I chose this book for my fiction blog this time around largely because of a serendipitous piece of timing. I started reading it shortly before a trip to Paris early this past summer, a trip which involved me spending some time in the Belleville area of the city, a little to the east of the Gare du Nord. This novel, Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin (the cover is shown on the home page), is largely set in that part of the capital – and I always think it’s cool to be reading a work of fiction that is set somewhere that you happen to be in. Also, it’s a fascinating and entertaining book.

It essentially involves two couples. First, we are in 2019. Anna, aged 39, lives in her apartment in Belleville which is surrounded by scaffolding while interminable works on it are underway. (In time, the scaffolding reveals itself to be a kind of metaphor for the storyline.) Her husband, David, is presently working in London; their lives have been thrown into turmoil since Anna had a miscarriage, which in turn has caused her to see a therapist. She is a psychoanalyst herself, but has signed herself off from seeing any patients while she tries to sort out her life.

She meets Clémentine, a young art-history graduate who lives nearby with her boyfriend, Jonathan. The two women gradually start to meet more frequently. They drink and smoke and talk and then late one evening Clémentine appears at Anna’s door. “She has been drinking. She comes in, and she tells me she fucked someone in a bar. A woman. Upstairs from the bar. I don’t think I should go home to Jonathan like this, she says.” Somewhat drawn closer together by the episode, Clémentine invites Anna to a party at hers place. She therefore meets Jonathan. It transpires he is an old flame for whom she still holds considerably more than a candle.

Then we go back to 1972, to another couple, Henry and Florence, who live in the same apartment. Florence is also a psychoanalyst, being taught by a leader in his field, Max Weisz. Indeed, he’s teaching her more than the subject she signed up for. After one encounter in his study, she says to him teasingly: “Now I understands why they call them seminars.” Her marriage to Henry moves towards its inexorable conclusion, but as we return to our original protagonists we learn that Jonathan is Max’s son. The three main characters for the remainder of the book are him, Anna and Clémentine.

It feels inevitable that the two women will begin an affair. They do. But it’s a little more complicated than that. “I don’t know what he [Jonathan] wants from me,” muses Anna at one point. “He has a 24-year-old girlfriend with a perfect body, why isn’t he home fucking her instead of me? What is he reliving through me?”

That last sentence gives a sense of the essence of the book; the difficulty of divorcing oneself from the past, whether one wishes to or not. And, of course, as you will doubtless have gathered, the way in which the novel deals with these themes is almost stereotypically French. But then the author is an American who lived in the French capital for 20 years. Elkins in Paris would never be confused with Emily in Paris.