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.
The book is divided into three parts, and Anna spends the first in a maddening state of paralysis. When her analyst clears her to return to work, she doesn’t. When Clémentine invites her to join the movement, she equivocates. She hasn’t had sex with David since the miscarriage (“my body tightens and there is no entering it”), and when he calls to urge her to join him in London, she doesn’t pick up. “OK Bartleby, I think, what’s all this about?”
Therapy isn’t working; it’s only the surprise re-emergence, at the end of the first section, of an important figure from her past that roots Anna back in her body; and the book’s final third is governed by a reckless subordination to her physical desire. Meeting this lover feels like “feathers brushed the wrong way,” Elkin writes, her prose as sensual as it is cerebral. “A disruption in the order of things.”
Lacan, Freud’s controversial emissary in France, held that desire stems from loss, and that sex and womanhood are merely “constructions,” as Anna puts it. “We can’t apprehend them directly, purely, except through the fog of language” — which, like all narratives we impose on experience, “isn’t innocent.”
Neither is Anna. Occupying the same Belleville apartment building across time, her various lovers, psychoanalytic influences and ghosts wrap around one another like limbs in sheets. The middle section jumps back to 1972, when Anna’s apartment belongs to Henry, a sexist paralegal whom we recognize from Anna’s present, and his feminist wife, Florence, a student activist and disciple of “the maestro,” Lacan himself.
Throughout Elkin scatters shrewd and satisfying Easter eggs of connection among Anna, Florence and Clémentine, women of different generations who contend with the same stock questions of sexual liberation, childbearing and “the male gaze.” For all the time that has passed, for all Clémentine’s “free-spirited, politically committed” queerness and Anna’s efforts to replace Florence’s midcentury brown kitchen tiles with the “pristine” white tiles du jour, the younger women’s preoccupations are simply Florence’s on repeat.
Readers of Elkin’s nonfiction will find themes and even phrases repurposed here, her own bibliographic history superimposed onto the present, fictional text. In “Art Monsters” (2023), she surveyed the likes of Carolee Schneemann, Kara Walker and Virginia Woolf, women who “committed themselves to making the body the site of liberation,” who lived out the “tension between being an artist and having a family.”
But Elkin’s “Flâneuse” (2017) in particular seems to have been percolating on the same Parisian strolls as “Scaffolding,” arguing as it does for such strolling as a woman’s artistic necessity, without the accompaniment, or threat, of men.
One day Anna relates a jarring scene she’s just witnessed in her neighborhood: A marcheuse, the local euphemism for Belleville’s Chinese sex workers (literal translation: “walker”) is “robbed” of a potential client by the police, “this paternalistic government that purported to protect her.” But what help is Anna? The marcheuse yells at her for staring; she feels “shame at being able to watch, and go on with my day.”
“Don’t you ever feel that way in your sessions?” Clémentine responds, knives out. “Isn’t a shrink a kind of voyeur? Or, you know, they pay you to help them, to give them some relief, maybe that makes you a little more like the marcheuse.”
Touché. If Clémentine is a woman of action, of purpose, then Anna is the prototypical wanderer, the grieving woman with nowhere to be, her profession built on mining other people’s lives for narrative. Both and neither of these approaches seem right. Paraphrasing Lacan, Anna offers: “There’s no cure for being human.”
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