Heading North: A Novel

By Holly M. Wendt

Braddock Avenue Books, November 2023

ISBN: 9798985725681

The story opens on the cusp of the New Year in Russia, where two minor league teammates are playing pick-up hockey on a frozen canal. Viktor Myrnikov and Nikolai Stepnov play for the joy of it, and also for the chance to be together in a way that is acceptable to anyone who might see them, including the policeman who tells them to get off the ice. The lights on the squad car and the cop’s flashlight illuminate the broader cultural landscapes Viktor and Nikolai are living in and the magnitude of the risk of being seen for who they are: men–hockey players–in love with each other. That night, Viktor and Nikolai don’t know what awaits them in the years to come as they pursue professional hockey careers and grapple with whether and how to be together. They don’t know how quickly their shared dream is going to end. But in the moment when a new year dawns, they are together, ineluctably pulled back to the ice to play more of the game they love–“Begin as you mean to go on.”And so the first chapter of Holly M. Wendt’s Heading North: A Novel closes, and the rest of this tender, sometimes painful, so often beautiful story of longing and belonging begins. 

The novel unfolds through Viktor as he gets a shot at playing in the NHL and Liliya Areyev, the GM of fictional NHL team the San Francisco Pilots. Liliya works under her father, the team owner, and works around the selfish whims and schemes of her husband, who is himself a successful NHL player and celebrated son of Russia’s hockey program, as well as the father of Viktor’s beloved, Nikolai. The way these relationships and roles overlap both smooths Viktor’s path to a North American pro career and chafes against what he truly wants. With every chance he earns or is given, with every choice he faces, Viktor must hold the secret of Nikolai’s and his relationship. After a tragic accident, Viktor is forced to do this heartrending work alone. Liliya, too, is fighting her battles, in the front office and in her marriage, acutely alone. More than once, Liliya retreats to hockey as the place she knows best when the rest of her world is making less and less sense. Viktor, too, clings to hockey as the one solid thing in his disorienting life. As Viktor is getting to know a new teammate whose family has suffered because of their cultural identity, he names what hockey may have been for them, too: “It’s a history Viktor doesn’t fully understand, but he knows about sinking into sport, hoping whatever was gained there could make up for another kind of loss.”

But sport is not the same as the system it operates in, a fact that the story illustrates in subtle and satisfying ways. Even while hockey is home for Viktor and Liliya, the barriers and blindspots of professional hockey often do more to threaten them than provide a safe landing place. Liliya especially will not let herself forget that she has a job to do, that pro hockey is a business with financial and professional stakes. And yet, training her focus on the business side of hockey and on the job she has fought hard to have, is a way to not fully look at how her decisions are affecting Viktor’s life and what is not working between her and her husband. Viktor must navigate two systems in which who he is is not acceptable–the culture of his home country and the culture of the league he dreams to make a career in. For both Viktor and Liliya, their work is both a diversion from deeper troubles and what keeps their heads above water. In sport especially, devotion to work–the grind–is an acceptable way to bury ourselves and true desires.

One of the novel’s great strengths is how the characters connect with each other and don’t, the grace they give each other and the times they are hard-pressed to muster their humanity. Several common barriers to connection play out in the character of Viktor alone. The fear of his sexuality being found out and potential punishment for it keeps him from getting too close to anyone on his minor league and pro teams in Russia. When he joins the Pilots in San Francisco, he knows he is perhaps safer, but the fear of being rejected by his teammates still looms large. And added to it is the fear of outing Nikolai and humiliating his famous father. On top of it all is Viktor’s limited English language skills, which keeps him from understanding the nuances of communication between his new teammates and keeps him on guard for what they might be noticing about him. Connection is limited when one party is wholly invested in staying hidden. 

The relationships playing out on the page in Heading North are at once delicate and stubborn, tender and brutal. Not unlike the nature of hockey itself. And not unlike so many of the story’s sentences and paragraphs, exquisite and beautiful in their precision. When Viktor first joins the Pilots, a passing drill reminds him that “hard hands cannot control the puck.” In a story in which the physical contact between characters, on the ice or elsewhere, and how those touches are borne and interpreted is paramount, the author is soft-handed. The characters are fully embodied but never violently or egregiously so, even in the throes of a bloody fight. Wendt’s care with details and emotions means the blows land more squarely, bruise deeper than surface skin and tissue.

Although the story is fueled by the dynamics and relationships between characters, the plot provides a satisfying spark. For most of the book, the clock is winding down on Viktor’s pro career and his life as he knows it. This hurtling toward a future he doesn’t want to see is made even more unbearable by a run at the playoffs that could end at any moment. By his own choice, Viktor’s destiny is in someone else’s hands until the final chapters when he must choose for himself, might have to believe “that there could be, for one instant, the possibility of being two things.”

We could interpret “two things” here as identities; for Viktor, he could be a professional hockey player and gay; for Liliya, she could be a respected hockey executive and a woman. Maybe the “two things” are also about belonging: we can be who we truly are and be unconditionally accepted as part of an us. This is often a theme in stories about sport because of how it speaks to our fundamental human longing to be a part of the team without having to give up our true selves. Or the reverse: to be our whole selves and know there is a team out there–blades sharpened, sticks taped–just waiting for us to show up.

Carlee Tressel is a player, watcher, teacher, daughter, and writer of sports. When she worked a campus job at a desk next to Meghan, little did she know she was trying out for a spot on her own personal sports lit Dream Team. Several years and creative projects later – including a book about the GOAT of the cold-rolled steel industry – she is honored to be the newest editor for the Under Review. Alongside her bookish bachelor farmer, Carlee writes and raises corn & kids in rural Indiana.