The Intangibles

The Intangibles is Paumgarten's 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 a "beer League" player, a parent, a son, a coach, a fan, a middle-aged white guy in New York, a 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.

The Intangibles is also a timely, sharp, and witty exploration of masculinity, of boys and men, sons and fathers, of both the toxic and non-toxic kinds. And a deep, questioning look at, and finally a celebration of, a certain world of male friendship, in which sport - or the dreams of sport - becomes the lingua franca for a group of men with all their faults and hopes. Paumgarten's memoir both explores and undermines some of the mythologies of manhood and sport, while creating a fresh, rich, and honest portrait of men at play - the kind of male play of such outsized 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 male world that is both shocking and commonplace. It happens to be an atmosphere that many American boys and men still breathe - in schools, offices, locker rooms, bars, and backyards - and that women have had to contend with. Paumgarten never felt entirely comfortable around bro culture, but it's always been there, in myriad forms, from the subtle to the extreme. In The Intangibles - the name of Paumgarten's most memorable beer league team - we meet an array of hockey-crazy men, the author included, trying to make their way through the world with the baggage that's been laid on them by the men came before them - fathers, grandfathers, coaches, sports heroes - and the growing knowledge that they have laid their own baggage on their sons. Striped through these mines of granite and ore, shining like precious metals, are surprising veins of vulnerability, reflection, and reckoning.

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.