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What other writers, young and old, prized most about Mr. Updike was his prose — that amazing instrument, like a jeweler’s loupe; so precise, exquisitely attentive and seemingly effortless. If there were a pill you could take to write like that, who wouldn’t swallow a handful? Equally inspiring was his faith in the writing itself. He toyed once or twice with magic realism, but the experiment never really worked and he gave it up. Though he loved Jorge Luis Borges, he didn’t in his own work go in for Borgesian mirror games, and he was free from the postmodern anxiety about the fictiveness of fiction, the unreliability of language. He was an old-fashioned realist, with an unswerving belief in the power of words to faithfully record experience and to enhance it. If other writers, younger ones especially, couldn’t quite subscribe to that belief, still it was reassuring to know that there was someone who did.
Jack Falla, who died earlier this year at the age of 64, was one of the last of a breed — a very good hockey writer who never became burned out or cynical. He covered hockey for Sports Illustrated in the ’80s, the great Gretzky years, and then turned to teaching and writing books about hockey. He even wrote a hockey novel, “Saved,” which is easily the best goalie novel ever (in truth, there aren’t very many) and in the tiny pantheon of hockey novels stands not that far from “Amazons,” written by Don DeLillo under the pseudonym Cleo Birdwell, and has the additional virtue of being actually obtainable. (After DeLillio disowned “Amazons,” it became so scarce that you can’t find a copy for love or money.)
Falla was not the prose equivalent of his idol Jean Béliveau; he was less a stylish, mesmerizing writer than a straightforward, unassuming one, and he hated flourishes and pretension. He used to tell his students: dependability beats talent if talent isn’t dependable.
