GODS WITH A LITTLE G

By Tupelo Hassman

In the main, teenage girls don’t fare well in literature. With a few notable exceptions — and some monster slayers and to-the-death survival game champions — girls in books and on screens are infantilized, overly sexualized or both. Sometimes they are mean girls, or they are so addled by crushes and lip gloss that they’re all punch lines and inconsequence. They are assaulted and murdered at such astounding rates it’s a wonder they’re not extinct. It is no easy feat to thwart the sexist tropes of girlhood, but such is the task before Tupelo Hassman in her second novel, “Gods With a Little G,” and its spirited, whip-smart protagonist, 16-year-old Helen — or Hell, for short.

Like Hassman’s debut, “Girlchild,” with its similarly dauntless teenage main character, “Gods With a Little G” is a bildungsroman that shows us a young woman in the midst of her becoming. Becoming, you will remember, is a harrowing process. Somehow most of us survive, some just barely, and some make it out only to spend a good portion of adulthood trying to stanch the bleeding. As we read, we suspect Helen will be among the latter.

She lives in a town called Rosary, a dusty evangelical hinterland in a desolate part of California. Through Helen’s eyes, Hassman establishes the setting so convincingly that I could almost smell the aging oil refinery that looms over its 27 churches. “Rosary’s skyline is a graveyard. A line of crosses and bell towers march on forever, each taller than the last,” she tells us. “The refinery has a pole rising from its center, higher than any of its smokestacks, which burn all day and all night over the crosses below.”

Rosary is, if one can say such a thing, a kind of evangelical caliphate where the school textbooks teach that “dinosaurs and man lived together at the same time.” As Helen quips, “Get thee behind me, Science.” Her sense of humor (she suggests renaming one of the town’s streets “What Would Jesus Drive”), delivered via Hassman’s high-octane prose, enlivens the bleakness of the town where R-rated movies are verboten, premarital sex and abortion are prohibited and birth control is limited. Even the internet is heavily policed, and all the people who aren’t white have been driven out. Hassman offers us a vision of regular small-town folks enacting the worst aspects of themselves and their religion; a vision all the more salient in the current climate where abolishing people and ideas we don’t like has become the new American dream.