Puckstruck: Distracted, Delighted and Distressed by Canada's Hockey Obsession

With a love of words as deep and impassioned as his love of hockey, Smith delivers a maddening opus for the ages. Drawing from a myriad of literature about the sport as the basis for his free-flowing text, the author takes the reader on a day-long skate down a twisted, frozen river, following but never catching the puck%E2%80%94or the point. The text is all over the place, recapping the best hockey fiction one moment, and its contributions to the English language the next, with side stops just about everywhere %E2%80%94 fighting, helmets, missing teeth, captains, Lady Byng, the decision to retire, and God in hockey. "This is not the book I was going to write," he confesses at one point, and it is evident, with no strong backbone uniting the whole. Reading individual sections on their own%E2%80%94the arrival of the Swedes in hockey, hockey sounds (foom!, ponk!), the hockey days of Smith and his family%E2%80%94is a delight and a credit to the author's mastery of language and research. But ultimately, it walks a delicate line between academic essay and mainstream book. (Nov.)