What’s Lauren Elkin’s brilliant novel Scaffolding like? Well, it’s arty, like a French film, very involved, kind of angsty, questioning and it’s all about love and sex or variations thereof. “There is so much we will never know about other people, no matter how much we love them, or how much time we spend with them”, but what does love mean? Who do we love and why? What happens when we ditch monogamy and fuck other people? And is conforming to what society deems as ‘normal’ ever going to lead to fulfilment? “The way we accept certain ways of being with people in the world and can’t accept others. About trying to break the bounds that society has woven between society and ethics. About desire, trying to understand it and live it out, rejecting the ways it is monitored and moralised and contained”. The ideas posed and questions asked (and not quite answered) revolve in and around a Parisian apartment inhabited by two couples, and occasionally by their lovers and friends. One couple in 1972, one couple in 2019, providing a compare and contrast; has anything really changed? Is identity and family history still to be considered? Is toxic masculinity and male violence still a thing? Is love and romance still a battlefield where people need to win or cede the higher ground or is that a cliche that needs binning? Some of this is worked out on the streets especially when a series of feminist fly posters appear (“Sexism is everywhere and so are we”) and some worked out in the bedroom as plenty of bodily fluids are exchanged in the pursuit of an answer, or, more likely, an orgasm. Meanwhile the scaffolding and builders are all around the apartment’s powerful presence and who can concentrate on figuring all this stuff out when there’s so much bloody noise? Scaffolding is incredibly rich but floats in the air, confounding expectations and challenging assumptions along the way. It’s extraordinarily well done by Lauren Elkin. And I don’t have to get too hung up or angsty to say I genuinely love this book. A future classic.

Scaffolding – Lauren Elkin – Publ. by Vintage, £9.99

Steven Long