwar Italy. Like a lot of things one dashes off in e-mails, the sentence isn’t strictly true: I can acknowledge when I’m competitive, particularly in a professional situation—but the acknowledgment is muffled, half suppressed. The competitiveness always takes me by surprise, coming, for example, in the form of a sudden sneaky urge to best someone in a minor contest that means very little. Upon “winning” in such situations, I feel a satisfaction that embarrasses me, or sometimes remorse; upon losing, a petty bitterness that is also embarrassing. Either way, I generally don’t let myself experience the feelings for long.

And those are the clear-cut situations, meaning they’re subject to some sort of professional metric—say, critical reception or audience response at a reading. In spite of my discomfort, I think that competition in such situations is natural, probably an unavoidable fact of life. Maybe it’s even good for you! But Ferrante’s novel, the first in a series, describes something far more intimate, complex, and, to me, disturbing. Reading it, I was reminded of a line I heard many years ago, perhaps on a radio show, that struck me with memorable force: “Men compete about what they do; women compete about what they