The Intangibles: Friendship, Fatherhood, and the Love of the Game

Nick Paumgarten’s memoir of his consuming lifelong obsession with a game —hockey —its tribe, and its unreasonable demands.

Over the past two decades, Nick Paumgarten has become one of The New Yorker’s most admired and popular staff writers. He brings to journalism what great novelists bring to fiction: an instinct for character, a respect for complexity, and an eye for the telling moment. The Intangibles is his memoir told through the oddly illuminating lens of hockey. Not a book about hockey, really, but one in which a lifetime of obsessively hanging around the game — as player, parent, son, coach, fan, middle-aged white guy in New York, person of privilege, an imperfect man among other imperfect men — provides a vivid and sneaky-exotic window into a cultish world that hides in plain sight. It’s an alternate realm of aspirational vigor and prolonged boyishness, of plucky brutishness and occasional violence, a haven and a release from the pressures of adulthood and city life.

In The Intangibles — the name of Paumgarten’s beer league team — we meet an array of hockey-crazy men trying to make their way through the world with the baggage that’s been laid on them by the men who came before, and the growing knowledge that they have laid their own baggage on their sons. Striped through the book are surprising veins of vulnerability, reflection, and reckoning.

The Intangibles is also a timely, sharp, and witty exploration of masculinity, of boys and men, and of sons and fathers, of both the toxic and nontoxic kinds. It is a deep, questioning look at a certain world of male friendship, in which sport becomes the common language for a group of men who otherwise might not have one. Paumgarten both explores and undermines some of the mythologies of manhood and sport, while creating a fresh, honest, and funny portrait of men at play — the kind of competitive pursuit that defies logic, age, orthopedics, and the responsibilities of grown-up life.