‘The Goddess of Fireflies’ by Geneviève Pettersen

Reviewed by Rachel Carlson

Geneviève Pettersen’s debut novel The Goddess of Fireflies, translated from French to English by Neil Smith, is a complex and nuanced account of girlhood that feels like it’s narrated in real-time. In Chicoutimi in the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region of Quebec in 1996, fourteen-year-old Catherine initiates a rebellion fuelled by the rapid emergence of adolescence in the midst of middleclass boredom and the instability of divorce, domestic violence and parental neglect. Her fourteenth birthday is greeted by a lavish gift of a $1,000 check from her drunk father following a fight between him and her mother that results in blood, tears and a wrecked car on the lawn. But this is neither the beginning, nor the end, of a cycle of abuse and gift-giving that characterizes Catherine’s family life.

Soon after her birthday, Catherine’s parents go through a hurtful divorce and she moves into a condo with her mother. Things get so bad that her parents communicate only by fax. Catherine goes through her own separations from her childhood and her friend group to form intense bonds with a new set of peers who introduce her to a PCP-based drug called mesc. As her parents’ attention wanes, her rebellion slips out of control and she enmeshes herself in the local punk scene.

The Goddess of Fireflies, winner of the 2015 Archambault Prize, is as much material history as it is narrative. Catherine begins building her emergent identity in timely trends and products: 18-hole Doc Martens, Panasonic Shockwave Discmans, clothes bought at Le Chateau. Her life revolves around the movies and music of the era: Pulp Fiction, The Evil Dead, Nirvana, Hole, NOFX. Her story has the aesthetic assemblage of an exquisitely detailed period production on par with AMC’s Mad Men or Netflix’s Stranger Things. Fittingly, the novel is already slated for film production and it’s easy to imagine the kind of homage it could become—a 1990s aggregate of culture and events that may work even better on film than it does on the page.

Nostalgia is a through line in the novel and Catherine’s negotiation of identity, sexuality and social position is intensely, painfully familiar. She jockeys for status among girls who are more savvy than she is and the psychological warfare they incite rings true. Catherine competes with Melanie for the attention of Pascal, a boy they both like. Melanie beats Catherine in a fist fight, but then makes amends with a brief hangout and a line of mesc they snort in the mall bathroom. It’s not drugs, but rather a mixture of ground up Tic Tacs and baking soda. But the bullying soon escalates:

One afternoon at the end of gym class, Melanie emptied my entire gym bag on the floor while I was in the showers. When I came out to get dressed, my clothes were scattered all over the locker room. Melanie started jeering at me, asking if I’d been in a toilet stall snorting mesc again. Was it good shit? Who was my dealer?

It’s a scene played out in high schools everywhere—a game to make someone as vulnerable and fearful as possible. Melanie puts Catherine’s authenticity on trial to make her a poser in the eyes of her peers—one woman tears another down to maintain a position of relative authority and capture the brass ring of male attention.

This dynamic also plays out in Catherine’s emerging sexuality. While she initiates and plans most of her sexual encounters, Catherine doesn’t know how (or she doesn’t know it’s a possibility) to ask for what she desires. After winning the attention of Pascal, Catherine prepares herself for her first attempt at sex with him: “I told Pascal to wait a sec and then I shut myself in the bathroom and slipped on my red lingerie … I kept staring at my stomach and telling myself I had a nicer body than Melanie’s. I was as pretty as the girl in the Budweiser poster in Pascal’s room.”

Through male pleasure and attention, Catherine attempts to recoup some of her power and allure, but she’s working in the midst of, and sometimes unknowingly promoting, sexual oppression. “Slut” is the worst thing a woman or girl can be called in the novel, and Catherine uses this against other women and girls, but the insult is also levelled against herself. When a news story surfaces of a woman raped in McLeod Park, Catherine is harsh in her judgment: “I’d heard that story too and even knew who the girl was. Personally I thought she made the whole thing up … She was a slut. Every guy in town had fingered that chick.” Catherine negotiates the contradictory, double-bind situations that most women, but especially teens, face. Sexiness is power, but too much is poison, and the line in between is shifting and arbitrary.

Female relationships in Fireflies are difficult and intense. Catherine’s new friend Eve Côté and her clique are sexually confident, beautiful and hit all the right notes of fashion and rebellion: “They were always together, those girls, and at school everybody’s eyes were drawn to them. They reminded me of fireflies.” Catherine and Eve’s friendship grows quickly over experiences of drug use and shared family holidays. They bond over recklessness and parental absence or disinterest, but also with moments of tender emotional intimacy and goofy bouts of humour that women are often denied in literature. They are still children in these moments and show the painful and often ridiculous transition from childhood to adolescence.

Catherine embodies the in-between state of early adolescence—not a child, but not an adult either. While Catherine is sexually active, using drugs, and making most of her own decisions, she’s afraid of the dark and worried about what “the weatherman” has to say and if her father will remember to protect his tomato plants from the frost. She makes intelligent, well-thought decisions, such as using the birth control pill as it’s prescribed, but nearly kills herself because she’s on mesc and dressed inappropriately in the woods in the middle of winter. Her narration is delivered with distant bravado as though nothing really touches or affects her. The novel erupts into emotionality with the death of someone close to her and with the Saguenay flood that hits a day after Catherine’s fifteenth birthday. She watches a home her parents almost bought when she was a girl as it is swept from its foundations and destroyed in the uncontrolled waters. It’s a fitting transition to the sequel Pettersen is currently working on.

Overall, Fireflies is an unflinching account of teen life in a community lacking adult care or oversight beyond police involvement or the looming threat of juvenile detention. The novel avoids a moralizing tone and leaves judgment to readers, but most importantly, it is a story about girlhood, coming-of-age, and the fraught negotiation of sexuality and identity faced by young women.

Esplanade | 200 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN 978-1550654370