The Nix by Nathan Hill

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


“I’m writing my mother’s story,” Samuel Said. “But I’m writing the true story. The actual events…”

“So it’s going to be like 600 pages and ten people will read it? Congratulations.”

Oh…well played, Mr. Hill…well played.

The Nix is Nathan Hill’s first novel (for the record it is 620 pages in hardcover) and this little nugget at the end is like the meta explanation for the story…I am not sure if the wonderful novel I have just read is true in any sense of the word, other than the truth that only art can bring…

A Nix is “anything that you love that one day disappears, along with a piece of your heart…” In Samuel Andresen-Anderson’s life, it is his mother who disappeared long ago…only to reappear later in the most chaotic of ways.

Samuel is a college professor who whiles away his down time playing a computer game called Elfscape…he finds himself at a career crossroads, teaching ungrateful kids the finer points of “things we will never use” and realizing the real world is much less accommodating than his fantasy world. He once had the whole world in front of him…he had a book deal but found he could never write that book. Suddenly he is no longer a promising young man but a floundering middle-aged man.

Now he owes his publisher a book…or he needs to pay back a whole lot of money that he doesn’t have.

And one of his ungrateful students is threatening to make his life hell….

Meanwhile…his long-lost mother reappears….and commits an act of violence against a blowhard potential candidate for president. And an opportunity arises…to tell the story of his mother (Faye) and how she disappeared and what she was doing all this time…we go back to 1968 and the Democratic National Convention…we go back even further and learn about her parents…and through this tapestry we see how one thing led to another and you know…it’s 620 pages and most of it works.

The Nix is a pleasure to read, the kind of novel that makes you stop and think about your own things that have been lost, and what could we have done to make them stay?



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