Book review: Paumgartne's 'Intangibles' looks at men and sport

The Boston Globe · Hamilton Cain · 2026-11-04 13:00 UTC

A spike in suicides. The loneliness epidemic. Boys lagging in school. The gloom of the manosphere. There’s a crisis in masculinity, experts argue, recognizing crucial differences in biology and socialization; yet solutions seem scarce while discourse splutters on in op-eds and think tanks. Enter Nick Paumgarten. In “The Intangibles,” his first book, the New Yorker staff writer ventures into a maze of cishet friendships through his decades in “beer hockey,” amateur leagues devoted to the has-beens, over-the-hills, and never-wases, all addicted to a game that structures their lives. Raised in WASP splendor on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Paumgarten gravitated toward hockey in rinks across New York and New England, channeling his natural aggression: “Nothing else made me so assertive, combative, or self-righteous, or brought me so much animal joy. It was an altered state, a kind of goblin mode.” His short fuse lights up each match, a coming-of-age in laced skates, stick in hand, eye trained on a puck.

As a student at St. Paul’s he pulled back from the sport, then donned skis at Princeton, but the allure of hockey proved too much when he returned to New York, an aspiring journalist in a committed relationship with his future wife, Siv, who found his passion both eccentric and charming. Paumgarten discovered other aficionados in Tompkins Square Park in 1994, a ragtag bunch removed from his Social Register set and glitzy publishing parties, allowing him to transgress class barriers. His teammates leap from the page: Scoobs, a Minnesotan with type 1 diabetes; Reg, an ex-evangelical from Michigan; Monty, a goalie whose father runs a camp for caddies on Nantucket; Rico, famous for his executive function; and his longtime foil and friend, Junta. “He played a loud game. His skating style was heavy, busy, like sneakers in a dryer,” Paumgarten observes of Junta. “He wiped out a lot and often had snow shavings on his sweater to show for it.” There were no practices and scant organization; the matches started late in the evening, and afterward the guys would debrief in pubs and bars.

Paumgarten embellishes his through-line with a primer on technique and strategy plus an array of details and anecdotes, from the 1980 Olympics’ ”Miracle on Ice” to statistics on Stanley Cup winners. He evokes maneuvers across the “matte finish” of a freshly iced rink, the visceral escape: “Achieving total immersion in play, without a thought or even trace of feeling regarding anything else in your life, outside of the next shift or the battle on the boards with a nameless adversary for possession of the puck is more than palliative. It’s a vacation from yourself.” The memoir also weaves in bits of social history: hockey sprang up in the Gilded Age and took root in New England prep schools and the Ivy League. (St. Paul’s Lower School Pond is considered the birthplace of the sport in the US.) Paumgarten riffs on the West Side’s storied St. Nicholas Hockey Club, underwritten by J.P. Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt, seeing himself both within and apart from his tony milieu, critiquing its customs (“the hometown advantages”) from the safe perch of the present. He tucks New Yorker lore like easter eggs throughout his chapters. This all would seem passé in the hands of a lesser talent, but Paumgarten delivers finely calibrated sentences with echoes of Emerson and Whitman, an American Sublime amid the Plexiglass confines of the rink.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe · All coverage of this story