A 16-year-old girl has agreed, after months of resisting his harassment, to go with an older boy to his fifth-floor apartment in Naples. She’s only tepidly attracted to him. He is the son of a big man (gangster or lawyer – Giovanna doesn’t know, or much care, which). His protruding teeth count against him but he has what she needs – a car, a room, a penis, an almost touching persistence in following her around. She wants to be relieved of her virginity, and she’s chosen him as the necessary instrument. As they climb the stairs she is thinking of another young man, the high-minded, unattainable Roberto. “I thought that, fifty years on, if I and Roberto had become far closer friends than we were at this moment, I would tell him about this afternoon and get him to explain to me what I was doing.”

This is the tone of the pseudonymous Italian author Elena Ferrante’s latest novel, La Vita Bugiarda degli Adulti (or The Lying Life of Adults): blunt realism, a kind of baffled innocence, a musing detachment and an expertly managed double-vision that allows us to be right there with the young protagonist while also seeing her, as from afar, through the mind of her adult self.

Giovanna, precocious adolescent that she is, is plodding her way through “a very long book” about the “remembrance of things past”. Well before Ferrante drops this hint, Proust’s ghost is palpable in this novel. There are complex, meandering sentences in which minute variations in mood are examined with fastidious exactitude. The reader is entirely admitted to the narrator’s mind. We see other characters only through the mist of her incomprehension. Is her father a vile seducer, or is he a hard-working teacher who, yes, has run off with his best friend’s wife, but is nonetheless a kind man who has taught his daughter to value integrity? Is Giovanna’s aunt Vittoria the heroine of a gothic love story (complete with graveyard scene and everlasting grief), or just a mentally unstable bully who has ensconced herself, cuckoo-like, in the family of the man whom she stole from the very wife and children she now terrorises? Is the bracelet that keeps turning up the clue to a banal adultery-themed mystery, a symbol of love’s transfiguring power, a piece of cursed jewellery like the Wagnerian ring, or merely a McGuffin?

However, this is the main question that Ferrante’s legions of admirers will be asking: is this new book like her much-loved Neapolitan quartet? Yes and no. Like those novels, it moves between Naples’ dangerous and dilapidated lower town and the sea-view homes of the bourgeoisie above, but it more nearly resembles Ferrante’s earlier books, with their tight focus and tart explorations of individuals’ discontents.

The quartet had at its centre a comparatively bland heroine around whom a huge cast of more vivid characters gyrated, outstanding among them the fierce, dazzling, tragic Lila. Those books encompassed a whole world, its intricate web of politics and criminality, love affairs and vendettas. The Lying Life of Adults, by contrast, is all interior, centred on one girl’s development. Religion matters because of what it represents to Giovanna – something grand that belongs not to the polite world of her atheist parents, but to the mysterious vitality of her aunt’s working-class milieu. Power, whether shored up by force or by money, impinges on her via the boys she meets.