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A Novel
by Lauren Elkin
A novel of Paris, desire, love, psychoanalysis, and the turbulent affairs of two couples across time.
After a miscarriage and a breakdown, Anna, a psychoanalyst, finds herself unable to return to work, obsessing instead over a kitchen renovation and befriending a new neighbor―a younger woman called Clémentine who has just moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective.
Forty years earlier, in the same apartment, Florence and Henry are renovating their kitchen. Florence is finishing her degree in psychology and attending feminist meetings and Jacques Lacan's infamous seminars. She is hoping to conceive their first child, though Henry isn't sure he's ready for fatherhood.
Two couples in two separate but similar times―set against a backdrop of political disappointment and intellectual controversy―face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy. Lauren Elkin's Scaffolding is about the way our homes hold communal memories of all their inhabitants and their stories; about the bonds we create, and the difficulty of ever fully severing them; about the ways people we've loved live on in us.
"The links between Florence and Anna feel a bit forced, but there's a great deal of depth and intelligence to the descriptions of their feelings around desire. Readers will find much to sink their teeth into." —Publishers Weekly
"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 ... There's no shortage of excitement." —The Guardian
"An unabashedly philosophical novel—one that keeps the reader hooked by the sensuality of its prose ... This is an accomplished debut; a novel of ideas enriched with passion and curiosity." —Financial Times
"[Scaffolding] unspools layers of psychic history to ask questions about the nature of desire and the possibility, or not, of intimacy." —Times Literary Supplement
"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
"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
This information about Scaffolding was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lauren Elkin's essays have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, Frieze, and The Times Literary Supplement. Her book Flâneuse was named a notable book of 2017 by The New York Times Book Review and was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. A native New Yorker, she lived in Paris for twenty years and now resides in London.
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