The Intangibles
Friendship, Fatherhood, and the Love of the Game
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The Intangibles
Narrated by:
Nick Paumgarten
Pre-order Now for £14.69
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Narrated by:
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Nick Paumgarten
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By:
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Nick Paumgarten
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.
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Critic reviews
"When I finished this book, I experienced many different emotions at once. I felt deeply unsettled, filled with both melancholy and triumph, mixed with feelings of admiration and envy for the beautiful writing and the howitzer power of the details, and with the sense that I'd finally read the sports story I've been waiting for my whole life. I loved this book, clearly, but more important, I get it. How this was a story Nick Paumgarten must tell, a story he'd been preparing, byline by byline, to write for his whole life. I understood his lofty ambitions, how he wanted to create a lush tapestry in which his teammates — in which he and his father and his sons — could strive towards the only real job for a man: to take what we inherited and pass on the good, and try to understand and prune the bad, and to find our place on a wheel that is turning and can't slow down. To know ourselves before we return to dust. In the end his outsized ambitions are matched, then surpassed, by the way the book lingers emotionally after the last sentence like the echoes of a siren or train horn in an empty midnight hockey barn." — Wright Thompson, New York Times bestselling author of The Barn, Pappyland, and The Cost of These Dreams
"Nick Paumgarten's marvelous memoir The Intangibles is itself filled with so many intangibles that they are impossible to catalogue. There is the charm, the wit, the poignant coming-of-age story, the laugh-out-loud lines, the mad beer-league hockey scenes, the violence, the grace, the messiness of life, the insights into parenthood, the moments of transcendence. What they all add up to is something tangible: one of the best books I've read this year, or any other." — David Grann, #1 New York Times bestselling author
"Nick Paumgarten's marvelous memoir The Intangibles is itself filled with so many intangibles that they are impossible to catalogue. There is the charm, the wit, the poignant coming-of-age story, the laugh-out-loud lines, the mad beer-league hockey scenes, the violence, the grace, the messiness of life, the insights into parenthood, the moments of transcendence. What they all add up to is something tangible: one of the best books I've read this year, or any other." — David Grann, #1 New York Times bestselling author
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