Where It All Goes Down
Northern Quebec, Canada
The opening lines to the novel put the setting front and center, ensuring that the readers are prepared for the remoteness and wildness of the place we'll be spending over the next 27 chapters: "I can't believe I'm on this road again, twisting along past the lake here the white birches are dying, the disease is spreading up from the south, and I notice they now have sea-planes for hire. But this is still near the city limits; we didn't go through, it's swelled enough to have a bypass, that's success" (1.1). This passage quickly clues us into the fact that we're not exactly headed to a buzzing metropolis, if getting a bypass counts as big news for the city referenced.
Of course, the narrator's family cabin—where most of the novel's action takes place—isn't even in, or particularly near, this city; in fact, to get there, you need take a boat out to the tiny island in the region's lake where it's located. So, yeah—the setting is very remote and isolated.
But don't go thinking that all this isolation brings tranquility and peace—far from it. There are clear tensions between the French- and English-speaking natives of the region, and there's also a lot of talk about Americans and their values and habits—and how they are sneaking their way into Canada. In fact, that first sentence's reference to a "disease spreading up from the south" might be a clever little metaphor for the infusion of Americans and American values into the region, which is a recurrent topic in the novel.
With all of its isolation and the pervasive mood of imminent invasion, the setting is pretty perfect for all the psychological drama that the narrator and her friends are wrapped up in. The narrator seems to feel like she's been invaded, encroached upon in pretty major ways in her life—for example, she claims her ex-boyfriend called the shots regarding her abortion. So the repeated references to culture clash and the encroachment of Americans on Canada are a nice mirror to the narrator's feelings of having her physical space, as well as her being, violated.