Think of Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, with Nick Carraway observing his dubious friends and acquaintances—part of their story but always on the margin of the action.
Think of Marcel Proust’s endless reconsiderations of everything.
Turn the narrator into a woman, who adds to endless reconsiderations endless and peculiarly feminine doubts, self-doubts, waxing and waning of self-confidence.
Begin the story with two girls in a working-class neighbourhood of post-World War II Naples and its collection of petty criminals, gangsters, shopkeepers, and fascists whose wartime activities are never mentioned but permeate the air.
Is Lila/Lina Elena’s best friend? enemy? doppelganger? evil twin? Will Elena, like Nick Carraway and Melville’s Ishmael, escape the fate of the others, or will she be dragged down with them? The novels present an exhausting yet hypnotic four-volume, slow-motion train wreck covering half a century of these fascinating, frustrating, sometimes infuriating, occasionally hilarious lives.
In the background we get the Sixties, political upheaval, Cold War, the sexual revolution, etc.
P.S.: The men, with rare exceptions, do not come off well. Not at all.
P.P.S.: The narrator’s name is Elena, as is the author’s, and in the novels Elena becomes a novelist who writes about her best friend . . . but the novelist’s name is a nom de plume. And . . . the rumour mill has it that the author may actually be a man, writing under a woman’s name! Mon dieu!