Third and Long

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Chris Fisher’s third book of short fiction is a delight in every way,
from plot to dialogue to characterization. So good are these eight
stories that it is hard to pick a favourite. Is it “Lilacs,” the
opening story, in which a young man is made to realize that his
alcoholic father is not as bad as he had been led to assume? Is it the
title story, “Third and Long,” about a pick-up football game between
two small Saskatchewan towns, one anglophone (Rawling), the other
francophone (Ladieux), where pride and competition and combativeness
combine to create a memorable and joyful Canadian event?

I think my favourite story is the last, “The Road Less Travelled,”
in which a trip from Regina to Toronto to the Hockey Hall of Fame
becomes the post on which Fisher hangs an everyman tale of father and
son and the ties that bind them together, no matter what. Les, a Sears
salesman in Regina, decides to take his dying father and his uncle on a
four-day drive to Toronto to visit the Hall and take in a couple of
Leafs games. The result is a road story, full of delightful
characterizations. Uncle Richard is amazed at the number of people.
“Why, just in this area alone,” he says looking out the taxi window
at the Toronto streets, “assuming only two people per car, and the
people on the sidewalk moving, at three abreast and taking up three feet
widthwise, that makes in this block alone at this very moment, more
people than in all of Dolguard.”

Fisher is a talented writer. His first collection, Sun Angel, won the
first Saskatchewan Book Award.