sla book review: now is the winter

now is the winter

Reviewed by Angie Abdou, College of the Rockies

MARCH 29, 2010 archive

Now is the Winter

Now is the Winter is a fresh and provocative contribution to the growing field of hockey studies. The thirteen essays included in this book examine the fraught relationship between hockey and Canadian identity. The editors argue that Canadians' "possessive emotionality" about the sport may account for "the long delay in treating hockey and its literature as subjects of serious critical inquiry" (9).

I should emphasize, though, that the book extends beyond Canadian studies. Four of the contributors are non-Canadians, and objects of inquiry include: the Americanization of the sport; the role hockey plays in the Canada-U.S. rivalry, and how hockey is represented in New Zealand media.

Though the collection grew out of papers given at the 2007 hockey conference hosted by Jamie Dopp at the University of Victoria , the essays take their spirit from a shinny match at a 2005 hockey conference in Massachusetts. After an unexpectedly wild game of Academics on Ice, someone asked "What happened out there?" The answer that came back – "Hockey happened." – provides the focus of this collection. The question that unites the eclectic articles is simply "What happens when hockey happens?"

To answer that question, these scholars focus their attention on an impressive breadth of topics. Andrew Holman provides an analysis of American juvenile sporting fiction from 1890-1940. David McNeil captures the narrative told by hockey photographs from the early 1950s. Kelly Hewson delves into some risqué hockey lyrics from one of Canada 's favorite bands, The Tragically Hip. Brian Kennedy explores the transformation of hockey with the rise of sport as spectacle and the subsequent necessity to package hockey so people may "reliably consume its carnivalesque elements" (168). Anne Hartman provides astute cultural analysis of women's shinny in Toronto public parks, where shinny becomes "a site for performance of non-normative gender and sexuality, a space that may be read as queer" but is also "queer as in funny" (137).

The contributors to this collection are not only scholars but are also hockey lovers. This passion for the sport brings readability, humor, and optimism to the collection, all of which are an unfortunate rarity in academic writing. The work's optimism is best captured in the introduction's claim that the various essays speak to "the hope, tentative but real, that differences between self and other can truly become no more important than home and away hockey sweaters: costumes that make the game possible but that we take off again when the game that brought us together has done its work and it's time to talk about the play" (15).

You don't have to love hockey to love Now is the Winter. The insights gleaned are not limited to this single game. The book is multidisciplinary in the truest sense, with the contributors representing over a dozen fields of study, including Canadian Literature, Kinesiology, History, Creative Writing, Social Anthropology, Sport Management, Business, Indigenous Literatures, and Communications. Some essays consider hockey and popular culture in general terms, and some are as specific as the analysis of the 2006 trade of former Edmonton Oiler Chris Pronger.

In the introduction, the editors outline the impressive range and depth of literary hockey fiction in Canada , touching on many of my personal favourites – Paul Quarrington, Bill Gaston, Lynn Coady, and Cara Hedley. So, my first (and only) disappointment came when I realized that these authors and their excellent novels do not reappear in the body of Now is the Winter. I hope that book – the one that provides a deep and extended analysis of the great Canadian hockey novels – is Dopp and Harrison 's next contribution to this thriving field. I will happily buy the first copy, put it on my reference shelf right next to this one, and use it just as regularly. There are not too many collections of academic essays that leave me wanting more, but I'll be keeping an eye out for Now is Winter, The Sequel.

In the meantime, Now is the Winter has given me much to think about every Saturday evening when my husband tunes into Hockey Night in Canada. While he eagerly awaits Don Cherry's latest words of wisdom, I will be thinking about hockey as "a bastion of heterosexual masculinity" (138), considering what Mikhail Bakhtin would make of the N.H.L., and pondering whether or not women who bare their breasts to celebrate their team's victory are really "participants in the celebration of bodily power" (200).

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