Lauren Elkin’s first novel, “Scaffolding,” traces the multiple infidelities of two Parisian couples a generation apart.
SCAFFOLDING, by Lauren Elkin
The signs were glued on public walls across Paris under cover of night, bold black letters painted on sheets of paper, arranged into sentences decrying a national crisis of violence against women. “SHE LEAVES HIM HE KILLS HER.” “SEXISM IS EVERYWHERE SO ARE WE.” “STOP FEMICIDE.” “WHAT GOOD IS IT TO BE ALIVE IF WE HAVE TO LIVE ON OUR KNEES?”
Put up beginning in 2019 by the feminist group Les Colleuses (“the gluers”), the real-life messages appear in their original French throughout Lauren Elkin’s first novel, “Scaffolding,” about a Parisian psychoanalyst in the midst of a psychological breakdown of her own.
On leave from seeing patients after a miscarriage, 39-year-old Anna encounters the first of these messages as she’s walking up the hill to her 750-square-foot apartment in the gentrifying neighborhood of Belleville: “TU N’ES PAS SEULE,” you are not alone. Without context, she imagines the anonymous speaker to be “talking right to me.”
She feels alone in more ways than one. Bereft of her child, her career and her husband, David, a lawyer who’s living in London for work (“something to do with Brexit,” Anna says, “I don’t really know”), she devotes her days to a languorous combination of roaming the city, going to therapy, remodeling her kitchen and talking to her new neighbor Clémentine, a 24-year-old art history student who moonlights as an artist’s model and member of Les Colleuses.
In a layered plot involving intertwined love affairs a generation apart, Elkin superimposes the past onto the present onto the past the way Clémentine and her cohort cover the centuries-old walls of Paris with their slogans. The way workers screw the titular scaffolding into the Haussmannian facade of Anna’s apartment building, an apparatus for restoration, for progress.
But toward what, exactly? In a sustained, forgivably unsubtle metaphor, Elkin compares Anna’s grief, as well as her psychoanalytic practice, to this urban ravalement, or “refacing”: an existential pause in which the subject is being tended, worked on, fixed. The novel can feel like one long, Socratic dialogue between Anna and Clémentine, debating the value of such work, the ethics of sex and fidelity and childbearing and feminism.
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