Elena Ferrante Knows and Shares in My Brilliant Friend (L’amica Geniale) Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (L’amica geniale), the first novel in the Neapolitan Quartet, is an exercise in excelling from the sidelines. Unable to make herself the main character despite being the protagonist, Elena Grecco, or “Lenù,” comes of age in 1950s postwar Naples, where her passivity in encountering gross…