*Scaffolding*, the debut novel by Lauren Elkin, is a beautifully layered exploration of love, identity, and memory set against the evocative backdrop of Paris. Set in the same Belleville apartment but split between two timelines—2019 and 1972—the story follows two couples confronting parallel struggles with fidelity, marriage, and the desire for children amid waves of political and social change.

In 2019, Anna, a psychoanalyst grappling with a recent miscarriage, befriends a young, radical feminist neighbor named Clémentine as she tries to rebuild her life. In 1972, Florence, a psychology student attending Jacques Lacan’s seminar, is working to conceive a child with her husband, Henry, who harbors doubts about fatherhood.

Elkin skillfully weaves together the lives of these two women across time, exploring how personal spaces hold our histories and memories, bridging past and present. With a narrative that feels as intimate as it is cinematic, *Scaffolding* offers a poignant meditation on the lingering effects of love, loss, and the enduring connections we forge with others and with the places we call home.

This character-driven novel follows a woman recovering from a miscarriage and reexamining her marriage and relationships. Short vignettes make it a buoyant read, carrying you through the story at a good pace.

Part of the reason I picked up this novel is because it mentioned a connection to another couple that lives in the main character's apartment, but many years before. I love a time jump, especially when people are related by the place they inhabit. However, I felt let down by this section. It appears randomly in the middle of the novel for a comparatively short number of pages, and I found it jarring and unnecessary.

Besides the basic similarities between the stories, I wasn't convinced of the relevance of the time-jump or what purpose it served in enhancing either narrative.
Even so, I found the contemporary narrative really engaging. I loved picking apart the intricacies of the main character's relationships along with her and wondering what she would decide to do next. Her mind was always busy, and whirs from one observation to the next at a fast clip.

This novel is deeply philosophical, questioning desire and how it manitests in difterent relationships. I'm not the biggest philosophy fan- often find it hard to understand, but Elkin writes about it in a way that feels engaging yet full of depth and wonder. It felt really refreshing, and I think it helped for me to wonder at these concepts within the confines of a narrative structure.

A thoughtful story about marriage, relationships, our responsibility to one another, desire, and breaking apart the boxes we for ourselves into. It feels meditative, yet brisk, and always captivating.

I would like to thank NetGalley and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux for providing me with an advance e-galley of this book in exchange for an honest review. Look for it in your local and online bookstores and libraries on September 17, 2024.

Pensive and philosophical in its very French way, Scaffolding reads like a long walk in the park. It's soft in certain places, ebbing and flowing between matters such as sexuality and desire and infidelity (practically multiples of one another), all the while being invariably meditative in its explorations. Although the plot is rather light, I found that its lack actually illuminated the characters of interest and allowed their depth and complexity to feel more material. The book's most consistent and delightful quality is how grounded it is in its location imagery — for a story so central to both the city and the Parisian apartment, the writing feels like an invitation to stay.

Gorgeous novel that does a fun thing I love of establishing two time periods in the same setting, and then bouncing the time back and forth in the last part of the book. You've got two couples in a small village in France dealing with the looming possibility of parenthood and how each person reacts to it, and how they unknowingly interact with the aftermath of each other's interactions. Lyrical, goregous fall read.

thank you netgalley for the e-arc in exchange for my honest review. what gorgeous and fresh style of writing, elkin is so skilled at writing. i thought the stories were about themes and situations that you don't read about/hear about in mainstream publishing and it was really nice to read something new to me.

beautiful, allusive writing - good character descriptions - sensual and engaging - I suppose, very much one world - rich people (despite being bohemian) playing with each other's faithfulness and. relationships - all ends well, I suppose - after a miscarriage unhinges our psychiatrist narrator she relives an earlier relationship with husband of a woman she meets by accident (who is bisexual) - and while her own husband is way at work, she rebuilds their flat, reassesses her life, and opts to return to her husband - last we hear, she's working again as an analyst and has a baby. so gritty only in parts but beautiful anyway. i love Elkin's works on Paris and this is another one, really - the city is set out wonderfully..

“The word you think is the most right may in fact be the most wrong. We force words into place and they don't want to stay there. I love you, we say to someone, when we mean don't leave me. Don't leave me, we say to another person, when we mean to say I want to leave you but I'm a little worried you'll throw yourself in the Seine. Don't throw yourself in the Seine, we say, when we want to push them in. We can't stand each other but we love each other too much to leave.”

It’s 2019 and Anna lives in an apartment in the Belleville neighbourhood of Paris with her husband David. She’s a Lacanian psychoanalyst who is currently on leave as she hasn’t been doing well since losing a pregnancy. Each day she goes for a run, buys a baguette, contemplates renovating her kitchen, and anticipates the upcoming refacing of the building. She meets a new neighbour, Clémentine, an artist who it turns out, is involved in a feminist guerrilla art project posting messages around Paris about women’s rights, sexual assault, and femicide.

For nearly half the book, we live inside Anna’s increasingly distracted and troubled mind as she struggles to find meaning and motivation. Her own therapist has told her to write and the book often feels like journal entries, some long, but increasingly, as Anna’s own mind becomes fragmented, as short as one or two sentences, the structure reflecting the construction metaphor suggested by the title, that one must sometimes break down before, with a supportive structure, you can rebuild.

And then, as though with a freeze frame, record scratch, we are whisked back fifty years to Max and Florence who, we come to realize, are living in the very same apartment. Chapters alternate between their POVs allowing us to view their crumbling relationship from both sides in ways both poignant and at times, quite funny.

Scaffolding is a deeply feminist novel about women’s rights and relationships, about the life-changing effect of pregnancy, about female desire and agency. Elkins embeds the work of the real life “colleuses” (gluers) into the story, including the messages in French (there’s an appendix at the end that provides translations) and she references the Bobigny abortion trial of the 1970s and I couldn’t help but reflect on the throughline to the current trial in France which, one hopes, will also lead to change (they’re even connected by a name, Gisele, who is the lawyer in the first one and the courageous victim in the current one).

Alongside these main themes, Elkins weaves in other threads. The Holocaust continues to echo, sometimes loudly, sometimes more quietly. There are oodles of references to music, art, Lacan, Freud, and so much more, and while I should have taken the time to look them all up, I frequently found I didn’t want to lose the flow of the book, so I didn’t. And it was all set in what felt like a bit of a love letter to Paris (or maybe I just get that feeling about anything set in Paris).

Scaffolding is one of those rare things: a really smart novel that manages to be very readable at the same time and I loved reading it. Elkins plays with structure and narrative voice in interesting ways that suit the themes and ideas she’s exploring. While it didn’t show up on any of the prize lists this fall, I’ll keep my fingers crossed that it might be a perfect candidate for the Carol Shields and Women’s Prizes.

I love books that take you on the interior journey of its protagonists (think Deborah Levy, Rachel Cuck, Sheila Heti) and Lauren Elkin gives us this in spades. With a bit of Paris thrown in for good measure.
But I never felt fully drawn into Anna and Clemintine's world. For some reason I was left outside, looking in (perhaps the scaffolding got in the way!)
Yet the mood and tone and feel of this book has stayed with me for days afterwards.

[a review link to my blog will be posted here when it is published]

Only read the first third. This book was written so sickeningly pretentiously that it felt suffocating. Endless references to trends, styles, etc that were so desperately reaching that it hurt. I prefer subtle pretension, something that you don’t even consciously identify as overtly exclusionary or referential.

This book reads quickly and I enjoyed the prose. However, while I was intrigued by the elements - two couples through time in the same apartment, love, desire and psychoanalysis, feminism and motherhood and relationships, France and the legacy of the Holocaust - I never felt it quite came together. I liked most of it, it just never became more than that. And in the end, the building blocks from which the story was constructed were not really innovative, but remained within the expected. Another semi-French novel about psychoanalytical theories, infidelity and desire, with a big metaphor for reconstruction and change through the renovation of the apartment (and its exterior). I enjoyed the read and loved the cover, but will not think much about it.

I was easily absorbed into this atmospheric and sensual story of the affairs of two couples in different time periods. The pace was perfect and I especially enjoyed the layers of history as they unfolded. This intriguing story twists and turns in all the right ways and will certainly leave you feeling satisfied.

*Scaffolding* by Lauren Elkin intricately weaves together the lives of two couples navigating the complexities of marriage, fidelity, and motherhood in the same Parisian apartment, fifty years apart. As Anna grapples with her personal struggles in 2019, including a heartbreaking miscarriage, her obsession with home renovation leads her to connect with Clémentine, a vibrant member of a radical feminist collective. Meanwhile, in 1972, Florence confronts her own uncertainties about motherhood while immersed in the feminist movements of her time. Elkin's narrative deftly explores how our living spaces are repositories of memories and emotions, highlighting the interplay between personal and political turmoil. Readers will be drawn to the rich character development and the thoughtful commentary on the evolution of relationships, making this a compelling read for anyone interested in the intertwining of personal histories and societal changes.

If possible, I would actually give this book 4.5 stars, rather than four. Although I enjoyed the book overall and was very drawn into the story and interconnectedness of the characters, the hardest part for me was keeping focus during discussions of psychoanalytical theory. But I've already recommended it to other people, and I look forward to any novels Lauren Elkin writes in the future.

wow! this was an amazing read with gorgeous writing, immersive scenes and characters that i'll be thinking about for a while after reading. i had been anticipating this read all summer and it did not disappoint!

Scaffolding was my most anticipated release of the year. I am a big fan of Elkin's translations (particularly of Michelle Pierot's The Bedroom) and her criticism ( Art Monsters ), and was thus thrilled to discover that she was coming out with her debut novel.

The book follows two plots, one in 2019 and the other in 1972. Both examine the concepts of pregnancy, desire, (in)fidelity, and how such incorporealities are contained and propagated within a city's architecture. On another level, Scaffolding examines Judaism, in particular French Judaism, the recent surge of immigration into provincial France--unfortunately Elkin gets the date of Chinese New Years wrong and this wasn't caught by the editor--and the birth of feminism and the sexual liberation movement in Europe. The final, overarching concern of this novel is Freudian psychology and Lacanian thought.

In short, this is a very ambitious project that has a lot to contend with on its plate. Elkin isn't entirely successful at drawing all of these loose threads into cohesion. To start with, there are many strengths of the book: I loved the stream-of-consciousness prose, the short chapters contrasted with longer ones, and there were many lines that I found disarming in their beauty. Moreover, I really loved the inclusion of two story lines and thought that they complemented each other well. However, some characters and storylines, for instance David and the main character, Anna's, miscarriage, were dropped. Insights into Judaism occur throughout but are rarely explored on anything deeper than a surface level. Another disappointing part of the book was Elkin's use of increasingly trite phrases, such as "we are still writing our histories"--part of my frustration derives from the fact that the reader knows that she can write better than this. The triteness doesn't stem from a lack of ability but rather, in my opinion, an exhaustion with the editing process. I also thought that the "Dinner with Andre"-esque last scene was also a bit cheesy, especially considering her academic interest in the flaneuse. I thought she could have used some more imagination.

That being said, I did love this book a lot and am glad I read it. There is so much to think about.

Scaffolding is filled with messy relationships. Love triangles and unearthing the morality of fidelity dominate the plot of this novel. Personally, I was not a fan of how the novel developed and found it difficult to sympathize with any of the characters because they are so focused on their extramarital affairs at the expense of other facets of life.

I wish more of the book had been devoted to Clemintine, who I thought was the most interesting of Elkin’s characters. She offers the reader a more nuanced version of feminist thought (one that extends beyond sexual liberation). Unfortunately, she remains a mysterious figure throughout the novel until the last quarter or so, when we learn about her past but through other people.

One huge misstep for me in Scaffolding is the author’s decision not to articulate our main characters’ desires to enter motherhood. We hear Anna discussing that she thinks it’s what’s expected of her, but both Anna and Florence ultimately say very little as to why it means so much for them to have children. Given that pregnancy drives so many decisions and feelings throughout the novel, I can’t understand why we don’t see any deeper reflection, especially when the book is marketed with feminist subthemes.

I think other readers will likely enjoy the fluid prose in Scaffolding, but unfortunately the book was just a miss for me. A big thank you to FSG for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I can't believe this is a debut! The writing was so impressive. It has a quiet intensity that really crept up on me and I loved the story.

Elkin wrote such a succinct and sensual read that encompassed psychoanalysis in a really approachable way while also using it to explore desire and fidelity, relationships and gender.

I definitely need to own a copy of this book the prose I as fluid and I want to highlight so many passages of our characters inner dialogue.

Look forward to anything she writes next, brava.

It was very lovely book. It reads very well and has a nice pace. It was my first book from the author and I was pleasantly surprised.