IF the walls of the apartment on Rue de Belleville in the 20th Parisian district could speak, the story would span centuries. Lauren Elkin prefers to take the scaffolding in that apartment as a starting point in her debut novel, Scaffolding. Elkin tells of two women who live in the apartment 50 years apart. Both have remodelled aspects of the apartment. The scaffolding then becomes the metaphor for rebuilding their lives in that period.
I wouldn't describe the novel as a “brainy sex romp" like a male British critic did. It's safer to say that Scaffolding shows how we use structures to rebuild our lives. And that the traces and signs of people who've been there before remain visible. It's a deceptive novel – filled with conversations and wandering thoughts about evolving feminism, about art, and our psychological scaffolding we constantly try to define.
But it is also a novel in which no one can escape the subtle subversion of their own lust. If the walls could speak, they would say the intellectual discourse is built on the inescapable onslaught of animalistic reproductive urges.
The first resident of the apartment on Rue de Belleville that we get to know is Anna. She is a 39-year-old psychologist who, after a miscarriage, decides in 2019 not to accompany her husband to London on Brexit-related matters, but to stay at home, renovate their apartment, and process her own nervous breakdown as she slowly returns to normalcy. She befriends Clémentine, a younger woman involved in radical feminist activism. Their friendship and Anna's introspective journey expose personal and social tensions against the backdrop of modern-day Paris. I don't think Lauren Elkin could have chosen a nicer place.
Things are, if the reader will excuse the euphemism, rather fluid. I should also put more emphasis on Clémentine's friend Jonathan here, but I'd rather leave it as a stimulus. Sometimes you just know something is going to happen, and then it happens.
After that, the focus jumps back to 1972, when Florence and Henry are also navigating marital and parental aspirations in that same apartment. And they also spend a lot of time and energy on a new look. Florence, a psychology student, hopes to start a family, while Henry hesitates. You see the patterns here?
Florence and Anna grapple with challenges in their marriages. They discover the sweet seduction of infidelity and never-revealed liaisons. They are fuelled by both ambition and their sex drives. The apartment itself serves as a silent witness to their histories and the interconnections that become apparent over time.
What sets this novel apart is the author's willingness (or is it cunning?) to mask Anna, Florence, and Clémentine's surrender to their lust with grand conversations about the intellectual aspects of yearning. Yes, yearning – as in craving, need, being randy for another's body. Is this right or wrong? When a woman says she wants someone, is it at a lower level than when she says she yearns for someone? Yes, one can certainly look at cravings in a basic way, but Elkin seems to think that her female characters are experiencing something on a higher level.
Reading the novel was likewise an interesting process for me. I told myself that I wouldn't like to be married to someone like Anna, but in the end, I felt that even though she was an uncontrollable whirlwind, she at least still had the decency to rationalise her behaviour in ways that belong to the piquant domain of Freudian psychology.
Early on, Elkin tries to orient the reader by connecting Anna with the French Freudian disciple Jacques Lacan. Anna says she thinks about healing in Lacanian fashion: “How the way we talk about our lives, the way we think about them, the things we want, encode our desires, how we can learn to live with them instead of being guided by them. You will almost never be cured. There is no cure for being human."
The strongest criticism one can bring against Scaffolding is that it is a construct seeking to prove that man is human, all too human. That's okay as far as I'm concerned. Bliss has never been bad.
Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and can be ordered from Exclusive Books.
♦ VWB ♦
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Kerneels Breytenbach is a former publisher and journalist from Cape Town. He also authored the short story collection Morsdood van die Honger, the novels Glimlag, Piekniek by Hangklip, Ester, and Hond se Gedagte, and the cookbook Die Lekkerste Lekker. He often writes for magazines about food and restaurants, and as a journalist has also become known as an expert on pop music.
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