Hockey Night in Canada

Hockey Night in Canada is Diane Schoemperhen’s third collection of short stories. Her previous collection, Frogs and Other Stories, won the Alberta Writers Guild Award for fiction, and in this latest book Schoemperlen’s voice continues to be distinctive, genuine, and perhaps above all, inventive.

The collection speaks primarily about adult relationships between men and women, relationships that are usually problematic but never exaggerated beyond the realm of the everyday. It is the ordinary which intrigues Schoemperlen, and the reader is invited to explore the interconnectedness of contemporary lives with her vignettes of ordinary experience as backdrop.

At her best, Schoemperlen’s stories are imaginative and appealing. In “What We Want,” for example, Penny and Pat are secretaries and “there’s nothing wrong with that.”

One wants kids, the other one doesn’t.
One’s been married, the other one hasn’t.
One wants to get married, the other one doesn’t.
Guess which one?

Evelyn is a divorced photographer who “wants to be famous and fairly rich.” “Mitzy May is a tricky kind of gab.” All these women’s lives are described in anecdotes, separated only by almost poetic choruses:

We want to be dangerous.
We want to be wicked.
We want to be enormous.
We want to run rampant.
We want to get savage and leave the whole sad world behind us hanging by a thread.

Schoemperlen’s poetic touch is again evidenced in “A Simple Story.” To a certain extent, she is an imagist, presenting clear, piercing vignettes and urging the reader to fill in the story: “Aunt Louise said dreaming of snowbanks was a portent of death. But it wasn’t a dream. Those snowbanks around that old house were as real as pillows, real and meaningless as these ones piling up all over the city tonight.”

Schoemperlen also wants the reader to fill in the story in “Life Sentences” — literally in this case. This “girl meets boy, girl marries boy, girl is glad to be rid of boy” story leaves words out in favour of parentheses. As the reader supplies the appropriate adjectives and emotions it becomes evident that it is the familiarity of Schoemperlen’s characters and the easy recognition of her descriptions that unite this collection. Schoemperlen writes with enough restraint, however, to avoid reducing her characters to caricatures, and she succeeds well in portraying individuals within the cliches of white, middle-class, English Canada.

Many of these stories are written in women’s voices and speak genuinely of women’s experiences. In “She Wants to Tell Me,” the conversation between two acquaintances on an apartment balcony is punctuated — indeed dominated — by the protagonist’s interior monologue. Answering her own questions, filling in the other woman’s sentences, perhaps inventing her companion completely until she becomes an intimate stranger, if indeed a stranger still.

Though short (only nine stories), this is a strong collection. Each piece stands complete on its own and works well with the others. Schoemperlen’s book contains few disappointments.