On Haunting, Humour, and Hockey in Wayne Johnston's "The Divine Ryans."

Set in mid-twentieth-century Newfoundland, "The Divine Ryans" is a haunted tale in which nine-year-old Draper Doyle narrates the story of his father's visitations in the troubled year following his death. His father appears to Draper exclusively and usually in the guise of a hockey player, hockey functioning as a substitute for the lost intimacy between father and son. In articulating this coming-of-age story in which relationships, family secrets, and sexual codes ate all mediated through the rules and references of hockey, Wayne Johnston angles his narrative toward a dispossessed postcolonial expression of the ghosts that inhabit the margins of story and settlement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]