Lauren Elkin’s first two books, Flâneuse and Art Monsters, combined rigorous and often scholarly thinking with prose that was at once agile and gorgeous. Those books’ strengths – historical understanding and a deep commitment to the life of the mind – aren’t always sufficient tools for the more playful worlds of fiction, and in some ways Scaffolding is the sort of very cerebral novel that a good essayist would write. Epigraphs from Lacan and Cixous set the scene in terms of cultural references as well as intellectual sophistication.
Scaffolding has a double narrative: two young couples living in the same apartment in north-east Paris in 1972 and 2019. Both women are psychologists contemplating motherhood: Anna in 2019 is a psychoanalyst on leave after a late miscarriage; while Florence in 1972 is hoping to conceive with her husband, Henry, who doesn’t much want a baby and isn’t consistently sure he wants a wife. French-American Anna introduces us to “the Parisian apartment I had always dreamed of living in”, imagined since childhood Christmas trips to Paris with her French mother. It has “all the indispensable Haussmannian details” and is “high enough on the hill to see all the nearby rooftops and beyond”. It would have been the scene of a sociable family life, “but then the baby didn’t come”.
