Scaffolding: A Novel

Summary

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.