The Intangibles

The long-awaited first book by the award-winning New Yorker staff writer — a memoir that uses his lifelong obsession with the game of hockey as a prism into a sharp, witty, and entertaining exploration of masculinity, of boys and men, and of sons and fathers

Over the past two decades, Nick Paumgarten has become one of The New Yorker’s most cherished 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. What Paumgarten has never done—until now—is write a book. The Intangibles is his memoir told through the odd but vivid 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.

Paumgarten both explores and undermines some of the mythologies of manhood and sport, while creating a fresh, rich, honest, and funny portrait of men at play—the kind of male play of such outsize personal and group importance that it defies logic, age, orthopedics, and the responsibilities of grown-up life. For all its entertainment and humor, however, The Intangibles also reveals a shadow world that is both shocking and commonplace.

Though he rarely plays anymore, Paumgarten still cherishes the game of hockey. In many respects, The Intangibles is a love letter to the game—and a razor-sharp, original, and mordant anthropology of its participants and their earnest strivings—by one of our finest writers.