The Nix

Beautifully written, wonderfully narrated, filled with keen observations and credible interior monologues. Abandoned because it’s too painful to watch the broken people and learn about the things that broke them.

“The Nix” is the first book of my “20 for 20 reading Size Matters challenge": To Read twenty books from my TBR pile that are 600 pages/20 hours long or more.

Books this long (two or three times as long as the typical novel) are a significant investment of time, emotion and imagination, so I promised myself I wouldn't persist with any book in the challenge that had become a book I wasn't looking forward to reading more of.

Sadly, "The Nix" failed that test today.

It's very well written. The narrator delivers a wonderful show more performance. The book is stacked high with believable people and astonishingly well-observed interior monologues. I'm abandoning it because Nathan Hill seems to like to cripple his characters and make me watch. I've decided not to watch any more.

You may feel differently about this book. It has a lot to recommend it. So I'm sharing the reaction I had to each of the first four parts of the book as I went along, to give you the flavour or the book and my experience of it.


Part 1 Like watching a UHD TV

I've just finished part one of this book, which was mostly spent establishing the character of the son, Samuel, whose mother, Faye, has been arrested for throwing gravel at a particularly obnoxious ex-State Governer and with setting the tone for the novel.

It's the tone that I find both most engaging and most difficult to deal with.

This is a book that doesn't have a narrative thrust so much as a slow roll down a gradually steepening slope which instinct tells me is going to accelerate gradually but inexorably until it hits something, probably with a loud bang.

It's a book of scenes that are primarily focused on the interior monologue of the main character in a scene. None of these scenes is tackled quickly. They go on and on and as they go on things get worse and worse and you want it to stop but you know that it won't and you read on anyway.

The scenes could be sketches in a standup comedy: their acutely observed and focus on behaviour that makes you cringe because it's as familiar as it is embarrassing. Except that where a stand-up comedian would be fast, using his or her wit to impale their subject in a flash of verbal steel, "The Nix" is slow and relentless, flaying the subject inch by bleeding, painful inch.

There's the scene where a character. in the process of falling into sleep after a disappointing day, rehearses all the reasons why, day after day, he fails to change his life, sort out his house, start his new diet, break free of his obsessive behaviour and be the person he wants to be. It's a mixture of hope, regret, self-reproach and self-deception that I'm sure most of us have experienced and it's there in all its unforgettable technicolour glory.

There's another scene, that goes on and on, in which Samuel, a professor of English at a minor school, tells a student that he's failing her for plagiarism and finds himself on the receiving end of false argument after false argument about why he can't do this until his rage overtakes him and he says something that he shouldn't. This slow but predictable loss of control in the face of faux-outrage is all very familiar to me.

So, I know it's meant, probably, on some level, to be funny. The problem is that it is too true to be funny. Tragic. Masochistic. Nightmarish. Any of these words can be made to fit but not funny.

I feel as I do when I see those huge Ultra High Definition TV screens showing programs in the showrooms of electronics stores: overwhelmed and disoriented. The image I'm looking at is SO detailed and SO clear that it feels like a distortion. I NEVER see the real world with that level of clarity, so the television's accuracy is disquieting.

I'm going to continue with "The NIx" because I'm fascinated by the ability to sustain this hellish but familiar view of life and because I want to be there when the rate of roll of the plot reaches it highest velocity.

Part 2: The book as a hologram

This is one of those books where the idea of moving through the story from beginning to end is treated as a bizarre idea that the reader must abandon early to avoid frustration.

At one point, Samuel's agent explains that those who think publishing is about books are obsessing about the container when they should be focusing on the content.

"The Nix" is more like a hologram than a book. The author uses the text to turn the content in the light, letting the reader see it from different angles. The "it" is not really a story, it's a person, our hero. It's who is, who he was, who he will become but it's all of those things at the same time. The hologram is his identity. Although changing the angle at which the reader sees the hologram shows up different aspects of the hologram, the thing itself is there in its entirety and unchanging from the first page to the last.

This means that, although Part 1 ends with Samuel meeting his beleaguered mother for the first time in more than two decades, Part 2 takes us backwards, not forwards, to Samuel's childhood and because I know something of the man he now is, I see the boy he was differently than if I had met the boy first. The man is not the outcome of the boy, the boy is the outcome of the man.

This may sound weird but it feels normal and easy to understand when I'm reading the book, partly because the author takes this approach to narrative entirely for granted.

What does seem weird is the description of American High Schools in the 1980s. Where they really so authoritarian? Did they really issue passes, that constituted a contract about required behaviour before allowing eleven-year-olds to go to the toilet during class? And did the students really comply? It's described with such forceful clarity that I'm inclined to believe it but it feels very alien to me.

Part 2 continued: Thank you for making me confront this about myself

I've finished part two of the book, set in Samuel's childhood. It was intense, vividly described and mostly unpleasant.

Part of the unpleasantness is something I'm generating.

Here's this sensitive, vulnerable eleven-year-old kid that I ought to feel sorry for or at least feel some empathy for. He's puzzled by his enigmatic, secretive, often distant mother. He's afraid of everything. He cries uncontrollably at the slightest provocation and can do nothing to stop himself. He feels abandoned, alone and afraid.

And I don't like him.

I don't like spending time in his head.

His snivelling anxiety fills me with a slow-burning anger.

I want him to either grow up or shut up but I know that he's going to grow up to be a man riddled with anxiety and fear and a sense of being owed something because he was damaged and it wasn't his fault and his life isn't what it should be and he isn't who he should be and none of that is his fault either.

And instead of sympathising or sharing his pain, I just want to tell him to get over himself and take care of what's in front of him.

I don't like this response. I'd like to be nicer than that but I'm not. So thank you, Nathan Hill, for making me confront that about myself.

I really, really hope this is all going somewhere and won't just end with "Ain't life awful?"

Part 3: some very well done character pieces

Part three had some great scenes in it: the girl who keeps justifying why she can't and shouldn't need to read Hamlet and how successful she's going to be in business because of her social media presence. The way in which the grandfather remembers Norway and his youth there and how this is interwoven with dementia. The strange lawyer who speaks as if he were a legal text, denying or defining reality and sweating relentlessly. Still don't like the main character but I'm keeping reading because the next part is about his mother's youth and she seems interesting.


Part 4: Why does he keep doing this to his characters?

Part four initially re-engaged me with the novel. It goes further back in time and focuses on Faye's Highschool years. I liked Faye. I'm meant to like her.

Once that's accomplished, once I care about her, Nathan Hill cripples her.

He imposes severe anxiety attacks on her that turn her into someone morbidly afraid of failing at anything. She excels at every task she takes on and avoids any task or social situation in which she might fail. She's about to escape to a scholarship in Chicago but I know Nathan Hill's pattern now, he pulls off his character's wings before they're able to fly, so I know something cruel is about to happen to break Faye further.

I don't want to watch it happen. I don't even want to know what it is. So, nine hours into a book that is more than twenty-one hours long, I'm setting it aside to read something where the writer is less cruel to his characters. show less

This book! I'm conflicted about what to say about Nathan Hill's debut novel. On the one hand, it's one of my favorite kind of book - a big, meaty novel full of heart, and it's well-written and there are characters who are so nuanced and fully realized that it's a pleasure to read about them. Hill manages to humanize even the one truly bad man in this book - sure it's his wife's fault, but he's got layers. The Nix is a book about family, about how the ones you love are the ones who will hurt you, about the weight of the past, forgiveness and understanding.

And it's a messy, bloated book, in which one character is made to be the one we are all supposed to hate and, unlike every other character, drawn without depth to be the butt of jokes. show more It's a novel where women are the source of men's discomfort, the cause of their failure and their reward for successfully changing their ways. And it's a novel with everything neatly and nicely tied up at the end, no ambiguity allowed.

Samuel teaches English at a suburban university. He's not very good at it, preferring to put all his energy into not writing the book for which the advance has long been spent and playing an online World of Warcraft-style game. He's mad at his Mom for leaving him when he was eleven, which is also the year he made a good friend and developed a crush on his friend's talented sister. When his mother resurfaces - she's arrested for assaulting a presidential candidate - he agrees to write a nasty tell-all.

The Nix moves forward and back as it follows his mother's past, Samuel's childhood and their present, in a world almost, but not quite like our own. It's the kind of book that's hard to put down, at least when Hill sticks with his main and secondary characters. He does go off on tangents that detract from the story he's telling, but the parts that center on Samuel, his mother or the people in their immediate orbit, the book is fantastic.

I'm looking forward to what this author does next, and in seeing how he hones his craft. show less

Right up my alley!

The Nix is primarily the story of Samuel and his mother, Faye, and their problematic relationship. It alternates time frames between the late 60's and 2011.

The writing is oh-so-compulsively-readable. I loved it. It reminds me of Franzen (and actually Chabon a bit), but more engaging and a lot more humorous. This book has very funny moments, however it isn't comedic. It is highly character driven, which I loved. Hill is also excellent at weaving together the highs and lows of his characters in a way that gets the reader very invested.

There is a twist of sorts at the end which was fine, but really wasn't necessary for the book to be great, and to me, it felt slightly superfluous and forced. But that didn't detract for show more me. The actual ride is what makes this book special as opposed to the conclusion. I didn't want it to end. I honestly cannot wait to see what Hill does next with his talent . . . show less

This is often billed as a humorous book - I didn't find much humor, but I did find it fascinating. It's a great tale of an era, a slice of time - anti war protesters and college protests and a grown son trying to come to terms with his mom's abandonment. It took me a while to get caught up in the story and the unique storytelling style, but once "in", I found myself really enjoying the book, and even the odd, stream-of-consciousness type writing. Increasing my enjoyment were the philosophical gems scattered here and there - those sentences that just make you pause and think for a minute. Recommended.

*Well.* This is the best experience I've had reading literary fiction in yonks. Given my tendency lately to put books down without finishing them, I was a little wary of picking up a 700+ page piece of litfic, but I was also looking for some litfic that would kind of get me back into the groove of litfic. Not sure exactly what about The Nix made me think it was the book to do that, but it sure did. It took me about three weeks to finish this with fairly steady reading, and that feels decidedly like an accomplishment to me these days. It was long and it took a minute to read and I still stuck with it to the end. Booyah! Hill would be on my "Yay!" list if for only that, but, you guys, this book. It's awesome.

The story revolves around show more Samuel Andresen-Anderson, a teacher of freshmen comp at a university, and his mother, Faye, who abandoned him when he was a child but has resurfaced in Samuel's life through some highly publicized legal trouble she's landed herself in. The narrative moves among the present (2011), Samuel's childhood (1988), and Faye's teenaged years (1968), and explores their family dynamics. Those narrative moves are extremely satisfying, but what most interested and impressed me about The Nix was the way it presents and examines American attitudes toward media, news, and politics. Over the course of the novel we see the protest/riot around the Democratic National Convention in '68 from the perspective of several characters protesting as well as from the police; from the perspective of Walter Cronkite covering it; from the perspective of "average Americans" watching the coverage. We see a very talented player of a MMORPG who is addicted to the game. We see a publisher trying to capitalize on a scandal before it leaves the collective American consciousness. We see family stories and how they do or don't stack up against reality. All these threads come together well, and as a whole they create this amazing look at narrative and story and news and reality and belief and how all those things play together to create individual and mass perceptions of the world that drive events but which are, to degrees we really can't even fathom from any one point of view, wildly untrue. You know that little frisson you get when you're reading a thriller or mystery or other puzzly book and you realize how it's all going to come together? I got that sensation in the last forty pages or so of [The Nix] at how he was bringing all his story and thematic threads together.

This is decidedly the best book I've read so far this year. It's engaging, entertaining, well written, and says what it has to say masterfully. Read it, read it, read it. show less

One of the advantages to letting a book sit on your TBR list for a few years is that by the time you get around to reading it, you don’t remember the reviews, the blurbs, the plot synopses, or the hype that made you put it on your list to begin with. So it was for me with The Nix. All I remembered was that a nix is a mythological creature, so I went into this novel expecting something very different, and it turns out that what I got was very much better than what I was expecting.

The titular nix is a metaphor, so rather than a fantasy about Nordic monsters, I got a thought-provoking examination of the often bad choices we make in life, the monsters and burdens we thereby create and have to carry through life, and ultimately how we show more can—if not overcome them—learn to deal with them.

The story begins with Samuel Andresen-Anderson, a frustrated and bitter English lit teacher at a backwaters college, addicted to the RPG game Elfscape, stalled in the writing career that had seemed so promising when he was younger. The narrative gradually expands to reveal his past and that of several other characters who had a major impact on his life, including his mother Faye, who abandoned him as a child but abruptly reenters his life when she is involved in an act of political protest against a presidential candidate that goes viral; his boyhood friend Bishop; the love of his life, Bishop’s sister Bethany; and even his publisher, who ends up connecting to these threads in an unexpected way. We even get a glimpse of the past of his grandfather, Faye’s father, before he emigrated from Norway.

The novel started out with a light, somewhat flippant tone (maybe due to the audiobook narrator), so I was also expecting something more humorous and breezy. But again, though there is humor, there’s also pain and angst and ultimately resolution as the various characters come to deal with their monsters and ghosts. show less

''Αnd he used the ghost stories his mother told him, all those old Norwegian stories that terrified him. He wrote about a white horse that appeared suddenly, offering a ride, and if the reader decided to mount the horse, terrible death quickly followed. In another ending, the reader becomes a ghost trapped inside of a leaf, too bad to go to heaven, too good to go to hell.''

Samuel is a quiet, charismatic young professor, condemned to teach the beautiful subject of Literature to an audience of ''students'' who prefer to get drunk and post naked selfies on Instagram. Playing an RPG is a way out of his own troubles and the absence of a mother who walked out of his life years ago. However, she is in trouble now and Samuel realizes that he show more needs to understand Faye's motive for abandoning him. He needs to understand these new, turbulent times. He needs to understand himself.

And this is one of the greatest American novels of all time...

''They're not protesting me, per see. Nor my company, specifically. More like the world that brought my company into being. Multinational. Globalization. Capitalism. The ninety-nine percent is, I believe, their catchphrase.''

''Occupy Wall Street.''

''That's the one. Pretty grandiose name, if you ask me. They are not occupying Wall Street so much as a small rectangle of concrete about a thousand feet away from it.''

I love Periwinkle.

Nathan Hill creates an exquisite story that takes us from Norway during the Nazi occupation to Iowa during the 60s, the Chicago riots in 1968, to the Great Recession and the Occupy Wall Street movement. He blends a dozen genres, from Magical Realism to Historical Fiction to Literary Fiction, and a hundred techniques and writing styles, and produces a masterpiece where politics and social issues are blended with the folklore of the Nordic lands and the storms that rage in our souls.

Hill comments on the madness that lies in the battlefield of politics. Which one is correct, which one stands on the wrong side of History? No one knows for sure. Racial issues, musings on sexual identity, social status, the publishing world, a deeply corrupted education and judicial system where rich kids have the power to demand the punishment of a teacher who refused to yield, where judges can persecute and condemn innocent citizens without fear or control. He provides accurate commentary on today's young audience who considers the classics useless and ''why should we ever need to read these?'' Because you need education to become a better person, you idiots, that's why! I see it on bloody Goodreads all the time and it makes me shiver. But, hey, as long as we write intense (but short, mind you) monologues on Twitter. It goes without saying that I skipped the two chapters that included Laura, the most pathetic creature I've ever encountered in a novel and a mirror for most of today's society...

He vividly depicts the ignorance, naivety and narrow-mindedness of the radical groups all these years. Groups that are as tyrannical as the ones they protect against. But Faye doesn't buy their BS, nor does Samuel. Poor Faye is made to feel guilty for being better than her parents and their awful ''social circle'' of brutes. To excel is to be proud and vain. Small wonder she had enough! Hill even touches on the ridiculous use of the word ''toxic'', a part of today's language, beloved by the ones who aren't aware of the existence of other negative adjectives, because of Twitter and Facebook...

No need to tell you how much I loved Faye and Samuel and how much I loathed Alice, Laura, and Brown. In literary terms, I found this novel to be perfect. Flawless. There are many striking scenes, like the coffin-bearing procession and the 1968 riots. He creates such a brilliant depiction of scenery throughout and especially in New York which he describes with a particular fondness. And did you know that in Norwegian, gift could mean either ''poison'' or ''marriage''? Sounds about right, if you ask me.

There is a particular warmth about American Literature. I can't describe it with accuracy but I feel that even in the midst of extremely difficult events, there is a warmth and a sense of immediacy and tenderness. This novel is the very definition of this. The Nix is a one-of-a-kind reading experience.

''The things you love the most will one day hurt you the most.''

My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/ show less