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The only problem with letting a review of an immensely popular new novel hang precipitously between four and five stars, is the guilt of maybe downgrading the experience ever so slightly because of the insane and unsustainable hype The Nix has received. So let's start by saying Nathan Hill is not "John Irving with dashes of Thomas Pynchon and Charles Dickens." What he most certainly is, is a 21st-century Kurt Vonnegut - hilarious, chilling, with intense profundities where you least expect it -- but maybe not those bone-chilling profundities that Pynchon, Wallace, and LeGuin are famous for.

Because this novel is one of the most readable and enjoyable in new 21st-century fiction, it's no surprise J.J. Abrams recruited Meryl Streep to make a TV series from the plot. The book romps about at a pace, and with a coherence, that will captivate most readers. It stretches from Chicago DNC 1968 to Occupy Wall Street 2011, but it is at its heart a family story, meaning the reader won't get those sweeps of existential history favored by Powers, Pynchon, and often by Vonnegut himself. But that's OK.

There are a few quibbles, probably unavoidable in a first novel, that I should mention as pulling me away from giving the book a full five stars. First of all, the narrative follows the nonlinear, time-jumping plot line that seems so commonplace as to be almost a requirement of new literature in the 2010s. Hill does a good job with this, and it could be argued that the storyline begged for this type of narrative, but it sure would be good to find a new novel from a young author that followed a linear timeline for a change.

In leaping across decades, Hill is most comfortable when closest to home, say in the current era, and in the late 1980s. As we drift back into 1960s and even an occasional 1950s referent, Hill's characters get a little bit more two-dimensional, and mistakes are made. For example, the home-ec teacher's favorite olive-bologna aspic? Very much a Depression-era and 1940s thing. By the 1950s and the Camelot era, the smart party-giver had moved on to fondue, clam dip and Fritos. Now, before this sounds like so much aesthetic window dressing (salad dressing?), these kind of little errors can have big consequences.

The earlier references to Chicago 1968 and the pre-DNC days, for example, painted a movement that was much more serious and blind to its own faults than what actually passed for a New Left - in fact, his characters sometimes sound like a conservative caricature of the New Left. Hill provides plenty of endnotes to prove he did his duty studying Czechago, but these studies covered events, not always the emotions behind them. Hill's defenders would say it is to be expected from an author in his mid-30s, but Garth Risk Hallberg is the same age, and got the 1977 punk era in New York City precisely right in his novel City On Fire, in both details and emotions. (I should admit up front that I was only 11 years old at the time of Chicago, but I spent enough time among remnants of the New Left in the late 1970s, and talking to direct DNC participants, to feel I can say something about the emotions.) The characters Hill describes in his early 1968 flashbacks are overly serious, sounding more like the SDS Weather-spinoffs that organized "Days of Rage" than the majority of people at Chicago 1968. A very good percentage of people there for New Left activity were there to get stoned, get laid, or pull pranks first and foremost, which is why The Yippies were so popular. Few in Chicago had read Alinsky, fewer still had read Rubin or Freire.

As a protagonist, Samuel had to work at removing himself from the passivity of video games and assistant-professor academia, and sometimes he wasn't a very empathetic character. Make no mistake, the multiplayer online games were an interesting diversion, particularly as Pwnge spirals into his ultimate health crisis, but Samuel is often too forlorn, starstruck, and unwilling to commit. While the "Choose Your Own Adventure" segment at the center of the novel was interesting, Samuel came off as too much the hopeless romantic tied to Bethany's whims. In order to achieve 21st-century transcendent empathy, one must first drop weepy lovelorn romanticism, and the passivity surrounding it, as the dead end it truly is. Luckily, by the end of the Choose section, Samuel has come close to redeeming himself.

The novel's final 100 pages come close to winning it five stars. The segments on the actual day of the Chicago riots are much more believable than the earlier segments. And the final "De-Leveraging" section is quite beautiful, not only because many threads are brought to completion without being too corny, but also because Hill takes us to 2011's Occupy Wall Street and the centers of power in Manhattan, diving fully into such topics as the victory of what The Economist calls the "post-truth era," and the importance of using forgiving, forgiving, and forgiving again, as well as an abundance of gratitude and joy, to escape the apparent dead end of 21st-century culture.

I finished The Nix feeling happy about the historical trajectory that was presented, and happy about the possibilities for redemption that are all around us. Since this is first and foremost a satirical novel, are characters occasionally too stereotyped? (Periwinkle, I'm talking to you.) Of course. But so are the characters of Pynchon, Heller, and Vonnegut. Hill has presented us a 600-page multi-decade epic with a few hiccups, but with plenty of positive and jocular aspects to recommend it.