Scaffolding
A Novel
by Lauren Elkin
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Pub Date Sep 17 2024 | Archive Date Oct 17 2024
Description
A Best Book of the Year: Vanity Fair and the New Statesman
A New York Times Best Book of the Year (So Far)
A Most-Anticipated Book: The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, BBC, Marie Claire, Frieze, Literary Hub, The Millions, Our Culture, i news
"Smart and steamy . . . A beguiling puzzle—and a deep intellectual dive.”
—Associated Press
“Scaffolding joins books by Rachel Cusk and Deborah Levy, and as an erudite lust quadrilateral interested in ethical quandaries, it may put you in mind of Sally Rooney.”
—Anthony Cummins, The Guardian
The debut novel by the acclaimed author of Flâneuse and Art Monsters, Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding is a story of Paris, desire, love, psychoanalysis, and the turbulent affairs of two couples across time.
Paris, 2019. An apartment in Belleville. Following a miscarriage and a breakdown, Anna, a psychoanalyst, finds herself unable to return to work. Instead, she obsesses over a kitchen renovation and befriends a new neighbor—a younger woman called Clémentine who has just moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective.
Paris, 1972. The same apartment in Belleville. Florence and Henry are renovating their kitchen. She is finishing her degree in psychology, dropping into feminist activities, and devotedly attending the groundbreaking, infamous seminars held by the renowned analyst Jacques Lacan. She is hoping to conceive their first child, though Henry isn’t sure he’s ready for fatherhood.
Two couples, fifty years apart, face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy. They inhabit this same small space in separate but similar times—times charged with political upheaval and intellectual controversy. A novel in the key of Éric Rohmer, Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding is about the way our homes collect and hold our memories and our stories, about the bonds we create and the difficulty of ever fully severing them, about the ways all the people we’ve loved live on in us.
A Note From the Publisher
Advance Praise
Named a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by The Guardian
“Scaffolding is ingenious and febrile, delving into the intimacy and implacability of those awakening connections that layer, echoing, throughout our lives—doing so in ways that feel all at once vital, playful, profoundly moving. It’s a beautifully fluid meditation on what is at stake, and who we become, when we desire.” —Sophie Mackintosh, author of Cursed Bread
“Atmospheric and evocative . . . Elegant and poised.” —Alex Preston, The Guardian
“Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding is a novel that’s remarkable for its combination of intellectual toughness and sensual precision. This investigation into multiple forms of exposure—inhabited by an array of chords and repeats and hauntings—feels urgently contemporary.” —Adam Thirlwell, author of The Future Future
“Be warned: this novel will absorb you, disassemble you, and leave you strangely unwilling to put yourself back together again. Read it, reread it, then give it to your friends and teachers, your relatives, and your lovers.” —Devorah Baum, author of On Marriage
“My life has been hugely improved by this compulsive, twisting story of psychoanalysis, politics, and the weirdness of inhabitation.” —Lara Feigel, author of Free Woman
“Scaffolding is a quietly incendiary disquisition on desire and containment, on the bonds that make and unmake us. It seized me wholly: I read it with the voyeuristic fervor of stalking a new crush, or doomscrolling an ex. It’s also a tale of the unconscious as ultimate homewrecker, and is unafraid to upend the temporary structures of monogamy and domesticity, scrambling their contents, seeing how the pieces land. Elkin’s novel is a powerful testament to the idea that what we want might obliterate us, and it fearlessly reckons with the equally high stakes of pretending otherwise.” —Daisy Lafarge, author of Life Without Air
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780374615291 |
| PRICE | $28.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 400 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Esme F, Educator
Scaffolding is, without doubt, the best debut novel I've read all year (perhaps even one of the best I've ever read). For fans of Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy, and Lorrie Moore, this is a captivating exploration of the rich, sharp, complexity of relationships - the complications of entwined minds, lives, and bodies - one written with prose which is both tender and clever, laced with humour and heartbreak in equal measures.
Thank you so much to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for this free e-ARC!
Sam W, Reviewer
An excellent novel that reminded me of the 1996 French film L'Appartement. An incredible amount of upheaval, desire and intrigue takes place in Anna's life, and at the end, her life goes back to normal. Anna is a psychoanalyst struggling to come to terms with the trauma of a miscarriage. It forces her to examine her marriage and whether she is satisfied in it, and whether monogamy is a valid choice. It also highlights the secrets people choose to keep instead of talking to their partners, and asks: how well do you really know anyone? It's very playful, and demonstrates a real love and knowledge of Paris.
Sunny S, Educator
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.
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