Scaffolding

A Novel

By: Lauren Elkin

Narrated by: Lauren Elkin

A novel of Paris, desire, love, psychoanalysis, and the turbulent affairs of two couples across time.

After a miscarriage and a breakdown, Anna, a psychoanalyst, finds herself unable to return to work, obsessing instead over a kitchen renovation and befriending a new neighbor-a younger woman called Clementine who has just moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective.

Forty years earlier, in the same apartment, Florence and Henry are renovating their kitchen. Florence is finishing her degree in psychology and attending feminist meetings and Jacques Lacan's infamous seminars. She is hoping to conceive their first child, though Henry isn't sure he's ready for fatherhood.

Two couples in two separate but similar times-set against a backdrop of political disappointment and intellectual controversy-face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy. Lauren Elkin's Scaffolding is about the way our homes hold communal memories of all their inhabitants and their stories; about the bonds we create, and the difficulty of ever fully severing them; about the ways people we've loved live on in us.

©2024 Lauren Elkin (P)2024 Tantor

Tiresome philosophizing

The story was a bit tiresome. Young people experimenting and rationalizing about the nature of love and relationships. The narration was wonderful and soothing. A nice voice for which to fall asleep!

Wonderful

There’s a very light-handed, subtle way this story unfolds that I’m so impressed by. It just sweeps you along. It’s a total pleasure to read, as well as being thought-provoking and, on certain themes, quite powerful. There have been quite a few dissection-of-marriage/monogamy books published recently, and some are good, but this is excellent.

I love that the book examines relationships without creating a kind of fishbowl effect. The world goes on around the relationships, and in some way they seem vastly significant, and in some way not at all. This is what I’m always hoping for in literature, and it’s been missing from a lot of the recent “dissection”books. It reminds me of Jenny Offill’s work.

Young woman’s perspective, not for me

Infidelity. Middle/upper class female discontent. Sex. Self centered cynical romance. It’s perhaps just me outgrowing the genre.