Javotte by Simon Boulerice (review)

Boulerice, Simon. Javotte. Montréal: Leméac, 2012. ISBN 978-2-7609-3356-9. Pp. 182. $20,95 Can. We all think we know Javotte, Cinderella’s repugnant, ugly step-sister, so disfigured psychologically that she abused her innocent, hard-working, younger step-sister and so misshapen physically that her gnarled foot could not fit into that dainty glass slipper . No matter how hard she tried, the prince could not find in this grotesque Javotte chaussure à son pied. With Boulerice, however, we may discover that Javotte had been looking for the wrong prince. Offering a fascinating, if frequently unsettling, backstory to Javotte’s various malformations set in a small town in contemporary Québec, the author presents a troubled adolescent wracked by bodily awakenings and anxieties. Caught by and in emotional discoveries processed through psychic filters her unstable family and damaged friends give her, Boulerice’s Javotte ultimately is shown to be like so many of her teenaged peers: she wants to be understood, appreciated, admired. As such, Boulerice revisits a theme from one of his first writings, the award-winning 2007 one-man show Simon a toujours aimé danser, in which Boulerice himself plays a Simon both remarkable in his multiple differences and similar to many other boys in his desire to be respected. Even as we readers, unlike her family or classmates, come to understand and appreciate Javotte, she may never be“likeable,”however, in a contrast to Boulerice’s charming Simon: she self-consciously embraces cruelty as a strategy to set herself apart, detesting above all being marked by “banalité” (41). As she tries to negotiate, even reject, the painful workings of the universe around her—where, for example, her playful, loving father dies in the car wreck that caused her feet to be misshapen , her emotionally distant mother prefers comforting herself with other men to being with her scarred daughter, and she, the deformed, falls in love with Luc, the best-built boy in school—she chooses words that sting and actions that hurt. As she crafts ways she hopes will help her be noticeably non-banal and take revenge against those who have hurt her, this teenager finds a powerful tool in sex. In Boulerice’s hands, Javotte is always complex, even as she stumbles into what might have been, for other authors, clichés of high school sexual drama. To get closer to Luc, for example, she seduces Camille, his twin sister, but discovers that attention, caresses, and perfumes offer pleasures she both loves and detests. She purposefully accedes to the sexual advances of the father of Carolanne, the most popular girl in school and Luc’s girlfriend , but learns that sexual freedom and power come with certain costs. And, one day, her prince, the forever desired Luc, does come, but he does not stay. As the novel closes and Cinderella enters her life, Javotte promises to protect herself against yet more hurt from a creature more beautiful than even Carolanne. Boulerice’s Javotte, the ugly step-sister we thought we knew, ends up telling a cautionary tale about the cult of beauty that creates a logic in which certain plates of vengeance can be very hot indeed. Union College (NY) Charles R. Batson 262 FRENCH REVIEW 87.2 ...