Hockey Sur Glace: Stories

Ice hockey is the unifying element that ties together the seven stories and four poems in this poignantly written but thematically thin collection from LaSalle (Strange Sunlight; The Graves of Famous Writers). Most of the stories are set in New England, and hockey serves variously as metaphor, subject and narrative vehicle. ""Hockey Angels,"" for instance, is a coming-of-age tale filtered through pickup games and early schoolboy competition, while ""Wellesley College for Women, 1969"" offers a more romantic meditation from a Harvard undergrad narrator. ""Le Rocket Negre"" deals with the rise and fall of a black star, a relative rarity in the sport, while ""The Injury"" takes an oblique stream-of-consciousness approach to hockey's unique dangers. The best yarn in the collection is ""Additional Considerations,"" which posits the existence of a ""sleep shot"" that represents the narrator's desire to interject those critical statements and observations that often go unsaid in important relationships. It's refreshing to see a literary approach taken to a game that rarely receives much consideration in fiction. If much of the prose is far too mannered and elegiac, that's a common enough flaw in writing that uses a particular sport as a prism through which to view the passage of time. Readers familiar with baseball-inspired literature and its accompanying paeans to spring will be pleasantly jarred by the way LaSalle evokes winter as the trigger for intense memory and feeling. (Oct.)