The Nix - Nathan Hill

     2016; 625 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Dark Comedy; Family Secrets.  Laurels: 2016 Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction – Los Angeles Times Book Prize (winner), NBCC Leonard Award for Best Debut of the Year (nominated).  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

 

    It’s 2011, and Samuel Anderson is doing pretty good in life.  He’s an assistant professor of English at the Illinois university called “Chicago Circle”, striving to impart a spark of excitement for classic literature in college students whose interest is generally limited to doing just enough to pass his course for their Humanities credit.

 

    Since he's a nerdy English teacher, it’s not surprising that Samuel’s favorite pastime is playing an internet roleplaying game called Elfscape for hours on end.  He’s gotten pretty good at it, although the real pro is one of his fellow gamers known as “Pwnage”.  Samuel mostly plays the game at home during evening hours, although he occasionally sneaks online to play it on his university computer if no one is looking.

 

    Samuel is also an aspiring author, and was talented enough to receive a significant cash advance from a publishing company after winning a high school writing contest some years back.  Alas, his publishers are getting impatient, having waited several years now for him to write a bestselling debut novel for them.  But perhaps Samuel’s writer’s block is due to a dark secret he’s been carrying for years.

 

   Long ago, his mother deserted him and his father.  No warning, no reason given.  She packed her bags, kissed young Samuel on the forehead, split the scene in the middle of the night, and never returned.  Where could she be?

 

    Samuel’s about to get an answer to that.  Some crazy lady’s just been arrested for assaulting a presidential candidate after throwing rocks at him in a Chicago public park.  Yes, it might be a coincidence - someone with the same name as Samuel’s mom.  But let’s be real here, how many other people can there be named Faye Andresen-Anderson?

 

What’s To Like...

   The main storyline in The Nix follows the efforts made by Samuel to learn why his mom ran off years ago, but there are long detours into the lives of several secondary characters, namely Bishop, Bethany, Samuel’s grandfather Frank/Fridtjof, Alice, and Pwnage.  The book is divided into ten parts, with varying numbers of chapters in each of those (89 chapters total), and with the time settings bouncing around between 2011 (the book’s present-day), 1988, and 1968.  Samuel meets his mom in Part 3, but that conversation mostly generates more questions instead of answering some things.

 

    I’d describe the writing style as “Proustian” – long, run-on sentences abound that are surprisingly easy to follow (unlike Proust’s), but nevertheless make for slow reading.  Indeed, in one chapter (Part 8.3) with only two sentences: the first one is eight words long; the second one spreads out over ten pages or so. Kerouac would be jealous.

 

    The mammoth sentence is just one a number of literary capers that Nathan Hill uses.  Other examples: a.) chronicling the thoughts going on in the head of a person suffering from Alzheimer's; b.) discussing the four types of problems and/or people (see below); c.) detailing the sixteen ways to defend yourself if you're caught by your professor plagiarizing an essay for a homework assignment; and d.) simulating a “Choose Your Own Adventure” for Samuel, leaving the reader to guess its last choice.

 

    If this all sounds confusingly complex, fear not: despite The Nix being Nathan Hill’s debut novel, the writing is masterly.  I suspect the 1968 protests in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, which figure prominently into the storyline, are before his time, although he seems to want to keep his age a secret – neither Wikipedia nor Amazon lists it.  Yet that was during my college years, and I felt he captured the mood perfectly.  Ditto for his descriptions of things like college dormitory living, the “free love” era in the late 60s, and the grittiness of going on patrol during the occupation of Iraq.

 

    I also loved the way Nathan Hill works an incredible amount of trivia into the story.  There are a slew of Book, Music, and Video Game references, including Allen Ginsburg (who is also a character in the book), Basho, Phil Ochs, Sun Ra, Max Bruch (who?), Mega Man, and Missile Command.  The “Chucky the Camel and the Campbell’s soup can” incident is both surreal and enlightening.  Things like the drowning stone, the “maarr”, TMJ, Max Bruch, and the pronunciation of “Pwnage” were new to me.  I liked that things like solfege, sulfides, and synesthesia got mentioned, and I suspect that things such as Molly Miller, the iFeel social app, and the “Pleisto Diet” are all products of the author's fertile imagination.

 

    The ending is twisty, eye-opening, and heartwarming.  Samuel’s life has definitely changed, hopefully for the better.  Things stop a t a logical point, but very few plot threads are tied up.  That doesn't surprise or disappoint me – if you’re telling a story of a family, it is more realistic to end with “they continued on” than “they all lived happily ever after”.  What did impress me was Nathan Hill’s ability to tie all the plot threads together into a coherent conclusion.  The life stories of Pwnage, Laura, Faye, Samuel, Frank, and Bethany all merge together seamlessly.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Prognathic (adj.) : having jaws or mouth parts that project forward to a marked degree.

Others: Concomitant (adj);  Panopticon (n); Pullulation (n); TMJ (acronym).

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.2/5 based on 1,391 ratings.

    Goodreads: 4.07/5 based on 60,804 ratings and 7,580 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    “You can’t fail me because it’s the law.”

    “This meeting is over.”

    “You can’t fail me because I have a learning disability.”

    “You do not have a learning disability.”

    “I do.  I have trouble paying attention and keeping deadlines and reading and also I don’t make friends.”

    “That’s not true.”

    “It is true.  You can check.  It’s documented.”

    “What is the name of your learning disability?”

    “They don’t have a name for it yet.”

    “That’s convenient.”  (loc. 881)

 

    They wondered how many people would be showing up for the protest.  Five thousand?  Ten thousand?  Fifty thousand?  He told them a story.

    “Two men went into a garden,” he said.  “The first man began to count the mango trees, and how many mangoes each tree bore, and what the approximate value of the whole orchard might be.  The second man plucked some fruit and ate it.  Now which, do you think, was the wiser of these two?”

    The kids all looked at him, eyes as blank as lambs.

    “Eat mangoes!” he said.  (loc. 7512)

 

 

Kindle Details…

    Right now, The Nix sells for $12.99 at Amazon.  I felt very fortunate to find it when it was temporarily on discount a couple months ago.  This appears to be Nathan Hill’s only novel to date, which surprises me in light of The Nix’s phenomenal reception back in 2016.

 

“Any problem in a video game or in life is one of four things: an enemy, obstacle, puzzle, or trap.  That’s it.  Everyone you meet in life is one of those four things.” (loc. 3382)

    The quibbles are minor.  The reason for the book’s title eludes me.  A “nix” is a gnomish fairy-tale creature, and its presence in the story is tenuous at best.  There’s a “Discussion Questions” section in the back of the book, and is first one is “why the title”?  If I was in Samuel’s “Intro to Lit” class, I'm afraid I'd flunk that essay question.

 

    There’s a fair amount of cussing, and some references to sexual abuse and explicit sexual practices.  I thought it fit in nicely with the mood of the story, but prudes may disagree.  The main plotline, as mentioned, is Samuel’s family investigations, but there were times, such as when we’re riding along with his friend Bishop on patrol in Iraq, when I wondered just where the story was going.

 

    Finally, on an editing note, there seemed to be an equal split between the spellings of protesters/protestors.  Either is correct (English is a goofy language), but you’d think Nathan Hill would’ve chosen one way or the other, not both.  Admittedly, I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel when I’m griping about this sort of thing.

 

    9 Stars.  A great book which lived up to the hype I'd heard about it, and highly recommended.  I’d been wanting to read The Nix for quite some time, but my local libraries never had any copies in stock.  So it was a treat to find it discounted recently at Amazon.