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A hockey sweater, in Canada, is a serious thing. If you don’t believe me, try wearing a Flames sweater in an Edmonton sports bar, or an Oilers sweater at a sports pub in Calgary, and see what kind of reception you get. The hockey sweater serves a practical function � to keep one warm during a shift on the ice � but it can also serve as a badge of one’s regional and cultural identity within the world’s second-largest country. And all those elements of what a hockey sweater can mean within Canadian life come to the forefront in Roch Carrier’s 1979 story The Hockey Sweater.

Roch Carrier, a native of Sainte-Justine, Québec, studied at the Université de Montréal, and later earned a doctorate from the Sorbonne in Paris. He distinguished himself as an author of contes, a genre that can be described as a highly compressed version of the short story. His writing is characterized by a straightforward literary style that conceals depths of psychological insight, and by twist endings that may remind some readers of the work of Guy de Maupassant. An Order of Canada honoree, Carrier is an important exemplar of the literature and culture of Québec, and of Canada.

The Hockey Sweater, which is probably the best-known example of the contes for which Carrier is so well-known, takes place in Sainte-Justine in 1946, and is based on a real-life incident from Carrier’s childhood. The narrator begins by stating that “The winters of my childhood were long, long seasons. We lived in three places � the school, the church, and the skating rink � but our real life was on the skating rink.�

The importance of hockey in the life of the narrator and all his schoolfellows quickly becomes apparent when the narrator states that “We all wore the same uniform as Maurice Richard, the red, white, and blue uniform of the Montreal Canadiens, the best hockey team in the world.� The boys all style their hair like “Rocket� Richard, lace their skates and tape their sticks like “Le Rocket.� As the story’s narrator puts it, “We all wore the famous number 9 on our backs. How could we forget that!�

The illustrations for these opening pages of The Hockey Sweater reinforce well what the narrator is telling us. The wall of the makeshift locker room where the boys dress for hockey is covered with Richard memorabilia: posters, photographs, and a schematic showing Richard’s statistics: born in Montreal on 4 August 1921; �ailier droit, lance a la gauche [right wing, shoots from the left]�. Richard’s eyes glare out at the viewer from the poster, just as they did in real life. His intensity is unmistakable, and so is the hold that he has over these Québécois boys for whom he is the heroic figure.

Complications begin when the narrator’s Habs sweater grows too small for him and becomes torn in several places. The narrator’s mother, a proper Québécois woman who prides herself on administering a tidy, prosperous, and dignified home life, insists that “If you wear that old sweater, people are going to think we are poor!� and straightaway writes to Eaton’s, enclosing 3 dollars, to request a new Canadiens sweater. But, as the accompanying illustration by Sheldon Cohen shows she is writing the letter, “in her fine schoolteacher’s hand�, in French! She doesn’t like to use the forms in the Eaton’s catalogue, because they are all in English. And Eaton’s is an English Canadian company, headquartered in Toronto! The reader infers at once that complications are likely to ensue.

A two-page illustration shows the boy running excitedly out of the Poste Royale (post office), his package from Eaton’s in hand, his mother waiting for him on a snowy sidewalk pulling a sled, while next door, a couple of diners are talking with the chef at La Chaudronniêre Casse-Croûte. The illustrations� detailed rendering of mid-20th-century life in Québec are among the most delightful features of the book.

And then � horreurs! It turns out that Eaton’s has sent the Carrier family not the Montreal sweater that the narrator had wanted, but rather a Toronto Maple Leafs sweater! The narrator calls the event “one of the great disappointments of my life!� He points out that “Never had anyone in my village worn the Toronto sweater. Besides, the Toronto team was always being beaten by the Canadiens.� And, to emphasize the point, the narrator’s father is reading an article about the Canadiens beating the Maple Leafs 6-0, with the sub-headline “Maurice Richard à compté 3 buts [scored 3 goals]�. The narrator has fallen back to the floor in his rocking chair, his arm over his mouth in horror, and he is still gripping his tattered Canadiens sweater. Members of his family look on, trying (not too hard) to conceal their amusement at the boy’s plight.

The narrator insists that “You’ll never put it in my head to wear a Toronto Maple Leafs sweater�, but his ever-practical mother responds that “it’s not what you put on your back that matters, it’s what you put inside your head.� Besides, the sweater fits him perfectly, and if she writes back to Monsieur Eaton (a Torontonian and a Maple Leafs fan), he will be insulted; and by the time he sends the correct sweater, winter and hockey season will be over.

In fact, as a couple of commenters have pointed out, Eaton’s prided itself on its satisfaction-guaranteed policies; and the company, whatever Monsieur Eaton’s hockey affiliations might have been, would have been only too happy to rectify some clerk’s error and provide the narrator with the Habs sweater he so desires. But the mother’s pragmatic, common-sense outlook constitutes a barrier as solid as the stone walls that defended the city of Québec during the Seven Years War.

There is nothing for it but for the narrator to go to the skating rink in his Maple Leafs sweater. The illustration shows his isolation: he is outside the skating rink, looking morose and miserable in his Toronto sweater, while eleven boys on the ice, in their matching #9 Montreal sweaters, point at him with angry looks. Usually a first-liner, he is told that he will be playing on the second line; and then, when he takes the ice with the second line, he is told that he’ll be needed later, to play defence. In the third period, when he finally takes the ice and is immediately assessed a penalty, he is outraged, and shouts, “This is persecution! It’s just because of my blue sweater!�

What follows is the crisis of the story, after which the school’s young Catholic curate tells the narrator to go into the church and ask God to forgive him for losing his temper. The prayer that the boy does offer provides a humorous denouement for the story.

In an afterword, Carrier writes that “I wish to dedicate this story to all girls and boys because all of them are champions.� Stylistically, I found that The Hockey Sweater reminded me of the work of the American humorist Jean Shepherd, whose winter-holiday tales of his Indiana boyhood were adapted into the film A Christmas Story (1983). There is the same use of humour and exaggeration to dramatize how incidents of childhood that might seem trivial to an adult loom large in the life of a boy or girl, increasing and exacerbating feelings of being alone and misunderstood. The stories have sentiment but not sentimentality, and it is for that reason that Carrier’s work, like Shepherd’s, holds lasting value.

It was interesting for me to place The Hockey Sweater in its historical context: the story was published at a time when Québec premier René Lévesque was seeking to secure the province’s political independence from the rest of Canada. One can look at The Hockey Sweater and see in it an expression of the way in which tension between francophone and anglophone Canadians has often received indirect expression through the Canadiens-Maple Leafs rivalry.

But why bother? This is a great, human story for any parent in any country to read to their child. One need not know the difference between a breakaway and a game misconduct to love this story. Roch Carrier, a master of the art of the short story, truly outdid himself with The Hockey Sweater, a true classic of Canadian literature. He shoots, he scores!