She finally remodels her kitchen, removing the ugly brown and yellow wallpaper that links to the central set piece of the novel. The paisley wallpaper was installed 50 years earlier when Florence and Henry lived in Anna’s apartment in 1975. The married couple also repaper the walls. In this relationship, fidelity is once again at stake. If walls could speak.

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The novel does not offer “a final theory of eros, a morality of fidelity” but in the closing pages, Anna walks the street of the city, flâneuse-ing, as if emerging from a chrysalis. In Elkin’s non-fiction work, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, the masculine phrase flâneur is replaced by flâneuse, “one who walks” to encompass all genders. Anna emerges with renewed agency. But the writing is still on the walls. Women are still being killed by their former lovers in unconscionable numbers, making the novel’s final act of reclamation even more visceral.

Scaffolding is ekphrastic. Elkin responds to other works of literature such as The Yellow Wallpaper, and the seminal I love Dick, but also to the paintings of Shannon Cartier Lucy, whose uncanny artworks of women inhabiting surreal domestic spaces, feature in the novel and grace the cover. At an exhibition, Anna studies a painting of Clémentine: “every hipbone I’ve ever seen is there.”

Every hipbone we’ve traced, every book and painting we’ve exalted, every street we’ve walked, is part of the scaffold. We are all remade and reworked by those (things) we bring into our proximity, domestically and intimately. Between the frisson of febrile sentences and intellectual rigour, Elkin builds an elegant house of female desire.