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** spoiler alert ** Hey everybody, can you feel it? Can you tell by the advance copies, the promised marketing campaign(s), the effusive praise from the publisher? It's THE NEXT BIG THING!!! (I know it is, it says so on the cover.)

But let's dispense with the pleasantries first.

Mr. Hill's prose is straightforward, direct; thankfully, he isn't writing for other writers. His characters are distinct individuals whose motivations are (mostly) understandable. He skewers college & academia most delightfully (one sequence early on dazzles). There is heart in the book, and it seems to be in the right place� or, places.

Before I detail for you just exactly why this book is yet another in a line of emperors sans clothes, let me apologize for my preponderance of long, negative reviews. It's like this: good books need only a thumbs-up, an oblique description that preserves a new reader's experience.

But bad books, and especially bad books that have only their own promotion to recommend them? They need to be nipped in the bud. You may disagree, of course, but at least you'll have to explain yourself beyond I Was Excited to Read It Before Everybody Else.

OK then.

Some books want to tell us How Things Are Now, to make their canvas the whole of the world we live in and capture the moment we're all presently sharing. I've come to call these zeitgeist novels.

The zeitgeist novel aims at a story either so universal or so sprawling that it can't help but trap the reader in its net. But this presents a tricky problem for the writer. If he's too specific or peculiar, he may lose the reader's identification; if he generalizes and his observations are readily apparent, he loses the reader's interest.

The Nix falls under the latter rubric. The voice is pretty much all Captain Obvious, the book's conclusions amounting to revelations such as

- playing video games for most of your waking hours is bad for you
- leaving your family is wrong and will affect them negatively
- college students can be manipulative and dishonest.

There is very little in this book that could not have been written by any writer. Certainly it took time and dedication to produce, but neither while reading it nor afterward did I have any better sense of who Mr. Hill is as a person or how he, specifically, sees the world. Not enough distinguishes The Nix to recommend it.

In the latter pages, especially, Mr. Hill is given to stabs at aphorisms and the kind of the suppositions that pass for wisdom only in tone, not substance. Like, "Time heals many things because it sets us on trajectories that make the past impossible." It does? I've read that sentence a dozen times and I still can't make sense of it.

Or, after a description of airport terminal commerce, a one-sentence paragraph: "This is who we are." Is it? It does tell me somewhat who YOU are- reductive, and mired in sophomoric analysis. This kind of 'insight' merely flatters the reader; no one who reads a book like The Nix finds their soul nourished by the shopping opportunities between Gates 30 and 40. Again, obvious.

Worst: "who if he could have heard what was going through Bishop's head at that moment... would never have exploded that bomb." Wouldn't it be nice to think so, the untapped empathy even of the guerrilla terrorist, who needs only see into the soul of the other to stop him from killing? Here Mr. Hill reveals a fundamentally shallow view of the world, which in this instance (and others) borders on outright naïveté.

And then by the end we're again tying up all the loose ends, converging the characters, and arranging for the climax to take place at an historically significant event; we're in the head of Hubert Humphrey and Allen Ginsberg and Walter Cronkite and whatever on earth for? Because intertwining one's narrative with an Important Historic Event lends heft and significance� and is a hallmark of a bad book.

But narratives like these seem to be catnip to publishers, who love to take the credit for discovering The Next Big Thing. Congratulations, Mr. Hill, on being all the richer for it.