At the start of Holly M. Wendt’s compassionate debut novel, Heading North, two hockey players, who are also secret lovers, train on a frozen canal in the deep night. The setting shows the score: “the ice hums, a thin crack somewhere between them, an easing settle. The canal’s meter of water is the least of their danger.” Viktor “listens to Nikolai’s building speed. Nikolai skates right into him, his shoulder to Viktor’s chest, a shove and a promise as they scrabble, stick and stick.” A cop sends them packing with a barked “Don’t be here,” but the warning carries another meaning: Don’t be gay, here, or anywhere, especially not in hockey.

Wendt’s novel explores how we encompass grief, especially when so much of that grief is unsanctioned because of homophobia. Rather than asking how we skate through challenges, Wendt considers those challenges become part of life’s training ground. How to build community when the ground is made of ice?

The hockey players, gay and not out, must take care: “Being careful not to sit too close at team meals, not to be alone together too often, the constant scale of worry and longing weighing in the place where Nikolai’s shoulder touched Viktor’s bicep on the bus.” But Nikolai puts words to their mutual longing: “‘I want to skate with you again. I want to be with you again. I don’t want to go back there. I don’t want to keep hiding.’ A string of impossibilities, and Nikolai can simply say them, like this.” 

When a horrific plane crash wipes out the Russian hockey team, Viktor loses Nikolai, the only hockey player who really knows him. He also loses his entire team, his coach, and his friends. The loss reverberates far past the stadiums where they played. The novel doesn’t build to this tragedy; it happens soon, after we already know of Viktor and Nikolai’s great love. Afterward, Viktor follows his dreams, but it’s as if a leaden hockey puck has struck his heart. The bruise remains.

Will Viktor build a future on ice, alone and bereft, hidden yet completely exposed? As Viktor moves from Russia to the United States, he contends with “a new league, language, and culture under a grief he cannot share.” With skates and loss in tow, Viktor makes his way:

In San Francisco, even the ice is different—narrower, the lines slightly out of kilter with where Viktor expects them—and the tighter boards and glass hem him in almost as much as the sea of English around him. But it’s still hockey, and his body finds its ease on his skates even while his mind and stomach churn.

Hockey—trained, physical movement—is the embodied throughline. The story moves as if bounded by the water that makes up most of the human body. For Viktor, a previous life is gone, but water is constant. When Viktor reaches San Francisco, he slips into the ocean near the Golden Gate Bridge, a place Nikolai loved. Submerging himself, he is stung and bruised:

The waves soak him to the waist on the first step, again on the next, the current tugging hard when one stone rolls beneath his foot. A stumble submerges him to his armpits, then a wave breaks slantwise, splashes his face and hair, but he’s on the rock…. Around him, the water fractures into blunted stars.

In the pursuit of dreams, we are often similarly stung and bruised. It’s the kind of move this gorgeous novel makes over and over, breaking the protagonist’s heart while reminding readers to open their own.

Viktor loves again, but homophobia is ever present. He wonders if there is “some trick for thickening the skin, some clever way to shed the cruelty.” By contrasting Viktor’s closeted sexuality with another hockey player’s openness, Heading North makes clear how far we still must go to encompass all ways of being sexual and all ways of loving. Wendt’s exploration of grief and survival is buoyed by this hope; Heading North is a big-hearted novel with compassion at its soul.

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Holly M. Wendt is a recipient of the Robert and Charlotte Baron Fellowship for Creative and Performing Artists from the American Antiquarian Society and fellowships from the Jentel Foundation and Hambidge Center. Their work has appeared in Passages North, Shenandoah, Barrelhouse, Memorious, and elsewhere. Holly is a former Baseball Prospectus contributor and contributing editor for The Classical. Their nonfiction has appeared in Bodies Built for Game: The Prairie Schooner Anthology of Contemporary Sports Writing, The Rumpus, and Sport Literate. Holly is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lebanon Valley College. 

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Before she became a writer, Renée E. D’Aoust was a dancer. Her memoir-in-essays, Body of a Dancer, was published by Etruscan Press. D’Aoust teaches online at North Idaho College and Casper College. Her adopted dog looks like a very tiny Phyllis Diller and is named Zoë.