On the Game

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

At the outset of summer holidays, Montreal’s Yolande Owen, 15,
believes she has found true, lasting love with her first sex partner,
Etienne, a 21-year-old Haitian immigrant. An only child, Yolande, who
grieves her father’s death while remaining emotionally distant from
her mother, becomes easy pickings for the smooth-talking, gift-giving
Etienne, who, unknown to Yolande, is actually a pimp. Following a
successful “courtship” period that emotionally hooks Yolande,
Etienne creates a fictional crisis, one that he claims can be resolved
for him if Yolande will simply go out on what he describes as, and she
naively believes to be, a date with another man. After a few such
“dates,” all of which conclude with Yolande’s having drunken sex
with one or more men, she learns that she is just the most recent
acquisition in Etienne’s stable of seven girls/women who are “on the
game” (i.e., hooking).

Polak’s cautionary tale is most believable in its descriptions of how
Etienne emotionally entraps and then manipulates Yolande and in the
ongoing rationalizations Yolande creates to explain her behaviours and
those of Etienne. Less convincing is Yolande’s maintaining a summer
job as a counsellor at a Y day camp for children while prostituting
herself late into the night. That Yolande’s mother never catches her
sneaking out, or back in, also stretches credibility. The story falters
particularly badly in its concluding section, in which Yolande, who has
been “loaned” to another pimp by Etienne, is dramatically rescued by
her lifelong friend, Gabrielle. Recommended with reservations.