"Outside the building as well, the work is about to begin. Every ten years or so, Parisian buildings must be refaced, and it is our bad luck to have caught the ravalement so soon after moving in. It is going to be expensive and immensely disruptive. We voted against it at the owners’ meeting but you can’t outrun it forever; into every Parisian life a little refacing must fall, expensive and inconvenient."

Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin is the second of the author's works I've read after No. 91/92: notes on a Parisian commute.

Like that work, this novel is set in Paris, and is on which the author has been working on since 2007, indeed starting when, as she tells is in an interview at Gagosian Quarterly, "nearly twenty years ago, I was assigned Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1973) in a postgraduate seminar."

Elkin's own succinct description of the novel puts it perfectly - "a kind of Lacanian-Rohmerian mash-up set in Paris" (from Citizen Femme) and (from The Creative Independent):

"It’s set in the same apartment in Paris in 1972 and 2019, about the two different couples who live in the apartment at this 50-year distance from one another, and there are all kinds of interrelations between them. They’re both dealing with the idea of pregnancy, with wanting to have a baby, with difficulty getting pregnant, with fidelity, and trying to reckon with how to live with someone else in a long-term way and how to respect their alterity without trying to erase it or possess them. One is a psychoanalyst, and the other is training to be a psychoanalyst, the two main characters. So there’s a lot about Lacanian psychoanalysis and desire and lack and the compulsion to repeat."

The novel is divided into three parts of roughly equal length. Part I is set in 2019, in the Belleville district of Paris, where Anna, in her late 30s, has recently moved into a flat with her husband David. Anna suffered a second-trimester miscarriage recently, and David is living temporarily in London (a lawyer, working on Brexit-related issues), which is causing her to reflect on what each of them wants from their relationship. She befriends a 24 yo art history graduate, who lives in the same area of flats, Clémentine. When Clémentine first visits Anna's flat:

"She lights another cigarette, gets up, goes to my bookshelves. She scans them as if looking for something familiar. A finger across the spines of the collected works of Freud. You have a lot of stuff about psychoanalysis, she says. I’m a psychoanalyst, I say. Another one! she says. It seems like half the people in Paris are shrinks. The other half are in therapy, she jokes. I thought about studying psychology, was it very difficult? It seemed very difficult. Too much science. I guess your father helped you. She takes down a volume of Lacan, opens it, makes as if to close it, then looks at it more closely. Seminar Sixteen, D’un Autre à l’autre. From an Other to the other. Homophobe, she says, and puts it back on the shelf."

And Anna, who has been temporarily suspended from her psychoanalytical duties as she processes her own trauma, explains her Lacanian approach:

"The kind of psychoanalysis I subscribe to is more Lacanian, it’s less about your coming up with a narrative that explains and cures your symptoms and more about what might be suggested during the therapeutic process, how the way we talk about our lives encodes the way we think about them, the things we want, our desires, how we might learn to live with them instead of being led by them. You’ll never be cured, so to speak. There’s no cure for being human."

In addition to the scaffolding that is being erected on the exterior of the building, for the 10-yearly ravalement (the muncipality-mandated refurbishment of the facade), Anna is also planning interior works:

"There’s so much to be done in here, it’s a minefield of other people’s choices, I feel like I’m fighting with the past. It has to be entirely stripped and rebuilt–starting with the wallpaper in rotting shades of orange and brown. Here and there it peels away from the wall. Then the brown tiles over the stove with the owls on them. Owls, for god’s sake! Hit them with a hammer, crack them into pieces, scrape off the mortar. Replace with metro tiles, bevelled white, pristine for now, yet to meet the splashes of oil and sauce. Install butcher’s-block countertop, never to run with the blood of animals; we are vegetarians and our children will be too."

Clémentine herself is part of a clandestine group of women, the colleuses (literal translation: gluers), who overnight put up posters protesting against violence against women and femicide in particular:

"Saturday morning and something has been pushed under my door. I take a closer look: it is a newspaper article, taken from Le Monde.

Aux femmes assassinées, la patrie indifférente: les «colleuses» d’affiches veulent rendre visibles les victimes de féminicides.

A picture of a blonde woman, who could be Clémentine, but isn’t, is it? painting block letters on to A4 sheets of paper.
Above her, pasted on a wall: CÉLINE DÉFENESTRÉE PAR SON MARI 19e FÉMINICIDE
Across the bottom of the article, in red ink, Clémentine has written: COME OUT WITH US"

(this is a real-life group from the time, and Elkin has used the actual words from signs they posted)

Clémentine encourages Anna to take part, as well as to explore her sexuality (and Anna finds herself oddly drawn to an older man who she first meets when she forgets her purse and he pays for her goods at the bakery). A crucial scene in the evolution in Anna's thinking takes place with her and Clementine dancing to a cover of Lola by the Raincoats, from their first record of which Kurt Cobain said in the sleevenotes when it was reissued:

"I don’t really know anything about the Raincoats, except that they recorded some music that has affected me so much that whenever I hear it, I’m reminded of a particular time in my life when I was (shall we say) extremely unhappy, lonely, and bored. If it weren’t for the luxury of putting on that scratchy copy of the Raincoats’ first record, I would have had very few moments of peace. I suppose I could have researched a bit of history about the band, but I feel it’s more important to delineate the way I feel and how they sound. When I listen to the Raincoats, I feel as if I’m a stowaway in an attic, violating and in the dark. Rather than listening to them I feel like I’m listening in on them. We’re together in the same old house, and I have to be completely still or they will hear me spying from above and, if I get caught – everything will be ruined because it’s their thing."

And towards the end of Part I when Anna visits Clémentine's house and meets her husband, she discovers a coincidental but strong connection.

Part II takes us back to 1972 but the same flat, which is then occupied by Henry (a paralegal) and his wife Florence. Florence is also a psychoanalyst, or rather training to be one, attending Lacan's seminars at the Faculté de Droit. She shares with Anna a love of Eric Rohmer movies, indeed each woman's life could be from a Rohmer movie, although clearly not a taste in interior design, as she proves to be responsible for the brown wallpaper and the owl decor.

Florence is keen to start a family, Henry rather less so, so she takes matters into her own hands, stopping taking the pill and embarking on an affair with her lecturer at the university.

Politically, the backdrop, is a rising feminist movement (feeling the 1968 protest rather excluded them), and in particular the Bobigny trial, which was to lead to a change in reproductive rights in France.

And Henry feels pushed towards having an affair of his own, as well as questioning if he wishes to be responsible for a child he is not confident is even his.

Part III takes us back to 2019 (and early 2020, as rumours emerge of a virus in China), with Anna embarking on a sexual affair with both Clémentine and Jonathan, a more 21st century echo of Florence's more traditional approach in 1972. Echoes of the exclusion of women from the 1968 movement also come in, with Clémentine criticising the TERFs and their "fucked-up idea of what feminism is ... Feminism has always been about extending freedom to the greatest number of people, but there are some women who seem to have forgotten that."

While on a walking tour of Paris (echoes of Elkin's Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London):

"I recognise the Tour Saint-Jacques a little ahead. When I was in grad school, in my early years alone in Paris, I was preoccupied by it, by the fact that it had been in a state of restoration for many years, I was in a hurry for them to finish up, I wanted to see it, I studied it obsessively, and for so many years, as it stood there under the scaffolding, I idealised it, waiting for the day this medieval tower would be revealed to us, if only they would hurry up, and I imagined what it would look like, and scrutinised the photograph Brassaï took that Breton uses in Nadja, à Paris la tour Saint-Jacques chancelante, the unsteady Tour St Jacques, half under scaffold. As it was peeled back the tower began to reveal itself, a little bit at a time, and what turned out to have been underneath was something of a let-down, so clean and flat and nothing like what the medieval builders had in mind, newer than new even, and I realised I loved it better with the scaffolding, when we didn’t know what was taking shape beneath."

The novel ends, perhaps more conventionally than might have been expected, with a short coda that tells us what happened to Anna and David and Clémentine and Jonathan, and also with a hint that the man in the bakery might provide another connection to 1972:

"That morning, the morning of the scaffolding finally being gone, I ran into my friend at the threshold of the bakery. He opened the door for me. The scaffolding is down he said, but it wil go up again."

A thought-provoking novel with more depth than its ostensibly plus ça change story of Parisian having affairs might imply, indeed one perhaps needing more appreciation for Lacanian psychology than I have.

Scaffolding
By Lauren Elkin

There's an alert going off on my phone, the final demand to post my review about this book which publishes today, but I still haven't processed it enough to do it justice. I honesty don't think I ever will, so I'll just throw out a few thoughts.

This story grabbed me from the first page with it's uniquely French style and it's strong sense of place. Light on plot, this is a character driven story centred in an apartment in Belleville, over two timelines with a tangential relationship.

The driving force is the central character's quest to parse the attributes and meaning of Desire.

Themes include miscarriage, infidelity, bisexuality, open partnership, opposing opinions on the desire for parenthood. Through the various characters we explore insights about psychoanalysis, music, art and culture, morality and ethics, and the work of female activists who protest against Femicide by plastering the city with signs.

There are things about the structure of the book that haven't sunk in for me yet. I expected stronger resolution between the two timelines, but by the time it ended, I almost didn't mind.

The novel is emmense in scope but almost everything is trapped inside a space that is being ripped apart from the inside, pelted and flayed from the outside, and tightly wrapped and shrouded to prevent escape and camouflage the trauma. How female.

This is not going to be the right book for every reader, but in the right person's hands, this will resonate strongly.

Publication date: 13th June 2024
Thanks to #NetGalley and #randomhouseuk for the ARC

So I enjoyed part 1. I didn’t like the change of scene/relationship in part 2, and by the time we went back to part 3, I realised this book was way way over my head. I just didn’t ’get it’ and the writing made me feel stupid. And I’m really not.

Bold and brave, this book explored the intricate details of womanhood and longing. I loved the writing, it was so beautiful and enchanting. There was something incredibly addictive about the way Elkin writes, it’s full of life and love. The two couples that this novel focus on may be separated by time, but their struggles were timeless. I especially enjoyed the different relationships Anna had and what they all meant to her, and how she lost herself in everyone she loved.

I have no idea what I think about this. It is very very French. Whilst it beautifully examines the nature of individual relationships and how much one individual can truly know another, it occasionally felt like it wandered into the pseudo intellectual, or perhaps a parody thereof. I couldn’t not read it but I’m not sure I could say I enjoyed it.

Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin is an intelligent and beautifully written novel that delves into relationships and marriage, infidelity, friendship, fertility and loss, feminism, identity, psychology, language. It also creatively plays with the places and spaces we inhabit and reminded me of Holly Pester's The Lodgers in that sense.

Scaffolding follows the lives of two couples, set over two different timelines: present day and 1970s Paris. Both couples have lived in the same apartment in the edgy French neighbourhood of Belleville. Anna is a psychoanalyst, on leave from her job following a miscarriage. Her husband David is working temporarily in London. Anna quickly forms a relationship with her young neighbour, Clémentine. Florence and Henry, our 1970s couple, are at odds over whether to have a child. Florence is a student of psychoanalysis who has fallen in love with an older man.

Both couples navigate relationship difficulties against the backdrop of a growing women’s movement, from the burgeoning feminist protests of the 70s to the #MeToo movement of today. The book identifies themes of identity,
gender and sexuality. While I enjoyed the multi narratives and the Parisian setting, I found some of the chapters exploring Lacan and psychoanalysis, too cerebral and quite difficult to follow. 3stars for me.

The story of two couples whose only connection is that they both live in the same apartment, albeit one couple in the 1970s and the other in the late 2010s. Lauren Elkin's prose is crisp and precise, and she explores the emotional lives of her principal figures with skill. This is not a plot driven novel, and its short, often fragmentary chapters create dream-like moments. Elkin scatters her novel - which us set in Paris - with lots of philosophy, Lacan in particular, and so the novel evokes a certain French style of narrative. There is a lot to admire here, and I fully expect to see the novel on a lot of best of lists at the end of the year.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.

Scaffolding is in an incredibly clever book mainly about two couples who live(d) in the same apartment in different decades, and their relationships between, with and within themselves, each other, and others. The setting is 1970s and 2019 Paris.
This book is also about Brexit, in a way (joking, it is only a very minor point).

This is a quick read, despite the length. First of all, Elkin’s prose is curious and flows well. Second of all, the chapters are short, stream of consciousness, journal entry-type and length narrations by the characters. Third of all, the characters’ voices read authentic, circle back to my first point: poetic and modern, relevant, casual prose all at the same time.

The plot is not complex but the characters are. They authentically talk about their inner struggles, observations and make some social commentary too.

It may be momentarily hard to grasp who is talking when the POVs change but one gets the hang of this quickly picking up the clues.

I liked the writing style, the setting, the different periods and how they blend, and the themes. I also enjoyed the flawed characters.
As for the plot, I wish there was a bit more happening or rather this was longer.