Fran Magazine: Issue #46

The Ferrante is in Trouble issue

Thank you for reading Fran Magazine, the little magazine that could. This issue is for paid subscribers, but the cheapskates and haters and beloved non-paying subscribers can have a little sample.

The new and improved “Etc.” section

“Etc.” is dead; long live whatever the hell this new thing is.

What I’m watching: The Mike Leigh for the BBC collection on Criterion Channel. Nuts in May is laugh out loud funny!!
What I’m reading: Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett. Remember when Pond was the hot girl book of the season it was whenever Pond came out? I enjoyed Pond, but I am loving the author’s latest.
What I’m listening to: Carly Rae Jepsen’s latest album did little for me — I neither like nor dislike — but my ambivalence led me to Dedicated Side B, which holds up better than you or I remembered.

A Ferrante moment

I thought it funny that my friend and former teacher Alice Elliott Dark wrote about Elena Ferrante’s novels in her most recent issue of Alice on Sunday. I have had Ferrante on the mind lately too. Back in December, when I went to go see the Zoomer composer conduct the NY Phil, I picked up a copy of The Days of Abandonment from the baffling and often understocked Shakespeare & Co. location on the upper west side. I wanted a book to read with dinner. When I started my MFA program, I just finished reading The Neapolitan Quartet. “Have you read The Days of Abandonment?” at least two different members of my cohort asked. “That’s the really good one.”

In the four and a half years since I read The Neapolitan Quartet, I did not pick up The Days of Abandonment until just last month. I read The Lying Lives of Adults back when I was in Idaho last fall as it pertained to an ongoing writing project. I also read The Lost Daughter because Netflix sent me a free copy along with a useless DVD of that movie, available to stream on Netflix, a service I already pay for. I have read a handful of her nonfiction, the odd essay that comes my way. It should go without saying that I love Ferrante’s books. I do not love them in a guilty or unapproachable way. I think they are all uniformly pretty great. Some have stayed with me longer than others. That’s fine. I sort of can’t believe how long it’s been since I read The Neapolitan Quartet: I lugged all four of those books with me when my brother and I were traveling in that area after quitting our jobs. No woman should carry around a duffle bag with 2,000 pages worth of Italian literature, and yet — (Owen brought books by Robert Louis Stevenson). Relatedly, I can hardly process 2018 as five years ago. The only way to remedy this, I believe, is with a reread sooner than later.

I started The Days of Abandonment that Thursday night when I went to the symphony and then it sat in my purse for a month. The thing about a 180-page novel is that it’s perfect to fit in a purse. People will often ask me how it is I make time to read. The answer, among other strategies, is that I have one commuting book and one at-home book and juggle the two simultaneously. The downside to a 180-page novel is how often was I commuting during the holidays? Hardly at all. So it took a month to read a short, easy (all considered) read. The plot of the novel is that a woman is left by her husband, and she now must care for her two children and their dog by herself. I recall starting the book that Thursday in December and being like, “Oh, so it’s just about, like, her days… of abandonment… Got it.” Not everything has to be that complicated.

The woman at the center of The Days of Abandonment is named Olga, and in her separation from her husband, who has left her for the daughter of one of his peers — AGE GAP DISCOURSE HERE — finds herself increasingly alienated and repulsed by society. She is incapable of taking care of her children, let alone herself. The dog — don’t get me started. She attempts, lewdly, to seduce her neighbor that she doesn’t even like that much. She behaves so miserably that I found the book stressful to read for long stretches of time, wondering, not without reason, if harm would befall one of her children.

It was interesting, to say the least, to read this book all the while sporadically keeping up with the FX on Hulu or FX or just Hulu — I don’t know, I’m not a genius — adaptation of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman¹ is in Trouble. I haven’t read her book, I have merely the show to go off of, but it is my understanding that it is a fairly faithful adaptation of the novel, adapted by Brodesser-Akner herself. Fleishman is deceptively centered around its title character — Toby Fleishman, played in the adaptation by Jesse Eisenberg. Toby, like Olga, has been abandoned by his once-spouse Rachel (Claire Danes), though unlike Olga and her husband Mario, this couple was already separated. The core conflict of Fleishman is in Trouble is that one morning Rachel drops off her two children with Toby, and then disappears. Is she alive? Dead? Absconded with someone else? That’s for him to find out. Only the reveal of Fleishman, if you can call it that, is that the story both is and isn’t Fleishman's but also his friend Libby’s, who grapples with the idea of life outside her own suburban domesticity.

cred: hulu/fx