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It may happen in a dream, or maybe when you're out near the beach or the river reading a book by yourself, a nix will come by, a ghostlike looking horse, beckoning you to climb aboard for a ride. And so suddenly, you find yourself on the horse having the time of your life, galloping along the coast of the ocean or river watching the water far down below and then suddenly, the horse on it's own, goes offtrack and starts heading over the water and then the plummet into the water where hopefully you won't drown. If you're strong, you'll be able to swim to the shore and survive. To some extent, the lives of each of the main characters involve a Nix, something that looks so tempting and inviting in the beginning and then ends up taking them down.

The storytelling is rock solid and fun to read and there is a great mix of different characters, the main character, Samuel, a 30 something single writer/professor who seems to be on the edge of collapse, health chaotic because of his addiction to a video game, his dislike of most of his lazy students trying to get by with minimal work, his still painful loss of a mother who has disappeared from his life 20 years earlier, and the pressure on him to write a work of fiction because he received a large advance to write it 10 years ago when he published an exception short story.

The Nix involves Norwegian Folk Tales (The Nix) child abuse, police abuse, extreme video game addiction and sometimes drug addiction, hilarious and cringeworthy descriptions of the requirements for girl's to become proper young ladies in the 60's, one of the male characters is very emotional and caring and falls apart crying far too quickly. Different and yet very touching. There's a lot of travel involved as Samuel tries to piece together the life of his mother who kissed him one last time and walked out the door on Samuel and her husband, carrying her suitcase, one final kiss. There's a great coming of age section where Samuel makes friends with a tough little neighbor kid and then falls in love with his beautiful and talented twin sister.

There's a section that involves the riots and demonstration in Chicago in the late sixties during the campaign for Humphrey and Nixon. Lots of drugs, rock and roll and sex as well as police brutality.

And yet each piece of the story comes together in the end and we arrive at a realistic ending, nothing tidy about the ending, but very real and feasible.

Parts of the story were five starts. I'll be thinking about this one for a long time. Hopefully it won't take Nathan Hill another ten years to come up with his next book. Luckily, he's pretty young. In fact, too young to come up with some of the brilliant observations about life and what we humans do to each other. Excellent book.

Sample of the writing, slight spoiler (view spoiler)[ They were, he realized, going to kiss. Or, rather, she was going to kiss him. This was going to happen. All he had to do was not screw it up. But in that moment, in those few seconds between realizing she was going to kiss him and the actual kiss, there seemed to be so many ways to screw it up. He felt the pressing and unexpected need to clear his throat. And scratch the back of his neck, at that spot where his neck joined to the shoulder, which always itched when he was nervous. And he did not want to move into the kiss, as it was dark and he could accidentally knock teeth with Bethany. But then in his desire to avoid knocking teeth he felt himself maybe leaning back and overcompensating and he worried that Bethany might mistake his leaning away from her as a desire not to kiss and she might stop. And then there was the matter of breathing. As in: Do it? His first impulse was to hold his breath, but then he realized if she approached slowly enough or if they kissed long enough, he would eventually run out of air and be forced to breathe mid-kiss and expel his lungs in a big poof right into her face or mouth. All of these thoughts happening roughly simultaneously in that brief moment before the kiss, Samuel’s most rudimentary actions, his body’s most automatic functions� sitting straight, being still, breathing� now turned crazily difficult by the prospect of the kiss, which is why when the kiss actually did successfully commence, it felt like a miracle. Mostly what Samuel felt during the kiss was relief that the kiss was happening. And also that Bethany’s lips felt dry and chapped. This odd detail. That Bethany had chapped lips. It surprised him. In his imagination of her, Bethany seemed elevated beyond stupid earthly concerns. She did not seem to be the kind of girl whose lips ever chapped. (hide spoiler)]