In her debut novel, The Music Game (translated by JC Sutcliffe), Stéfanie Clermont captures the darker side of the millennial experience: poverty-wage dead-end jobs, existential master's degrees, romantic disappointments, and, sometimes, lifelong depression. While The Music Game moves between a wide cast of first- and third-person narrators, it contains an overarching story centered on three young women navigating their teens and twenties. The narrative structure borders on a collection of linked short stories and is written in non-chronological order: One chapter might be set during someone’s post-grad in Montreal while the next chapter is set during another’s childhood in Ottawa. The result is a poignant reflection of how our past shapes and informs our relationships.

The Music Game takes us through the three main characters’ post-college lives, where Sabrina sells produce at the Jean Talon Market, Céline pursues her master’s degree, and Julie heals her relationship with her mother. While selling produce, Sabrina thinks of her “three unpaid internships for various cultural organizations that hadn’t led anywhere, of [her] friends, who were disappearing one by one under mountains of stress, work, trials, and relationships.” Not only are these moments of incisive self-reflection characteristic of the novel, but the streams of consciousness are also chillingly familiar to anyone who has navigated their young lives in the past decade. The Music Game then jumps back in time, where we learn that Céline’s cousin assaulted a drunk sixteen-year-old Sabrina; Céline resented her “petit-bourgeois” parents and acted out by smoking and going out with older men; and Julie’s dad “preferred journalism to his job as a father.”

At her best, Clermont captures the evolving reality of an aging friend group’s bond—its need for tough love, support, and honesty as the anxiety of growing old and becoming self-sufficient sets in. Snapshots of the mature and hardened women provide bittersweet context for chapters narrated by their younger selves, who flirt with bad decisions and partying and hold fast to a conviction that one day they’ll change the world.

As the plot winds through its non-linear, polyphonic style, its structure unites the characters’ complicated, individual suffering. By not explicitly introducing the narrator of each chapter, the vignettes could, in their first few pages, belong to anyone. There is a solidarity in what the characters endure, and in how they climb out of each situation as a unit. 

The final chapter presents the story that gives the book its title. The friends sit around playing The Music Game—a sort of charades for guessing what song someone describes the “plot” of—laughing, sharing stories, and drinking beer at an unspecified time. The Music Game tells us: whatever we experience, we get through it thanks to our friends. The communities we foster have the power to heal our fraught upbringing, our assault, or our heartbreak. Clermont’s The Music Game is a devastating and raw debut that lends a voice to a young, diverse generation of characters making the transition to adulthood.

Brianna Di Monda is a contributing editor for Cleveland Review of Books. Her fiction and criticism have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Litro Magazine, Worms Magazine, and Full Stop, among others.