Girls in the world of Great Rock Novels are rarely the ones calling the shots. At best, they’re muses, subjected to impromptu hagiographies through the music and lyrics of their Peter Pannish sweethearts onstage. If they’re in the band, female characters are often babe-like bassists, holding it together in the shadows; frequently, their presence jacks up the tension when they hook up with one or more bandmates. Worse, if they’re not in the band, girls are with the band, Cynthia Plaster Casting model penises or star-fucking their way through 15 minutes of stardom.

The Angel Riots, by Toronto-bred writer Ibi Kaslik, is a different sort of Great Rock Novel, a sort of indie-rock tragedy that charts the unexpected rise and semi-collapse of a sprawling collective of starry-eyed Montreal musicians. It’s feminist insofar as it’s egalitarian — there’s no groupie-shagging on file, a preternaturally wise female protagonist shares narrative duties with a dude and, as Kaslik jokes, “the girls act just as badly… or as good as the guys.” Along with Michael Turner’s Hard Core Logo and Kevin Chong’s Baroque-A-Nova, The Angel Riots is one of only a handful of truly Canadian Great Rock Novels; it’s certainly the first to expose the bloodied guts and pipe dreams of the communal group mentality that’s marked the millennial explosion of this country’s independent music scene.

“The irony is that I do think it’s still very sexist, it’s still a man’s world,” insists Kaslik, over the phone from the middle of the Prairies. She’s camped out as a writer-in-residence at the public library in Regina, Canada’s murder capital and the site of Louis Riel’s execution, a “crazy place” where she claims she sees trails of blood on the street whenever she leaves her house.

“The very obvious metaphor I use in the book is a dysfunctional family, and in that context, you might have gendered roles. You have the leader and the players, the followers. You have the personality, and then you have the worker bees, just like a family. Everyone takes on roles based on what he or she has to offer. So a character like [lead singer] Margo has her sexuality, her femininity and her voice.”

To paraphrase an old Stars song, Kaslik is writing what she knows. For a long time, the writer had a gold-plated backstage pass Bebe Buell would’ve died for. She came of age with the kids who became Stars, Metric and Broken Social Scene; some of them fell in love with her, some started bands with her (Kaslik herself performs at Tuesday’s book launch), some wrote songs about her (the girl’s face fills the frame in the BSS “Ibi Dreams of Pavement” video) and some broke her heart. The first time we met was at a Stars show in Montreal’s tiny O Patro Vys club in 2003. I was intimidated; Ibi was scrutinizing.

Make no mistake — The Angel Riots is a work of fiction. But even Kaslik can acknowledge that there are parallels between the fucked-up artists in the book and their real-world counterparts. “When I was wrestling with my anxiety or whatever around writing this book, my friend, who’s married to a member of a band, once said, ‘Y’know, Ibi — everyone’s always known you were a writer. What did they think we were doing back there? Just looking good in tight jeans and smoking cigarettes?’ That comment summed a lot of stuff up. We may have seemed like little accessories, but what did people think would happen?”

The book is about much more than cheap roman à clef thrills, though. Kaslik brings together a psychically scarred violin prodigy from Saskatchewan, a tortured trombonist who can’t figure out how to communicate, his charismatic best friend/frontman, a boozy sexpot singer and a handful of other neo-bohemians who chase the dragon of their fearless leader and indie-rock impresario’s utopian fantasies. All the characters are hooked on something — fame, junk, sex — and they all seem to want the lovely music to save their lives.

As with her previous novel, Skinny (which made the New York Times bestseller list), addiction — in a broad sense — is at the heart of The Angel Riots. Kaslik tackles the theme remarkably well, mapping out the dry-throated, adrenaline-surging drive with poetic language that cuts to the bone. She writes gorgeously about the high of seeing a perfect rock show, of goosebumps and mouths filled with saliva, of the band inhaling together and transforming “into a beast… [that drags] the audience to a sacred place where nothing [matters], except this fever pitch.”

“I think addiction is such a defining element of the human condition,” she explains. “I mean, not to get all Chekhovian, but we’re addicted to life. Why? Sorry to be so dark, but why do we wake up every morning? What are we addicted to? It’s a natural foil for drama. For Skinny [which deals with anorexia], the metaphor was hunger, and here you’ve got addiction to attention, addiction to the road, addiction to alcohol, whatever it is. It just lends itself so easily to drama.”

For the members of The Angel Riots (the novel’s namesake band) and their umbrella collective, the Bong Light Symphony, their addictions are, in part, a means of dealing with the monotony of life on the road — like Dean Wareham’s excellent new memoir, Black Postcards, The Angel Riots artfully reveals the decidedly unglamorous life of touring musicians. Kaslik does so through meticulous itineraries that suggest perverse riders: “2,754 bottles of water. 3,876 bottles of beer. 76 bottles of wine. 200 sunnyside up eggs. 9,000 french fries… 27 broken guitar strings. 2 charges of misdemeanour that fail to stick. 3 cracked lamps. 1 drunken swan-dive off a motel roof into the deep end of a Miami pool. 5 speeding tickets in the Midwest.”

But for these once-wide-eyed kids, their coping mechanisms also seem like a way to numb themselves to the reality that their imaginary indie-rock Xanadu will never be realized.

“I go back to real life, and we believed it for so long,” says Kaslik. “But I don’t think it’s possible to sustain that kind of utopia. Obviously success and the outside world are huge factors, but it also fails because it’s so insular. You become so interdependent, so codependent, like a sick, dysfunctional family that always falls back on itself, for better or for worse — and over time, it just becomes for worse.

“And it’s such a cliché about rock ’n’ roll. At the end of the novel, an older character says to [still-wide-eyed violinist] Jim, ‘Baby, rock… I coulda told you.’ It was the same thing in real life — people were like, ‘I totally saw this coming.’

“It is this weird claustrophobia where you can’t get away from people. It’s not that you want to, necessarily… I definitely see it in [the writing community]. You don’t even have to, like, be in a van with the 20 other writers of your generation, but you are. I’m in the van with the 20 other writers of my generation all over the nation.”