I'd Hammer Out Poverty

For two weeks, there has been a slow hammering nearby. The sound has accompanied all my work and thinking between eight and six each day, including weekends. I can’t see what the source is or what type of person is doing this. Are they building something? Is this creative? It sounds punitive. I picture Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke.

I also picture Lila and Lenu. This is a free association, but what are their lives but the constant strike of a hammer, emphasizing all the strikes they have against them. I am so happy to see them again in a new and final season of the TV adaptation of The Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante. There are different actors in most of the roles as the characters have aged in the story, and for the most part the new cast is as convincing as the old cast was; a hard road to begin with, as lovers of the books have their own imaginations of how the characters look going in. Lenu is the narrator of the novels and the most difficult to cast, as her interior is far more roiling and complex than her exterior, and more open to interpretation. I am happy with the new Lenu/Elena, Alba Rohrbacher, and obsessed with her hair, a thick rosy gold fall of curls that masses around her thin shoulders. We have only had a glimpse of the new Lila, Irene Maiorino, but already she has shown that she has the charisma and the power of the character; her mature beauty and vividness is hard to bear, knowing what is going to happen to her; Ferrante thought up the most unbearable of all life events to set at the center of her opus, the one you’d think of if asked what couldn’t a person ever recover from. The hammer will directly hit Lila this season, and all the strikes that came before and all that will come after echo from that moment. I am already dreading it. But I will watch.

The new Nino, Fabrizio Garuni, is more obviously Luciferean than the heartcrushingly beautiful Francesco Serpico who played the young Nino, who was only a nascent narcissist and liar. He is now fully formed and up to his trickster ways in the first episode of Season 4, spinning his web, being in two places at once, making plans with Elena for a future when he is still very married, and making a damning confession to her that the newspaper he worked on as a teenager hadn’t rejected her adolescent piece about a fight she had with a teacher, but that he’d thrown it away out of envy of its brilliance. She appreciates his honesty and believes this confession is a bid for even greater intimacy, but for those who watched, weren’t we all exhorting our TV to get out girl! This is Narcissism 101.

The heavy hammer in the book is poverty, and it is everywhere. The girls are born into a neighborhood in Naples that is still full of rubble from WWII, when Naples was destroyed and starved. The people are as frozen through by poverty and the violence that attends it as their ancestors were by lava that spilled from Vesuvius, the great symbol that hovers over the book and the city. The culture is patriarchal, what else is new, and among the poor of the neighborhood the brute enforcement of this hierarchy is crude and painful. Women must be trained to be subservient, and in the case of our heroines, this isn’t a straightforward schooling. They are readers and want to think for themselves, and they are exposed to the ideas of communism and feminism and grapple with how they can reconcile their own ambitions and knowledge with their maternal feelings and their desire for love or security. They both love Nino Sarratore off and on, and that never goes well, but neither is anything else a source of fulfillment for them—even writing is fraught. And they are close and in tune with each other, but their friendship cannot be a pure refuge, it is marbled with the scarcity characteristic of their environment, their sense that they have to be ever vigilant for fear of slipping under the city into the dark world below. They love and hate but cannot quit each other. Their looping returns create the contours of the book.

There is no God in these novels, and barely any mention of religion in that very Catholic society, and omission that makes a deep impression. The girls do not have the consolation of Jesus, nor do they seem to carry the solace offered by his teachings about poverty, there is no ‘blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’ for them. They do not feel blessed, or seen and watched over by any supernatural power. They feel poor, always, even when they have money. Nothing can alleviate their feeling of being looked down on and lesser. They shall not overcome.

The hammer was still thudding through my body when I went to see Matthew Desmond speak in my town the other night. He is the author of Evicted and Poverty, By America, and is a professor at Princeton. The discussion was a dive into the causes of and remedies for poverty, with an emphasis on the complicity the whole society shares for allowing these conditions to exist in such a rich country. Everything he said was like an echo from my own brain; these are questions I wonder about all the time. Where is the national conversation about alleviating poverty? How can we sleep at night knowing children—and animals—are unhoused and hungry and unsafe? Desmond managed to ask this without being confrontational; and he offered immediate ways everyone can make a difference. Go to zoning board meetings and change the landscape of housing to create more affordable housing and mixed class neighborhoods. Donate your real estate tax credit or don’t take the exemption; tell your congressperson you want that money to go to affordable housing instead. Join an anti-poverty organization and do the work. Shift your spending to union shops and companies that pay a fair wage. Applaud political policies and programs that support the poor, such as the Child Tax Credit, and let politicians know you want government money spent this way. It was inspiring, and I’m sure if everyone did these things it would make a difference, but will we?

Jesus said “the poor you will always have with you,” a stark reminder of the place that poverty holds on our conscience. It hammers at the soul, and bedevils us when we walk past unhoused people and turn away from outstretched hands on the street. How can this be that people are forced to live this way? What would happen if we truly grasped that we must be the remedy and changers of systems? If the Neapolitan Quartet is a great novel of friendship, I would argue that it is also a seminal novel of poverty. I own all Ferrante’s books, and have a TV in a house where I can watch the show. Yet the hammering is interrupting my focus all day. I really have to get up the nerve to go see what’s going on.