i liked this the more i read it. some wacky little sentences at the beginning esp as lacan is concerned but i think she writes her way into something very cool and very horny and thoughtful about desire.

ty to netgalley and fsg for the arc.

Really beautifully written and I loved how they weaved through culture and the dynamics between the characters. Unfortunately found the portions about psychoanalysis a bit dense.

Scaffolding was a beautiful gem of a book. The writing was sublime - so beautiful and smart without being pretentious, and I loved how this was very much a character-driven story. Set in France, the book is told through two timelines and focuses on many themes: relationships, parenthood, and miscarriages to name a few.

Some books I want to fly through, but this one was meant to be savored. I'm always looking for an utterly absorbing novel, and this one had me glued to my seat until I reached the final page. I'll be recommending this one to anyone on the hunt for a novel with memorable characters and gorgeous prose.

In Scaffolding, I found a thought-provoking exploration of modern life played against the backdrop of urban spaces. Elkin's prose is beautifully crafted, weaving personal anecdotes with insightful commentary on architecture and belonging. I especially appreciated her ability to make the reader reflect on how our environments shape our experiences and identities.
However, at times, the narrative felt a bit disjointed, shifting focus in ways that made it hard to maintain a cohesive flow. Additionally, while some sections were incredibly engaging, others felt overly academic, which could alienate readers looking for a straightforward narrative.
Despite these inconsistencies, the book sparked my curiosity and left me contemplating the intricate relationship between our lives and the structures that surround us.

scaffolding tackles a little bit of everything: desire, marriage, motherhood, feminist politics, psychoanalysis, home remodeling, queerness, religion, past/present/future… we see how all of those topics interact with the lives and relationships of two different women, anna and florence, who live in the parisian same apartment 40 years apart.

there are some loose plot points that mirror each other in both women’s lives, including affairs, pregnancy, and careers in psychoanalysis, but it is not a super plot heavy novel - it’s a quiet look at the ideas and inner turmoil of the characters. ultimately, i really loved the experience of reading this book. the way that elkin paints the picture of both characters and their home somehow felt comforting to read. her language remains accessible even as it presents interesting ideas about who and what we are allowed to desire through the lens of lacanian psychoanalysis. some of the context went over my head but was still thought provoking to read about.

i’m really glad to have enjoyed lauren elkin’s fiction as much as i enjoyed her nonfiction exploration of feminist art, art monsters. there is very strong connective tissue between both books, without it feeling like she’s repeating herself. i’m excited to see how those themes are expanded upon in her other work! i’m not sure how much of scaffolding will fully stick with me but it was an enjoyable novel to get swept up in.

“I always thought of scaffolding as something supportive that goes around or next to something else, but there is always at least one point of damage, they can't just pile it up free-standing.”

I was honestly so excited for this book strictly because of how beautiful the cover was. I can't say I was deceived but it definitely did not turn out to be something I loved. The text was dense and cold. I felt disconnected from the story and the characters. Overall it was just not for me.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙙𝙖𝙞𝙡𝙮 𝙣𝙤𝙧𝙢𝙖𝙡𝙘𝙮 𝙤𝙛 𝙢𝙖𝙧𝙧𝙞𝙖𝙜𝙚 𝙤𝙣𝙡𝙮 𝙡𝙖𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙙 𝙨𝙤 𝙡𝙤𝙣𝙜 𝙗𝙚𝙛𝙤𝙧𝙚 𝙨𝙡𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙨 𝙤𝙛 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙥𝙖𝙨𝙩 𝙧𝙚𝙨𝙪𝙧𝙛𝙖𝙘𝙚𝙙, 𝙡𝙞𝙠𝙚 𝙧𝙖𝙯𝙤𝙧 𝙗𝙡𝙖𝙙𝙚𝙨 𝙬𝙖𝙨𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙪𝙥 𝙤𝙣 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙗𝙖𝙣𝙠𝙨 𝙤𝙛 𝙖 𝙤𝙣𝙘𝙚 𝙥𝙡𝙖𝙘𝙞𝙙, 𝙣𝙤𝙬 𝙥𝙤𝙡𝙡𝙪𝙩𝙚𝙙 𝙧𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙧.
This novel manages to be many things, dipping its toes in psychoanalysis, feminism, fidelity, miscarriage and renovation. It is 2019 and Anna is recovering from a breakdown after her miscarriage. A French America living in a Paris apartment, Anna works as a psychoanalyst, one who is unable to get back to normalcy in her career or with her partner David, a lawyer, who is living in another country for his job. When he isn’t at their apartment for brief visits, asking her if her therapy with Esther is helping (necessary sessions for Anna to be cleared to get back to treating her own patients after being put on medical leave), she spends her time swallowed in the comfort of her solitude, wondering about the woman who lived in the apartment before them, also a psychoanalyst like herself. It is August, a time of year when most Parisians are away, including Esther, leaving treatment on hold.

One day Anna meets her new neighbor Clémentine, a feminist who lives in the same building with her boyfriend Jonathan. Anna invites her over for tea and it is not long before they form an intimacy. Anna is impressed by her confidence, experience, and intelligence, shocked that she is only twenty-four. Identifying mostly as queer, though unsure who she is really attracted to or why, Clémentine is not easy to pin down, ‘she is thoroughly herself’ and takes the place of all the friends Anna no longer sees. Through Clémentine, Anna thinks of the young girl she used to be, of past loves and how they change us. Despite wishing new love could erase all the feelings we had for those who came before, it is an impossibility. Remodeling her home, facing other people’s choices is like ‘fighting with the past,’ much as she is doing with her own heart during this emotional upheaval. Leaning into her new young friend is a fresh way of seeing, Clémentine challenges societal norms like marriage, having children or not, and the purpose of love, whether believing it should be eternal or not.

The time spent with Clémentine is bringing up buried feelings about her ex-boyfriend, whose name was also Jonathan. Finally, she is invited to Clémentine’s for their house warming and everything changes.

Part 2

It’s 1972, in the same apartment as Anna in 2019, Florence and her lawyer husband Henry live. Florence is obsessed with ‘women’s liberation’, according to her husband, and comes home one day telling him she has signed up for a masters at the university. How can that be when she wants to start a family? Through psychotherapy, she will be tied to strangers, and poor Henry will be stuck raising children they might have. What nonsense! What troublemakers such women are. The feminist ideas are liberating, to Florence’s mind, why should she feel shame for her passions? She spends her time at Jacques Lacan’s seminars with her friend Claude and falls into an affair with Max. But there is no way she can remain free to explore with other people as witness. Henry isn’t ready to be a father, and he certainly isn’t ready to be a fool whose wife is running around on him. Soon mixing up love and passion, questioning her marriage, her place in the world as a woman and the world’s expectations with Lacan’s words lighting fires in her head, nothing is going the way she hoped. What do we make of desire? How do we build a life we want loaded down with endless restrictions?

Back to Anna and the scaffolding, people working on the building outside, the endless noise, and the renovation within her own kitchen, it is enough to drive her insane, but the ghost of her past is the real punch to the gut. This is a hell of a read, sexuality, desire, how to remain faithful to ourselves when giving others what they need, the impact of society’s norms on our relationships, the past that will not stay behind us, there is a lot to explore and question here. What feminism looks like from different angles, at different time periods. Yes, read it!

Publication Date: September 17, 2024

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Scaffolding tells the story of two women separated by time, but living parallel lives in the same Paris apartment decades apart. We follow Anna, a psychoanalyst in 2019, and Florence, a psychoanalyst-in-training in 1972.

Character-focused books are something that I always enjoy, and from the first chapter, I knew that Scaffolding would become one of my favorites. This is my first introduction to Lauren Elkin’s writing, and I am a new fan.

Anna is such a compelling character to read. There is so much going on with her, but also there is a lot that she is avoiding. So much of the book is an exploration of relationships, sexuality, identity, desire, love, and feminism. But through all these lies an undercurrent of grief of the personal (Anna’s recent miscarriage) and the collective kind (protests surrounding the rise of femicides in France).

Lacanian theories of desire also play a significant part in this book. Anna is a psychoanalyst who subscribes to Lacanian views. Florence is also learning from him and attending his seminars. Both women use his theories as a framework for understanding their identities and their self-exploration. I had no knowledge of Lacan before reading Scaffolding. But it was interesting how Elkin added his theories into the book and how much it ties into the story. Did I get a little confused by these Lacanian ideas at times? Yes. But I always welcome those moments as an invitation for further reflection. I love it when a book pushes me to pause and think, a little break from passive consumption.

One thing I would have wanted was a bit of closure for Florence and Henry’s arc. When I finished the book, I had to go back to the end of their section to remind myself how it concluded. And although it was a banger of an ending (iykyk), I still wish I got to know what happened to them in the aftermath of it all.


Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for the ARC!

"Scaffolding" by Lauren Elkin presents a tale of two halves, much like the scaffolding that often shrouds Parisian buildings. The novel, set in Elkin's beloved Paris, initially captivates with its crisp prose and compelling storytelling. Fans of Elkin's non-fiction work "Flâneuse" will find familiar ground in her astute observations of urban life.
The first part of the book shines brightly, with well-crafted characters and an engaging narrative that pulls the reader into the Parisian setting. Elkin's writing is sharp and evocative, successfully translating her keen eye for detail from non-fiction to the realm of the novel.
However, the second part of "Scaffolding" fails to maintain the momentum. It feels somewhat superfluous and contrived, lacking the natural flow and authenticity of the opening section. This jarring shift in quality suggests that the novel might have been more impactful as a shorter work, focusing solely on the strengths of its initial chapters.
While "Scaffolding" showcases Elkin's talent for bringing Paris to life on the page, the uneven structure of the book ultimately undermines its full potential. Readers may find themselves wishing for a more concise exploration of the themes and characters introduced in the first part, rather than the extended narrative provided.

I probably would have liked this book better if the dialogue had quotation marks. I really don't understand why authors choose not to use them. It's an odd choice especially in writing general fiction. Also, this story really dragged around the 50% mark. I really wanted to like this novel more, but it was lackluster and forgettable.

Elkin’s is such a refreshing writer. Her writing on desire and feelings are done so complexly. My own interpretation of desire now feels in question and rearranged.

I throughly enjoyed the narrators walks through the city and the internal conversations they experienced when within their home space. I will miss being in the chaotic and flawed headspace’s of these characters.

Scaffolding is one of those books that defies simple description. It is less about what happens and more about what the characters think about what is happening. Anna’s narrative voice as a psychoanalyst and a devotee of those that came before make everything she does feel like intangible fodder for analysis.

In the background of this book is a deep grief and violence: miscarriage, femicide, generational memories of the Holocaust. Much of the plot revolves around characters' confrontations (or failures to confront) the ways in which they are haunted. Elkin weaves so many themes throughout the novel, yet none of them feel forced or contradictory. When I think too hard about everything packed in the 400 pages of Scaffolding, I get goosebumps from the brilliance of it. I think Elkin’s background as a studier of art translates to her debut novel being painted in an ambitious yet cohesive palette.

My only qualm with the book (which knocks it from 5 stars down to 4.25) is that the middle section of the book with Florence and Henry felt disconnected from Anna’s narrative. I kept waiting for it to come back with renewed significance, but it never quite felt like it meshed with the rest of the book.

Overall, this book is a daring and meditative look at what it means to participate in a marriage and the ways that desire can’t be contained. I recommend it to anyone who enjoys thoughtful prose or might want to justify cheating on their husband.

There's a lot going on in this novel set mostly in the Belleville neighborhood of Paris. The primary narrator, in the first and third sections, is Anna, a Franco-American psychoanalyst who has recently suffered a miscarriage. Her husband, David, a lawyer, has taken a job in London, at Anna's insistence, and she is alone, as she wants it, to deal or not deal with what has happened. It's summer, she is on medical leave, is seeing none of her patients, and meets Clementine, a young neighbor who has recently moved into a nearby building with her boyfriend Jonathan, the name of Anna's most serious ex-boyfriend, who had a profound affect on her, as did his father, a famous psychoanalyst whose books led her into her profession. The first third of the novel takes place during the very hot summer - climate change - and the guerrilla posters going up all over Paris highlighting the domestic violence murders of French women by their husbands or partners - and ambles as the two women, Clementine in her early twenties, and Anna in her thirties, spend time together - the nature of their conversations, intimate sort of, to a degree, but focused mostly on intellectual thought, trading theories, it's smart talk, also a little hard to believe but I didn't care. Anna, who is supposed to be using this time to oversee the renovation of the apartment she and David have bought, instead takes her daily runs, and spends time with Clementine. Then the action winds back about 50 years, to Florence and Henry, the married couple who once lived in Anna's apartment, married in the midst of the student uprisings and the sexual revolution in Paris, and Florence takes to attending the seminars given by Lacan. The novel's final part carries that sexual revolution experienced mostly by Florence to Anna in the same apartment with the tiles and wallpaper that Florence had chosen. It's a brainy novel - winding in much psychoanalytic theory, especially that of Lacan, assumptions made in psychoanalysis, monogamy, gender, patriarchy, interpretations of art, and more, how we become who we are, the events and people and lack or surfeit that make us, the memories that carry forward even if we aren't aware of those memories, even if they aren't our memories. In many ways, it's an adultery novel - with various views and experiences of love and autonomy and adultery - as experienced by Florence, Anna, Clementine, strung through, as well, with the undercurrent of the complicity of France and its people in the Holocaust - a thread that is interesting but also felt odd to me. It is also an extreme self-absorption novel - despite or perhaps because of all that's going on in the world, the characters here are engaged in themselves, even when they come together, they are still inward-focused. Observing is key here, and although the author is most interested in the retrospective testimony and observations of her characters rather than scene-making, it has twists and turns, as the characters, who ostensibly want to be exactly who they are - whenever they figure that out - hide or ignore much, both with themselves and from others. The last third of the book also self-consciously winds in queerness - Clementine, we learn early, has sex with both men and women, and probably leans more towards women, and Anna, struggling to figure herself out, and to figure out what she wants for herself, steps into relationships that further muddy the waters. I found it compelling.

Thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Netgalley for the ARC.

lauren elkin has such a wonderful and straightforward way of writing. some might say that this writing style is confusing and i agree, but with the way elkin has wrote each passage will truly make you invested in the story as it progress. this book is about a woman who is a psychoanalyst. and so with this, we follow her thoughts about the things happening around her and how she tends to basically psycho-analyze everything and anything. i find this book very mysterious in most parts and it almost feels like the main character is altogether losing parts of herself along the way of analyzing each and every move of this certain person she's close with. overall a nice read and i would recommend this if you are a fan of ottessa moshfegh. thank you so much to NetGalley and Elkin for this amazing read!

I finished this a couple of hours ago, and I still feel like I don't have the right words to describe my experience and what I think of this book.

Let me just express it in this way: Scaffolding, for me, is a biblically accurate angel that represents my current woes and dilemma on desire, specifically that of the flesh. What it means to love. What it means to be with someone, romantically or not. What it means to lay with someone. What it means to have an identity tied to being one's Other. All of these things I have tried to grasp.

And in one way or another, I have succeeded because of Lauren Elkin's words.

Another thing I really liked about this book is the fact that it depicts location - homes to be exact - as a melting pot of experiences, similar or not. It really situates the reader in the realities belonging to the characters held against the backdrop of their time and the politics brewing in it. I liked the way it was a stream of consciousness from three characters who, from the get-go, felt like real people. While I did have difficulty with some discussions about Lacan and psychoanalyses, it was still easy to follow through with the plot, to dive back into the existence painted in Belleville.

This was a delightful surprise to my relatively mundane reading life. I highlighted a bunch of lines, a sign that I had enjoyed my time with a book. The little tidbits of descriptions and hints that give space for the reader to think about the relations among them were also delicious - I just keep eating them up. I felt like I was reading a literary version of a tabloid for in/fidelity. Maybe that explains why I now recommend it to anyone - for someone living in a fairly conservative country, this made me reckon with the possibilities of desire and love. This made me reflect on my understandings and definitions still highly dependent on my religion.

Elkin, I was not familiar with your game. Now, I will be.

Thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux for this advance readers copy, in exchange for an honest review. Scaffolding is a novel split into three sections (two following main character, Anna, in 2019 and one following Florence and Henry in 1972), with the connecting thread between them being the apartment in Paris that is inhabited by both sets of characters during their respective sections/times. This book most certainly falls into the category of “no plot, all vibes” so, keep this in mind when deciding whether to pick it up!

While this type of book usually doesn’t work for me, I did enjoy this one! I very much enjoyed the author’s writing style and found that she was really able to pack in a punch in her succinct, eloquent sentences. Additionally, I think the generally short length of most chapters within the section helped keep me engaged. With this being said, many of the chapters do sort of jump around different trains of thought, which contributes to the stream of consciousness style that this book is operating under. However, the different topics that were explored in this novel, including feminism, women’s sexuality, and especially Anna’s self awareness of her own mental state/desires/etc. were very compelling. I did enjoy Anna’s sections more than Florence and Henry’s and would have honestly preferred to just focus on her.

There is a lot to take in with this book and several sections certainly merit a reread to fully appreciate and take in. I look forward to hearing what others think of this one once it’s out! I would recommend this to lit fic lovers and fans of the “no plot, all vibes” type of stories!

Just a marvel! Sexy and sophisticated, so grounded in the details of life of a city neighborhood and of Paris in the current age. I loved the voice of Anna, the central figure in the book, but I also enjoyed the deepening of urban history and themes of feminism and self-knowledge within a couple that the alternating voices of part two provided.

I really struggled to get into this book and ultimately did not end up finishing it. I found the connection between characters difficult to get into and there was something about the story that felt at arms distance. I wish I had better feedback but ultimately I was drawn to the cover and not as captivated by the actual story.

One of my favourite books I’ve read this year! Beautiful setting, characters and story and extremely gorgeous writing, will be rereading this one again soon

There are so many beautiful and insightful sentences in this book—but to me it felt like part way through, it got concerned that those thoughts weren’t enough and tried to do more than was needed. Personally I would have liked it better without the historical section in the middle.

I highlighted the hell out of the rest of it. A useful text if ur considering having an affair.