Scaffolding Author : Lauren Elkin ISBN-13 : 978-1784742942 Publisher : Chatto & Windus Guideline Price : £16.99 Sexual freedom, menage-à-many, infidelity; repeatedly, we seem to come back to these same old nuggets. I must move in terribly staid, petite-bourgeois circles because, despite reading numerous accounts of such shenanigans, I never come across them in real life.
It’s women who write about it, and perhaps that’s an inevitable flexing of newfound freedoms. But it all sounds so messy and, frankly, it’s so boring. There are other ways to engage the modern mind than romance and copulation, surely? Writing about free love amounts to little more than a kind of ongoing, deeply solipsistic navel-gazing, although admittedly with the gaze a little further south.
Which brings me neatly to Scaffolding, the new tome by Lauren Elkin. It’s described as a novel “in the key of Éric Rohmer” (which I assume is D minor, “the saddest of all keys”). Only this is less La Collectionneuse, and more Rohmer-does-#MeToo.
[ Translated fiction: coming of age in Trieste, tales from 19th century Brittany, and life in a post-Soviet world ] Along with a flashback to a (remarkably similar) couple living in the same apartment in 1972, the novel focuses on a woman called Anna who, after a miscarriage, sits around said apartment in Paris, thinking deeply. She does this after morning runs, between bouts of sleeping with her neighbours and considering her kitchen. Nothing can happen wit.
