Elkin writes these events as complicated adventures in wrong decisions—which, crucially, she neither justifies nor condemns. She lets her characters be bad yet ordinary, bad yet sympathy-inducing, bad yet worthy of a good life ... Elkin is deft but clear in reminding readers that there’s a distinction between badness and evil, or badness and hate.
Smart and steamy ... The changing of time periods and narrators makes the story resemble a where-does-this-fit puzzle, at times a challenge. But piecing it together in the end is part of what makes Scaffolding a pleasure overall — maybe even therapeutic.
The novel can feel like one long, Socratic dialogue between Anna and Clémentine, debating the value of such work, the ethics of sex and fidelity and childbearing and feminism ... Shrewd and satisfying.
A philosophical journey all ought to embark on ... A new and intimate story of desire and just how far we’ll go to justify obtaining them. A riveting, bold challenge to the norms of relationships, friendships and marriages, Elkin has certainly earned her place on any bookshelf and in the minds of any reader. I’ll be reading this one again and again.
An ambitious, multi-generational book that reckons with legacy, faith and feminist resistance ... Elkin’s prose can be clumsy ... But as Elkin weaves her many characters’ lives together and the book grows more complex, it becomes truly fascinating ... Complex ... As an attempt to examine how we make the same mistakes as those before us – and how we use the same excuses to explain our shortcomings – Scaffolding is an inventive and provocative study.
A novel of ideas. Not much happens and plot development is mostly psychological, interior in both spatial and intellectual ways. The prose is as well crafted as Elkin’s nonfiction leads us to expect, and the characters are very finely developed. She writes beautifully about ennui, literal and metaphorical disorientation, and the love of place. Not every good essayist should write a novel, but we should be glad Lauren Elkin did.
The first third of the novel ambles amiably in exploratory chat between the two women ... If her instincts as a scene-maker point towards retrospective testimony rather than in-the-moment drama, there’s no shortage of excitement in the twists supplied by what each character doesn’t know (or chooses to hide or ignore) about one another, to say nothing of the book’s increasingly horny energy, and a cheerfully deflating sense of comedy.
The result is a reading experience not unlike getting lost inside some many-chambered house: just when you think you’ve reached a dead end, there’s another door to open ... These characters verge, at times, on types. Yet Elkin writes them with a light touch.
It’s a novel that appears to be doing one thing, but is in fact doing something far cleverer, and more fun ... Two novels in one: the first a rather pseudy example of sad-girl lit, the second a compelling whodunnit-style revelation of the hidden connections between strangers ... If you can forgive the novel’s more pretentious moments, it is tremendously satisfying to solve the puzzle that Elkin has laid out for us.
I sometimes felt like I was correcting a university assignment. These (women, because it is women) writers need to trust that they are intellectual and interesting enough to carry the weight of their work.
Anna’s first-person voice, rendered as diaristic reportage, is immersive ... Sly ... Throughout the novel narrative doublings and repetitions enact the psychoanalytic idea of the uncanny, while story lines left dangling, including half-told Holocaust histories, lend a slithery undertow to the mundane naturalism of the prose style.
Stylish ... The links between Florence and Anna feel a bit forced, but there’s a great deal of depth and intelligence to the descriptions of their feelings around desire. Readers will find much to sink their teeth into.
