The Uninvited Guest.

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

Degen has written two books of poetry. This, the Torontonian’s first novel, was shortlisted for the 2007 Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award. His plot involves Tony Chiello, too small to make it to the top of professional hockey, who inherits the job of caretaker for the Stanley Cup, shepherding it around the world (it flies first class in its own seat). Since the NHL has become so international, its rink has widened considerably; Chiello must guarantee the Cup’s sanctity in places as distant and exotic as post-Ceausescu Romania.

When young Dragos Petrescu, “the first Romanian-born hockey player to play on a Cup-winning team,” heads back to Bucharest to get married, the trophy is allowed to go with him—accompanied, of course, by its keeper. Also on the flight is Dragos’s sexy cousin, Diana, with whom Tony flirts throughout the rest of the novel. Once in Romania, Tony meets the Petrescu family and is introduced to their rabid fascination with the ancient game of backgammon. In Eastern Europe, Degen says in an interview with Timothy Taylor on Bookninja, the game “is some sort of cultural obsession. You haven’t played backgammon,” he says, “until you’ve played against a feisty old Romanian man.”

This would make, in itself, an interesting piece of fiction: a Romanian hockey player, the keeper of the cup, a country’s love for backgammon, a spicy love interest developing. It is too bad that Degen falls victim to wordiness—a curse that plagues first-time novelists. The book might well have begun on page 115, Chapter 9, with a commendable one-sentence hook: “Antonio Esposito Chiello, the keeper of the Cup, is sent to Romania in only his second full year on the job.” It is a fine place on which to hang a story. But there is so much verbiage given to what has come before, what happens now and later, not to mention the history of some well-drawn but peripheral characters, that the pleasing tidiness of the central story is nearly buried. Too bad. There are some good things, here, and Degen should be back soon with a more polished effort.