Truth or Consequences?: My Brilliant Career as novel or memoir

A reader commented on yesterday's post, and she put it very well: Though Elena Ferrante's memoir-like series of novels (more on that in a moment) is full of incident, there's a numbing sameness and lack of direction to her work. Everything she narrates is told w/ the same cool detachment, and the book feels like a chain of events,, with relatively little authorial commentary, observation, or perspective. All, whether trivial (grocery shopping) or profound (murder) are presented in pretty much the same manner. The book is very easy to read - esp in electronic format through which you can easily check to get the quick background on one of the many hard-to-distinguish characters - and there are enough episodes that, in isolation, make for pretty good narratives: the first trip w/ her friends into downtown Naples, the New Year's Eve fireworks war, the journey to Ischia where a seemingly suave and sensitive man - father of the boy she has a crush on - tries seduce her. But there's also the sense of a novel stuck in place: repeatedly EF tells us how her best friend, Lila, is really smart and rebellious and struggles w/ her parents who refuse to pay for her additional schooling, etc. We get it. There's just not enough change in the two main characters or in the relationship between them to justify such a long work. Could the same be said of Knausgaard's My Struggle, which I have given the highest praise in many posts? Do I prefer KOK's work because of gender alliance? There may be some truth in that - but I would definitely say that Knausgaard is far more analytic regarding the events of his youth, far more detailed and complex in describing his difficult family, the feeling and experience of adolescence and first love, the yearning for career and success. KOK's work feels more like a memoir that Farrante's, by the way: as we move alone in volume one of Ferrante, My Brilliant Career, there are many long scenes, esp involving her friend Lila's family, that EF could not have experienced or narrated first-hand; and the coincidence of her working in the tiny pensione that the family of the boy she has a crush on just happens to rent for the summer is very unlikely aside from the exigencies of fiction. The Neapolitan Series is a novel, and we should judge it as such.