On the Possibilities of Transformation: A Reading of Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin: Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin (2024),  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York,  400 pages.

I read Lauren Elkin’s debut novel, Scaffolding, on a plane from Paris to New York in 2024. I had just spent the summer in a small town in the southwest of France, trying to write a new novel and then giving it up; thinking about moving to France, to London; thinking about the shape we bring to our unconscious desires, and why we hide ourselves from ourselves. I went to France on the heels of my first year of psychoanalytic training in New York—a five-year endeavor to shift my career and the container of my life. I wanted to see how Elkin, an accomplished Franco-American critic, essayist, and literary translator, grappled with these things—love, work, literature, language, psychoanalysis, unconscious desire—in her novel. I wondered if it might shed some further light on why I felt I could no longer write fiction.

The protagonist of Scaffolding is Anna, a Lacanian psychoanalyst in Paris who has been placed on medical leave in 2019 after suffering a miscarriage. Her husband, David, a lawyer, has gone to London for a job, possibly related to Brexit. Unable to work or see friends, only able to go for her daily run and trip to the boulangerie, Anna becomes obsessed with her plans for renovating their kitchen. Plastered with tacky wallpaper from the 1970s, with a layout both too small and too cramped, the kitchen holds remnants of its former tenants, Henry and Florence, a couple who may have married too quickly and have different wants—“wants,” as in differing desires rooted in different deficiencies, different parts of their lives they find lacking. The novel is filled with these (and more) overlapping couples, people trying desperately to expand the boundaries of themselves, discovering corners of their psyches that

were previously unknown to them, running their fingertips and their tongues over these corners.

In 1972, Henry and Florence are newly