Understanding Ken is set 25 years ago in the hockey-mad cities and towns around Trail, B.C. An adult novel, Ken is told through the eyes and in the voice of a hockey-obsessed 10-year-old. The boy is torn between his separated father and mother, who live in different towns, between school and hockey, between a vivid dream world and his quotidian existence. He struggles in school and on the ice because of his inability to pay attention. He hides from the violence directed at him by his father and by his chosen sport. He lives for hockey. Woven into this are the dimly understood on-ice struggles of the Montreal Canadiens and their star goalie Ken Dryden (the Ken of the title), who allows his team to lose as he sits out the season.

As a country, we are perhaps more critical of hockey writers than of any other group of writers we produce. That said, it is extraordinarily difficult to write a decent sports novel of any kind. They almost inevitably miss the mark somehow, often because they miss the nuances. The good baseball novels – and there are many more wannabe great baseball novels than there are hockey novels – can be counted on the fingers of one hand. There has never been a wholly successful hockey novel.

McCormack knows his hockey history, and writes knowingly of the world of peewee arenas and rivalries between minor hockey teams. Oddly, he doesn’t name any of his characters: we know them only as “the best player,” “the big boy,” “the coach,” and “the father of the best player.” Where McCormack falls down is not in the nuances of the game, but in the psychology of the boy and his parents, and in the structure of the novel. Understanding Ken is disappointing, as if we are watching a hockey player pick up the puck, shake his check, split the defence, only to stumble on the breakaway he created for himself.