The Nix: A novel by Nathan Hill (Epub)

Description

From the suburban Midwest to New York City to the 1968 riots that rocked Chicago and beyond, The Nix explores—with sharp humor and a fierce tenderness—the resilience of love and home, even in times of radical change.

It’s 2011, and Samuel Andresen-Anderson—college professor, stalled writer—has a Nix of his own: his mother, Faye. He hasn’t seen her in decades, not since she abandoned the family when he was a boy. Now she’s re-appeared, having committed an absurd crime that electrifies the nightly news, beguiles the internet, and inflames a politically divided country. The media paints Faye as a radical hippie with a sordid past, but as far as Samuel knows, his mother was an ordinary girl who married her high-school sweetheart. Which version of his mother is true? Two facts are certain: she’s facing some serious charges, and she needs Samuel’s help.

To save her, Samuel will have to embark on his own journey, uncovering long-buried secrets about the woman he thought he knew, secrets that stretch across generations and have their origin all the way back in Norway, home of the mysterious Nix. As he does so, Samuel will confront not only Faye’s losses but also his own lost love, and will relearn everything he thought he knew about his mother, and himself.

User’s Reviews

Amazon.com Review An Amazon Best Book of September 2016: The Nix is a surprising novel that you didn’t know you were waiting for until you start reading. At its center is Samuel Andresen-Anderson, a failed writer and increasingly apathetic college professor, who gets a second chance at literary fame from the most unlikely source—the mother who abandoned him as a child. The American public is up in arms about a rather absurd crime that Samuel’s mother committed against an obnoxious politician. While Sam is shocked and surprised to learn the whereabouts of his estranged mother, he also realizes it’s the chance of a lifetime to tap into the zeitgeist with some choice tidbits about her, if he can write it before media A.D.D. sets in. But in order to write the book that will revive him, Samuel is forced to dig into her life, and he discovers a completely different version of the woman he thought he knew; it turns out he’s not the only one who’s life is carved out of traumatic events. Nathan Hill is incredibly perceptive, as in this, which I can’t stop thinking about: “The things we love the most are the most disfiguring. Such is our greed for them.” Hill has created a brilliant junction of mother-son saga and comic satire about our self-righteous and obsessive society. This is a big, clever novel that wraps itself around you until you never want to leave. –Seira Wilson, The Amazon Book Review –This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Reviews from Amazon users, collected at the time the book is getting published on UniedVRG. It can be related to shiping or paper quality instead of the book content:

⭐ This is my goodreads review:It’s been awhile since I’ve been as affected by a book as I am by The Nix. Jason Sheehan reviewed the book for NPR, and captures some of my feelings:http://www.npr.org/2016/08/31/4901018…”After 10 pages of Nathan Hill’s debut novel, The Nix, I flipped to the dust jacket. I wanted to see what the author looked like because I was thinking to myself, Jesus, this guy is gonna be famous. I wanna see what he looks like. At 50 pages in I smiled when my train was delayed — a few extra minutes to read about Samuel Andresen-Anderson, the assistant English professor and gone-nowhere writer who’d failed to live up to a tiny bit of early promise. At around 100 pages, Samuel is in 6th grade — lonely, panicky, a crier at the least little thing — and I know I’m going to miss anything like a reasonable bedtime. At 200, it is stories of Samuel’s mother that keeps me turning pages: A teenager in 1968, driven, tightly wound. It is the sketched background of the woman who will abandon Samuel at 11 years old and wreck him in all the million ways that such a thing will wreck a delicate boy; the woman who will float back into his life years later on cable television — briefly notorious for throwing a handful of rocks at a conservative republican presidential candidate in a Chicago park….The Nix is 620 pages long. My last dog-ear is on page 613. It’s nothing important. Just a funny story told by one character to another about the Northern Lights and the burden of expectation. It is lovely in precisely the same way that a thousand of Hill’s other paragraphs are lovely — these looping, run-on, wildly digressive pages which, somehow, in their absolute refusal to cling together and act like a book, make the perfect book for our distracted age.”This book fits our time like David Foster Wallace was able to do with Infinite Jest, and Nathan Hill has that same brilliant, challenging writing style, on top of a satirical eye that covers the range of our modern world’s obsessions. I have so many sticky notes in the book that it’s hard to choose, but here are some of the lines that will stay with me, as he skewers everything from politics and journalism to materialism and obsessions. Mainly, all I can say is READ THIS!! :-)He opens with one page of the old Buddhist tale of the blind men and the elephant–which is woven so creatively into the book. These characters–especially the mother, Faye, and her son, Samuel–are all “blind”, in the way of humans to be limited in our perceptions of both life and ourselves. Faye says, on p. 565:”In the story of the blind men and the elephant, what’s usually ignored is the fact that each man’s description was correct. What Faye won’t understand and may never understand is that there is not one true self hidden by many false ones. Rather, there is one true self hidden by many other true ones. Yes, she is the meek and shy and industrious student. Yes, she is the panicky and frightened child. Yes, she is the bold and impulsive seductress. Yes, she is the wife and mother. And many other things as well. Her belief that only one of these is true obscures the larger truth, which was ultimately the problem with the blind men and the elephant. It wasn’t that they were blind–it’s that they stopped too quickly, and so never knew there was a larger truth to grasp.”Parts of the book make my heart ache–for the abused boy Bishop, for the stinging descriptions of what went on at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, for my favorite character Pwnage–lost in a video game since real life has become unbearable.But also, at times I was laughing out loud and saying, “Right on!” when Hill uses satire as viciously as Vonnegut and Twain ever did. Here, on p. 65, he nails road rage as Samuel explains why he hates to drive in Chicago:”The closer he gets to the city, the more the highway feels malicious and warlike–wild zigzagging drivers cutting people off, tailgating, honking horns, flashing their lights, all their private traumas now publicly enlarged.On p. 107, he captures all the inane, ludicrous qualities of a shopping mall, beginning with a long list of meaningless merchandise:”With its hundreds of stores and booths, the mall seemed to make a simple promise: that here you would find everything you needed….the mall’s overwhelmingness was meant to replace your imagination. Forget trying to dream of your desires; the mall had already dreamed them up for you.”On p. 530, he captures the despair of Walter Cronkite, trying to make sense of what is happening in Chicago in 1968. Even though Hill says he wrote the political sections a few years ago, the chilling timeliness of these lines is disturbing:”It’s a chilling thought, that politicians have learned to manipulate the television medium better than the television professionals themselves. When old Cronkite first realized this was happening he imagined the kinds of people who would become politicians in the future. And he shuddered with fear.”I could go on and on–but I want to get at the reason for the unusual title. At the beginning of chapter 5, Faye explains the old myth of the Nix from her Norwegian heritage–a beautiful white horse that allows a child to ride it, and then the child wants to show off to others–and “when they most wanted to be celebrated for it and thus felt the most vanity and arrogance and pride” the horse jumps off a cliff and are drowned. Then she tells Samuel:” The Nix used to appear as a horse,’ she said, ‘but that was in the old days.”What does it look like now?”It’s different for everyone. But it usually appears as a person. Usually it’s someone you think you love.’Samuel still did not understand.’People love each other for many reasons, not all of them good,’ she said. ‘They love each other because it’s easy. Or because they’re used to it. Or because they’ve given up. Or because they’re scared. People can be a Nix for each other.’ “I must tie this up, but need to mention two conventions of the book that worked so well, imho. Samuel loves “Choose Your Own Adventure” books as a child, and one entire chapter is titled “You Can Get the Girl” and is written in the format of those books. The other is the chapter about Pwnage, which is 11 pages of one sentence, and it works powerfully.Because I’m a grandma who plays Wizard 101, Pwnage’s escape into a video game held special poignancy for me (in gaming, “Pwn” means you “own”, or have beaten, an opponent. (And if it seems strange that a 76 year old would know that tidbit, it is! 🙂 This whole chapter is his attempt to break free of the addiction. Just read it straight through to get the total effect.I’ll conclude with some of the blurbs from Amazon:”A mother-son psychodrama with ghosts and politics, but it’s also a tragicomedy about anger and sanctimony in America. . . . Nathan Hill is a maestro.” —John Irving“A fantastic novel about love, betrayal, politics and pop culture—as good as the best Michael Chabon or Jonathan Franzen.” —People“It broke my heart, this book. Time after time. It made me laugh just as often. I loved it on the first page as powerfully as I did on the last.” —Jason Sheehan, NPR.org“Hill has so much talent to burn that he can pull of just about any style, imagine himself into any person and convincingly portray any place or time. The Nix is hugely entertaining and unfailingly smart, and the author seems incapable of writing a pedestrian sentence or spinning a boring story. . . . [A] supersize and audacious novel of American misadventure.” —Teddy Wayne, The New York Times Book Review“Irresistible. . . . A major new comic novelist . . . . Hill is a sharp social observer, hyper-alert to the absurdities of modern life. . . . his enormous book arrives as one of the stars of the fall season. . . . readers will find this novel. And they’ll be dazzled.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post

⭐ This book is six hundred pages. Here’s some topics it covers: video game addiction, war protesting, gentrification, social media expression, pedophile principals, crooked cops, consumerism, morality of war, immigration, outdated gender roles…that’s probably ten percent of its range, and I’d have taken more. If the quality were sustainable, I’d have read 6,000 pages, and this top ten list could then just be a single bullet point that was actually a heart emoji. I’ve recommended this at least a hundred times since I read it. My wife read it simply so I would stop badgering her to read it. It’s amazing. Here’s my favorite quote from an advertising agent explaining an ad that is simply a picture of a potato chip and two words: SNACK ROUTINE.“Think about it. Why does one eat a snack? Why is a snack necessary? The answer—and we’ve done a million studies on this—is because our lives are filled with tedium and drudgery and endless toil and we need a tiny blip of pleasure to repel the gathering darkness. Thus, we give ourselves a treat. “But here’s the thing,” Periwinkle continues, his eyes all aglow, “even the things we do to break the routine become routine. Even the things we do to escape the sadness of our lives have themselves become sad. What this ad acknowledges is that you’ve been eating all these snacks and yet you are not happy, and you’ve been watching all these shows and yet you still feel lonely, and you’ve been seeing all this news and yet the world makes no sense, and you’ve been playing all these games and yet the melancholy sinks deeper and deeper into you. How do you escape?” “You buy a new chip.” “You buy a missile-shaped chip! That’s the answer. What this ad does is admit something you already deeply suspect and existentially fear: that consumerism is a failure and you will never find any meaning there no matter how much money you spend. So the great challenge for people like me is to convince people like you that the problem is not systemic. It’s not that snacks leave you feeling empty, it’s that you haven’t found the right snack yet. It’s not that TV turns out to be a poor substitute for human connection, it’s that you haven’t found the right show yet. It’s not that politics are hopelessly bankrupt, it’s that you haven’t found the right politician yet. And this ad just comes right out and says it. I swear to god it’s like playing poker against someone who’s showing his cards and yet still bluffing by force of personality.”Read The Nix.

⭐ I enjoyed the book, was pulled through the plot, and would read it again. But it has some characteristics that made me wish the author had done a better job and not wasted a wonderful plot line and perspective on something so rough.The descriptive text wanders so far out into tangential details that I kept wondering why Hill would bother taking us there. Seemed as if he had a list of book ideas and fixated character treatments and was determined to use them all up in a first novel. Why not save a few for the next book, rather than jam them all into The Nix where they became a distraction? Half way through I was annoyed enough to seriously consider dropping it, but glad I did not.Great humorous passages and several laugh out loud moments kept me interested. And eventually the characters become better developed, although it takes some time. The plot is wonderful and takes some unexpected twists, although the one twist I was expecting did not ever appear. It just could have used more editing – thin it out in the middle, then don’t rush to finish so fast at the end. It seemed that the editor told Hill it was too long already, now just close it up, so the final resolution comes quickly and leaves much hanging unknown.I hope he saved some ideas for the next one, and will produce a more polished next work, because I am buying it.

⭐ Nathan Hill begins his novel by retelling the Buddha’s story of the blind men and the elephant. A king commands that all the blind men in the town be brought into the presence of an elephant. Each of the men experiences a different part of the animal. One feels an ear, one the trunk, one the tail, and so on. Then they are asked to describe what they have felt and, of course, they all describe different things, even though they have touched the same animal. The king is highly diverted.Hill then proceeds to show us his “elephant” as it is seen by many different characters. Although it is the same story, each one has experienced it from his/her own unique perspective and so each person’s truth may be different from all others.The New York Times review of this book referred to it as “the love child of Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace.” I can see that. The multiple story lines, the wordiness, the different styles of writing that are employed at various times throughout the book, and the seeming reluctance of the author to edit out any anecdote or observation that he’s ever heard or made; these could all remind one of those authors. But frankly, I found this book much more enjoyable than anything I have read by them.I don’t know how to even begin to sum up the plot of The Nix. It’s a novel that encompasses political history from 1968 to the present, that discusses addiction to playing online games, childhood tragedy and grief, academic entitlement, social mores, the decline of journalism, and military misadventure. It flits from the midwestern U.S. to New York to Chicago to Norway to Iraq and back to New York. It sounds like a crazy mix and it is, and yet somehow the author manages to make it all hang together in a way that makes for a prodigiously entertaining read.We start during the presidential campaign of 2011. The authoritarian demagogic governor of Wyoming is running for president. At a campaign appearance in Chicago, he is pelted with a handful of gravel thrown by a woman described as an aging hippie.That aging hippie turns out to be the mother of Samuel Andresen-Anderson, professor of English literature at a small midwestern college and an online gamer too addicted to a game called World of Elfscape to notice what is happening in the real world. He has recently challenged a young woman student over her plagiarized work and told her she will be given a failing grade. She admits the plagiarism but sees nothing wrong with it and fights back by complaining to the dean.Now, the aging hippie gravel-thrower had abandoned Samuel and his father when Samuel was eleven years old and he has had no contact with her since then. But her lawyer contacts him for help with her case and he meets her for the first time in twenty years.Flashback to 1968 and the riots around the Democratic convention in Chicago. The aging hippie was there, although she was then a young college student and not really a hippie. She has friends who are hippies, though, and she is caught up in their demonstrations and ends up spending a night in jail because of it.During his adolescent years, young Samuel was friends with twins, Bishop and Bethany. He was in love with Bethany, who was a talented violinist. She later becomes an acclaimed professional musician and, after many years absence, comes back into Samuel’s life at about the same time as his long, lost mother.Along the way, we also meet other Elfscape addicts, as well as Samuel’s father and his Norwegian-American grandfather, Walter Cronkite, Hubert Humphrey, Allen Ginsberg, and other assorted relatives, business associates, friends, and enemies of Samuel and his mother. The book goes on for more than 600 pages and it is full of wit and energy and brilliant writing. Even though I can’t help but think that it might have benefited from some judicious editing.This is Nathan Hill’s debut novel, hard as that is to believe. It seems like the work of a much more experienced writer. It is a sprawling story, both funny and sad at times.Of all the themes that are tackled here, the one that stands out for me, probably because this is January 2017, is the political one; the presidential candidate who is a wildly gesticulating billionaire bully running on an offensive platform of xenophobia and bigotry. In portraying a society that could conceivably elect such a person as president, audacious surrealism may be the only path to take. Nathan Hill treads that path without inhibition but he always seems to know just where he’s going.

⭐ I’ll give Nathan Hill this: it takes quite a pair to insult, misquote and then try to write internal dialogue for The Most Trusted Man in America.The Nix’s concept is fascinating, surely why it’s been optioned by J.J. Abrams for adaptation.Hill does a good job jumping between different characters’ points of view (several across different time periods, even), a move seemingly ready-made for an television series . His description is sharp. A lot of the dialogue is really quite clever. Often, I felt initially put off by yet another flashback or a hard style shift, but always ended up appreciating the new information and episodic narratives these segments provided.The Nix is not a masterpiece. The failings of a first novel are still apparent. The consequence of English-professor-writing about-an-English-professor is obvious authorial intrusion that, once too often, grinds the narrative to a halt as author Nathan Hill, not character Samuel Andreson, waxes poetic about his own likes and dislikes. Ian Fleming used to do the same with James Bond, with the crucial differences that Bond novels do not run over 600 pages long and Fleming knew when to stop. A particularly perplexing section of The Nix has two busy characters having a phone conversation with one participant going on a pages-long, off-topic tirade about the commercialization of Disney World, penned unrealistically, but quite enthusiastically, by this Florida-resident author. It’s unnecessary and distracting, with a condescension that reminds us that this writer hasn’t entirely grown past his angsty creative-writing student background.The Nix starts strong and ends somewhat quietly, out of necessity rather than artistry. It’s a fascinating preview work of a potentially great author, if he can manage to move away from his own frame of reference and deliver original characters and conflicts not so heavily inspired by himself next time. Otherwise, this will be Hill’s first and last outing, good until after the word-of-mouth dies down and the royalties dry up. Hill’s fate as a novelist could go either way at this point.

⭐ Best line in the book is “…if you see yourself as a puzzle, than you will be constantly delighted, because eventually, if you dig deep enough into anybody, if you really look under the hood of somebody’s life, you will find something familiar.”. This book was listed as humorous, but it was sad to me. First, I thought this was an excellent novel and highly recommend it. Yes, it is somewhat political but the Repulicans are stereotyped card board cut outs, the liberal are broken, sad, weird, disfunctional people. So, neither side can count this book as a rally cry. The charactersare fascinating. The novel includes child abuse, loneliness, computer addiction, tales from the “old world”, a mother who deserted her son, alost and damaged policeman, a promoter, a cruel judge, a lost father, a chemical factory, 1968 rioters, and much much more!!! As a person of”advanced age” I lived through this era – it really hit a nerve and brought back many memories. Many of the reviewers stated this is a “funny”novel but it is sad in several ways: time lost with a son, a father who forever remembers a lost daughter, a policeman obsessed with the love ofhis life, a small child abused, a soldier conflicted, a boy frightened about serving in Vietnam, politicians who use events with no honor(Democrats and Republicans), being lost in playing video games to escape real life, a teacher who does not improve his skills, a college studentwho cheats, lies, and has no moral compass, and more. Frankly, I did not laugh one time, but this book was fascinating. The book deserves anA++++++++

⭐ This is an extremely well-written novel that was thoroughly enjoyable to read. Yes, there is a mishmash of styles and tones, and the author knowingly withholds some crucial plot points in order to make the intricate back-and-forth-and-sidways structure work, but overall this is a witty and wry examination of the psychological and emotional burdens handed down from one generation to the next. The central story of Samuel and his mother Faye and her father, which forms the spine of the narrative, is the strongest part of the novel, which slowly reveals layer upon layer of their personal histories. If I had been the editor, though, I would have suggested that the author jettison the subplots (which are barely plots at all) about the plagiarist and the Warcraft addict — as amusing as these characters are (and parts of the book are astoundingly funny), they felt like distractions that ultimately went nowhere. The ending also felt a bit too tidy, given all that came before. Still, this is an impressive accomplishment. Any novel that can pull off having a Choose Your Own Adventure section alongside a gripping description of the Chicago ’68 Democratic convention plus an evocative narrative of childhood abandonment (the best-written section, in my opinion) is a winner.

⭐ I personally prefer stories that are presented in a more cohesive manner with a distinct beginning followed by the development of the story and a conclusion which makes sense. Many new novels, this one included, seem to be written in a more convoluted presentation style, which can make following the threads of the story difficult. I also felt that at the end, the author just felt a need to tie up a conclusion for all of the characters and as presented this was done what appeared to me to be in a flat, apathetic manner.

⭐ “The Nix: A Novel” starts slowly, introducing many characters in separate settings, with no apparent connections among more than a few of them, and no apparent plot direction. Gradually that changed, characters developed as individuals in relationships with each other, and eventually the story develops several coherent plot lines, the principle plot line becoming strong, compelling, with a definite point of view. The writer’s use of language is excellent throughout.

⭐ Enjoyable read specially the earlier conflicts and character unfurlings such as gamer/professor student debacles (not enough) Faye dilemma henry farm boy or city writer etc but all tgese great strands got lost in the Charlie Brown Alice item and Ginsberg and politics of the day (hippies protesting in the 60s drumming & wall street protesting etc) Hill drawing parallels, I get it, past to present…for learning tool, discussion in classroom (yuck) but as novel progressed Samuel and Faye fizzled out and parts were draggy less descriptive and sophisticated the way I like and I felt as if I could be reading YA genre which was clearly not the case due to graphic sections here and there. Niss or Nix motif was okay until it materialized and spoke to Faye! I was not left with resonating pulse, Faye’s sentiments ….forced trite (end) and and so maybe more depth of character and the literary tone preserved and maybe less is better and 700 plus words was too much for this one.

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