A psychoanalyst’s struggle to find self-insight
SCAFFOLDING LAUREN ELKIN 400pp. Chatto & Windus. £16.99.
LAUREN ELKIN’S Flâneuse (TLS, July 29, 2016) was an enthralling cultural history that took readers out on to the streets of Paris, in the footsteps of intrepid walkers from George Sand to Jean Rhys. Her debut novel, Scaffolding, is also set in the French capital, but it is much more interior in every way, claustrophobically so at times. Set largely in a single apartment in the increasingly gentrified, boho-bourgeois Rue de Belleville, and informed by the language of psychoanalysis, it unspools layers of psychic history to ask questions about the nature of desire and the possibility, or not, of intimacy. Can we, asks Elkin, even know ourselves, let alone another?
The apartment belongs to a married couple in their late thirties: Anna, a psychoanalyst brought up in the US, and her French husband, David, a lawyer. His firm has just relocated him to London, but Anna has decided to stay in Paris on her own. She is in depressive retreat, taking time off work following a recent miscarriage. Her seclusion is broken by the arrival of a new neighbour, Clémentine, who has moved into the building with her older boyfriend, Jonathan, another lawyer. As the story progresses Anna will find herself sexually entangled with them both as she relives her past and contemplates her future.
The scaffolding of the title goes up on the outside of the building near the beginning of the novel; by the end it is being taken down. Is it a supportive structure, enabling renovation and restoration? Or does it, as Anna free-associates, seem more like a “scaffold”? What, we are encouraged to ask, is the metaphorical scaffolding holding up – or holding back – the heroine’s sense of self? Do relationships with others support or annihilate us? How do we inveigle things – from material objects of conspicuous consumption (such as the modernist lamp of which Anna is house-proud) to the protagonists’ scattergun cultural name-checks (Gilles Deleuze, Éric Rohmer) – into shoring up our sense of belonging, a word suggestively broken down here into “be-longing”?
Anna’s first-person voice, rendered as diaristic reportage, is immersive. The conversations she reports feel authentic, with mundanities jostling up against profundities, and we wonder whether we are reading the text of the journal her therapist encourages her to keep. By removing the narrative “scaffolding” that a third-person narrator might have supplied, Elkin puts us on interpretative high alert. Anna’s job as an analyst is to “look in other people’s narratives for metaphors, the gaps, the gaffes, the subtexts, that point you towards what they themselves may or may not realise”. The novel slyly co-opts the reader into playing that role with respect
