Behind All the Plaster

Rhian Sasseen reviews Lauren Elkin’s “Scaffolding.”

By Rhian SasseenOctober 9, 2024

• Fiction

DO OUR LIVES SHAPE and influence the rooms we inhabit, or do we mold ourselves to fit our rooms? In American writer Lauren Elkin’s novel Scaffolding (2024)—her first, following four works of nonfiction on themes as varied as the Oulipo group, bus schedules, and women in the visual arts—the question of physical space and how we might navigate it guides the lives of two couples living in the same Parisian apartment. The result is a reading experience not unlike getting lost inside some many-chambered house: just when you think you’ve reached a dead end, there’s another door to open.

“Certain kinds of people show a more lively interest in private spaces,” the French historian Michelle Perrot observes in her 2009 book The Bedroom: An Intimate History (incidentally translated into English by Elkin in 2018, and the source of another quotation that opens the book as an epigraph). Included among these people are “the young, workers without families, students in search of experience, single women, the exiled, foreigners, isolated elderly persons, or those who can no longer bear the rhythm of everyday life.” Anna, Scaffolding’s chief protagonist, fits into a number of these categories: she is the child of French and American parents; as the novel begins, she lives alone in her Belleville apartment while her lawyer husband, David, works in London; and she is in the middle of a period of despair following a recent miscarriage that has destroyed her interest in life’s habits and rhythms. A psychoanalyst by trade, Anna has put her practice on temporary hold to take medical leave, and her days have now contracted into a series of long runs, appointments with her own psychoanalyst—and an abiding solitude further underscored by the fact that we begin the novel in August, and half of Paris has left the city for their holidays. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. “Alone in the apartment is my preferred state,” Anna thinks to herself. “[T]here’s something more physical about the aloneness […] I feel the space around me differently.”

This aloneness—or the loneliness it flattens into—functions as a tentative equilibrium for the destabilized Anna. It’s one that is soon breached, however, by the arrival of her new neighbor, an art model named Clémentine who has recently moved into the building with her older boyfriend (Perrot again: “the young,” “students in search of experience”). The novel’s opening scene, in which Anna gives the forgetful Clémentine their building’s door code after the latter has been locked outside, quickly establishes their dynamic. Clémentine is bold and inquisitive while Anna is more hesitant and searching, and the former provokes an immediate and instinctual curiosity in her older neighbor that will over the course of the novel become erotically charged.

Far from unfamiliar, these characters verge, at times, on types. Yet Elkin writes them with a light touch. In another writer’s hands, Anna and Clémentine might turn wooden, mere pieces of furniture to be moved around a room in accordance with their author’s whims, but the recent past Elkin situates their section in—sometime between Brexit and COVID-19—turns any whiff of familiarity into an asset. Put another way: these women seem like people we know. And besides, existing as a character of the kind that one might expect to find in a novel or stage play is in fact how Anna moves through her world. A Lacanian, she is committed to looking at her patients’ lives in terms of narrative, hunting “for the metaphors, the gaps, the gaffes, the subtexts, that point you toward what they themselves may or may not realise.”

What does Anna realize? Psychoanalysis, as a discipline, has a long and intertwined history with literature, beginning, of course, with Freud. “Story-tellers are valuable allies,” he wrote in a 1907 essay, “Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva,” one of Freud’s earlier works to draw on the illustrative example provided by fiction. “[T]heir testimony is to be rated high, for they usually know many things between heaven and earth that our academic wisdom does not even dream of.” Some of this knowledge stems from certain abilities afforded to fiction writers that science does not allow: there is the ease with which a writer can slide between the minds and mouths of her characters, for instance, as well as the impact that can be leveraged from a well-placed metaphor or image. Elkin uses both of these methods to her advantage. As the novel progresses, Anna, prompted by her nascent friendship with Clémentine, as well as the pressure exerted by her overseas husband to sublet their apartment and move to London, begins to consider her own past, her youth and her choices. Certain figures resurface in her memory; an ex-boyfriend named Jonathan becomes prominent. Names repeat. Wires crisscross. Like topography, the container of the person, their body, changes while the volume remains the same. An old friend of Clémentine’s from high school, she recalls to Anna, was named David. And her boyfriend, Jonathan—another lawyer—shares his name with Anna’s ex.

And then there is the construction work. Scaffolding pops up all over Paris, including in Belleville; Elkin writes that it “has the ring of the gallows to it.” Walls are torn down. Rooms are expanded. Anna eventually begins a much-delayed renovation project in her kitchen. As the space inside her own head rearranges itself, packing and unpacking the boxes of her personal history, so too do Anna’s immediate surroundings change. By the novel’s end, old wallpaper and a calendar marked January 1973 will be revealed behind all the plaster—history regurgitating itself.

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The past resurfaces easily in Paris. It is a city suffused with an interest in its own tangible history—an eyeball turned constantly inwards. It was in 19th-century Paris that the modern-day flea market was birthed, booths overflowing with used goods (today, the Marché aux Puces de Paris Saint-Ouen, on the city’s outskirts, practically constitutes an entire village unto itself, a town made entirely from the various magazines, clothing items, and household goods of days past). In The Arcades Project (1982), Walter Benjamin quotes Guillaume Apollinaire: “Even the automobiles have an air of antiquity here.” It is a city famous for its graveyards and its catacombs, a parallel universe of necropolis, and yet it is also a city on the move, a city that is the site for a veritable cottage industry of books about walking through its streets. This is a subject that Elkin has dipped her toes in too; her 2016 book Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London reclaims the spirit of Charles Baudelaire’s “flaneur” for women, and her No. 91/92: A Diary of a Year on the Bus (2021) references works such as Jacques Jouet’s poems composed while riding the Métro.

Cities have a habit of imprinting on their denizens. “All cities are geological. You can’t take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends,” wrote Ivan Chtcheglov, an early Situationist, in his 1953 essay “Formulary for a New Urbanism.” A city’s past lives are inescapable and built into their very architecture. “[W]e are in the twentieth century, even if few people are aware of it,” Chtcheglov later claims. “Our imaginations, haunted by the old archetypes, have remained far behind the sophistication of the machines.”

In Scaffolding, there is voiced resistance to this sentiment. “Everywhere you look they talk only of towers, machines for living that turn the people who live in them into machines in kind […] helpless little creatures with no independence. This is what the twentieth century has done to the body.” This contemporary-sounding thought, appearing near the beginning of Scaffolding’s second section, does not come from Anna but instead belongs to a man named Henry. A radical shift has occurred: as readers, we have time-traveled back into the early 1970s and switched points of view. The book’s second section is composed of dueling chapters from the perspective of Henry, a paralegal, and his wife Florence, a student taking courses in psychoanalysis and attending the lectures of the man she calls “the maestro” (Jacques Lacan himself). In the same way that their lives and interests function as a blurred mirroring of Anna and David’s, so too does their living space correspond: they have moved into the same Belleville apartment that Anna will inhabit 50 years later.

The book’s curiosity about its own on-page physical space underscores this theme of destruction and construction. In all three sections, whether told from Anna, Florence, or Henry’s point of view, chapters are often visually sliced down into brief paragraphs or single sentences before a longer chapter arrives and builds into a scene. Grammar grows increasingly haphazard in Anna’s sections: occasionally, commas will disappear, lending her thoughts a frantic pace; in a wonderful moment, the word “flint”—imitating the sound of a necklace swinging—is repeated so often that it becomes an onomatopoeic example of depression’s grueling thought spirals. At one point in the second section, a chapter told from Henry’s viewpoint briefly splits into two columns, with an anarchic energy that feels reminiscent of the films of the French New Wave.

Like Anna and Clémentine, Florence and Henry at times feel familiar, but in a way that brings to mind some of the movies and books of their era. They are in their late twenties and relatively hip; theirs is a generation that has been gifted leisure time and a postwar economy. With their interest in movies, music, and eventually infidelity, they bring to mind Frédéric and Hélène, the couple in Éric Rohmer’s 1972 exploration of marriage, Love in the Afternoon. (Slyly, Elkin sends them to the cinema to watch it, and the second section opens with the film’s first line: “Since I’ve been married, I find all women beautiful.”) Moments of consumerism exist alongside the legacy of World War II and its impact on their families (they are both Jewish), recalling the work of the Oulipo writer Georges Perec, as seen in novels such as the 1965 exploration of postwar banality Things: A Story of the Sixties, and its inseparable middle-class couple Jerôme and Sylvie. (Perec, in fact, is named in an earlier chapter—Anna notes that David is a fan of his work.)

There are other similarities, too, to the story that has come before them. As with Anna and David, the question of children hovers in the air for the other couple. Florence would like to have a baby, but Henry resists: he is, he tells her in an awful turn of phrase, “still a baby himself.” This impasse persists; both engage in dalliances outside the marriage. Politically, the pro-choice “Manifesto of the 343” has been published, and Florence goes to second-wave consciousness-raising sessions. (Elkin draws parallels between this and the MeToo movement in the contemporary chapters.) As Florence and Henry’s marriage falls apart, an awful feeling builds: with all of the mirroring Elkin has set up between the book’s sections, the third section’s return to the present day makes you wonder if Anna and David’s marriage is about to destroy itself too.

But regardless of the adage that “history repeats itself,” the book’s preoccupation with language resists neat patterns. Stories, and the ways in which they are told and edited, are important; famously, Lacan remarked that “the unconscious is structured like a language.” In our return from the past to Anna’s point of view, certain words and their meanings—certain names and their corresponding persons—have shifted. Information is revealed and new couplings expand and contract in on themselves like verb conjugations, variations on a theme. In the 1970s, the word “choisir”—to choose—was important, lending itself to the name of a pro-choice feminist group founded by a lawyer, Gisèle Halimi, that Florence watches on the news. For Anna, choice is at once the same and different. At this crossroads moment of destruction and reconstruction, with walls both literally and metaphorically falling down, what sort of life will Anna choose?

When thinking of rooms and literature, it is hard not to reach for Virginia Woolf and her idea of “a room of one’s own.” The interior of this hypothetical room is very familiar: books, a desk, a place to think and expand. A freeing anonymity. Woolf was focused on the inside, the liberations and transformations that might take place there. But, as Scaffolding attests, a room is also like a mind: exteriority informs it. Less obvious yet no less important are its physical enclosures—the city in which it resides, the bricks that built it, the posters affixed to it. The shape of the outside.