Canadian 'Puck Lit': Permanent Minor League Resident Or Promising Big League Prospect?(Critical Essay‪)‬

The common refrain of literary observers critiquing the quantity and quality of literature dedicated to hockey is, while hockey produces admirably in the former consideration--on average, twenty-five to forty new works on the game arrive in bookstores annually--it is in the latter where the genre suffers. The appetite of hockey aficionados is sated with a constant outpouring of predictable player-coach-referee-media biographies, standard statistic and record books, colourful illustrated "coffee table" offerings, and inevitably one more "inside" look at some aspect of the hockey world by Stan Fischler, the fast-food equivalent of McDonald's in the world of "puck lit." And while some of these offerings can truly be considered among the best that sports literature has to offer--Net Worth by David Cruise and Allison Griffiths, The Game by Ken Dryden, and Gross Misconduct by Martin O'Malley spring to mind immediately, among select others--the relative lack of fictional works compared with baseball, a game which possesses a similar position at the heart of Americana that hockey holds for Canadians, is rather disconcerting. However, Canadian works of fiction devoted to hockey do exist in the form of novels, poetry and theatrical plays, yet that is the problem. They merely exist; they have not garnered reputations as pieces of Canadian fiction critical to understanding this country and its people, like many American pieces of fiction devoted to baseball, such as Bernard Malamud's The Natural, for instance. American writers of distinction seem less afraid to devote attention to those sports that define their country; often the very best started out as sportswriters--Hemingway being the most famous example--and some have built and staked their reputations within the literary community on works devoted to sport. So why does this apathy exist among Canadians and Canadian writers towards works of fiction on the game that unites and inflames this country unlike any other? My purpose will be two-fold. First, to account for the lack of fictional works that define the game, while also outlining some of the more prominent works of fiction devoted to the game and what they say about the country's culture. Secondly, I will argue that, rather than a single all-encompassing reason, a combination of interrelated reasons collectively account for the stunted growth of hockey fiction and, by consequence, the weaker mythology surrounding the game than that which exists for Americans and baseball, for instance.