By Molly Murn
FICTION
Scaffolding
Lauren Elkin
Chatto & Windus, $36.99
Writing into the physical and psychic spaces we inhabit – our bodies, our houses, our relationships – Lauren Elkin considers what female sexuality might look like without the male gaze. In her incandescent debut novel, Scaffolding, Elkin, a Franco-American essayist and translator, exposes the intricate scaffolds of desire.
In an apartment in Paris, two women – 50 years apart – reckon with boundaries of self and other, while outside, the streets of the precinct are slowly being rewritten with graffiti. Les Colleuses is a collective of French women guerrilla artists who have been protesting gender-based violence in Paris since 2019, with collage, paint, glue, paper as their weapons. Elkin references them directly, inserting their anti-femicide slogans into the action of the novel. As the phrases gather momentum, we bear witness.
Lauren Elkin builds an elegant house of female desire. Credit:
But this is a quiet novel. Elkin’s formidable talent is in the stunning interiority of her characters. The central women fall in and out of love, have sex with the wrong (or right) people, attempt to outwit grief, discover comfort in the bodies of others, while crossing the treacherous borders of marriage and fidelity.
It is the women who are allowed a ferocious sensuality. Anna, a psychoanalyst – with an abiding interest in Lacan, “the philosopher of desire” – is not seeing patients while she grieves a miscarriage. Her husband David has taken work in London and hopes she’ll join him there when she’s ready. But she cannot leave the apartment that houses her loss.
She meets Clémentine, a young and radical member of Les Colleuses, who moves into the building and shifts Anna out of ennui, out of the sexless well of her post-surgery grief. Clémentine offers an ease of intimacy not predicated on reproduction or gratification, only sensuousness and healing. She regales a slowly awakening Anna with stories of the unshackled relationship she enjoys with her partner, Jonathan: “fidelity is a container for sex, to keep it from being too threatening. I have no idea what Jonathan gets up to.”
In other conversations around desire, such as with her analyst, Anna’s constant hankering to remodel the apartment, yet inability to do so, is challenged. It seems her emotional stasis is mirrored in the poetics of her fixed space. Perhaps grief, perhaps desire, both run along an outlaw’s sense of time.
Meanwhile the building in which Anna and Clémentine reside is being renovated from the outside in. Elkin gets at the “metallic violence” of “cranking and thundering” as scaffolding is erected on the exterior of the building. Within this cacophony, Anna undergoes a reckoning as her own body, like the carapace, is reassembled.
She finally remodels her kitchen, removing the ugly brown and yellow wallpaper that links to the central set piece of the novel. The paisley wallpaper was installed 50 years earlier when Florence and Henry lived in Anna’s apartment in 1975. The married couple also repaper the walls. In this relationship, fidelity is once again at stake. If walls could speak.
The novel does not offer “a final theory of eros, a morality of fidelity” but in the closing pages, Anna walks the street of the city, flâneuse-ing, as if emerging from a chrysalis. In Elkin’s non-fiction work, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, the masculine phrase flâneur is replaced by flâneuse, “one who walks” to encompass all genders. Anna emerges with renewed agency. But the writing is still on the walls. Women are still being killed by their former lovers in unconscionable numbers, making the novel’s final act of reclamation even more visceral.
Scaffolding is ekphrastic. Elkin responds to other works of literature such as The Yellow Wallpaper, and the seminal I love Dick, but also to the paintings of Shannon Cartier Lucy, whose uncanny artworks of women inhabiting surreal domestic spaces, feature in the novel and grace the cover. At an exhibition, Anna studies a painting of Clémentine: “every hipbone I’ve ever seen is there.”
Every hipbone we’ve traced, every book and painting we’ve exalted, every street we’ve walked, is part of the scaffold. We are all remade and reworked by those (things) we bring into our proximity, domestically and intimately. Between the frisson of febrile sentences and intellectual rigour, Elkin builds an elegant house of female desire.
Molly Murn’s novel Heart of the Grass is published by Penguin.
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