Refereeing Identity: The Cultural Work of Canadian Hockey Novels by Michael Buma (review)

Drawing on the simple yet elegant metaphor of the referee, Michael Buma examines how the Canadian hockey novel adjudicates masculinity and national identity by proposing and enforcing a homogenizing image of the Canadian as tough, northern, white, and male. Admitting that “the genre of literary hockey writing remains relatively young,” he makes a compelling case in Refereeing Identity that “hockey novels can no longer be marginalized or ignored … and have a great deal to tell us … about the game’s place in Canadian culture.” Buma’s study convincingly argues that this rapidly burgeoning genre about what some might consider “just a game” represents a concerted attempt to reinforce a traditional image of the Canadian precisely at a time when that image is perceived to be in crisis.

A lengthy introduction initiates the reader unfamiliar to the genre into what Buma refers to as “Canada’s hockey myth,” drawing on Roland Barthes, Benedict Anderson, and Eric Hobsbawm. Buma outlines the history and imagery of the sport’s construction as an indigenously Canadian game, which then fed developing notions of national identity. Finally, he defines the genre and explains that Refereeing Identity focuses on Canadian novels in English, which target an adult audience (nonetheless referencing youth literature) and in which hockey represents a central and sustained figure.

The subsequent analysis spans six interrelated chapters, each of which explores the thematic problem outlined in its title, effectively illustrating how the hockey novel performs its “cultural work”: to reinscribe hockey as “an expression of Canadian character” and “to rehearse and/or referee certain identities and derive their signification within larger networks of cultural meaning.” Buma does this masterfully, supporting his arguments with a corpus of nearly 100 novels, most published since 1990. Chapter 1, “Hockey and Canadian Identity,” outlines how novels like F.G. Paci’s Icelands (1999), Steve Lundin’s When She’s Gone (2004), and Ray Robertson’s Heroes (2000) establish “the pure essence of the game” as essentially Canadian, linking it to the nation’s northern climate and nostalgia for the lost innocence of childhood. Chapters 2 and 3, “The Myth in Crisis” and “Unity through Hockey?” explain how these novels depict hockey as a force that unifies the nation but also how it divides by excluding non-hockey fans from “the Canadian.” They also explore how American appropriations of the game threaten unity, as seen in Mark Anthony Jarman’s Salvage King, Ya! (1997), Larry O’Connor’s The Penalty Box (2007), and Eric Zweig’s Hockey Night in the Dominion of Canada (1992).

Linking gender to national identity is central to the cultural work of the Canadian hockey novel, Buma argues in chapters 4 through 6, “National Manhood,” “Myths of Masculinity,” and “The Homosocial Dressing Room.” Hockey novels by women – such as Judith Alguire’s Iced (1995) and Cara Hedley’s Twenty Miles (2007) – can be counted on one hand, and thus, like the sport itself, hockey literature remains largely the preserve of men. Buma deconstructs representations of masculinity and its linkage to national identity in novels like Bill Gaston’s The Good Body (2004), Wayne Johnston’s The Divine Ryans (1990), and Paul Quarrington’s King Leary (1987). He also critiques the corollary exclusion of women and gay men from conceptions of Canadianness.

As he delineates how these novels celebrate sport and nationhood, thus celebrating the genre itself to a certain extent, Buma consistently cautions his readers about the naïveté, even danger, in constructing national identity around such a violent sport. He concludes his study with the hope “that our collective vision for both hockey and hockey writing will become increasingly more expansive, inclusive, generous, and enthralling.”

Surprisingly only the second study of its kind, after Jason Blake’s Canadian Hockey Literature (2011), Buma’s rigorous analysis suggests that the Canadian hockey novel has come into its own as a legitimate popular, and sometimes even literary, form. Furthermore, it performs the cultural work...