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Picking out a quote to open a review of The Nix is no small undertaking. There are so many from which to choose. So I am just tossing this small selection out there up front. Feel free to choose your own opening quote.

”…when all you have is the memory of a thing,�� she said, “all you can think about is how the thing is gone.��

The things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst.

…given enough time, any weight can become too much to bear

..despite what the newspapers said, it was not the time of free love. It was the time of free-love writing, when free love was widely condemned, rarely practiced, and terrifically marketed.

Something does not have to happen for it to feel real.

What you call conflict of interest, I call synergy.

…if a new beginning is really new, it will feel like a crisis. Any real change should make you feel, at first, afraid. If you’re not afraid of it, then it’s not real change.

Check, please. Samuel Andreson-Anderson has been bailing on his own life for a long time. A professor at a college in suburban Chicago, he is beset by a clinically narcissistic pathological plagiarist of a student who puts all her considerable talent and energy into bailing on doing her assignments, while seeing that others are left holding the bag for her misdeeds. It would be funnier if we had not elected her spiritual twin to the White House, or maybe that is why it is so darkly funny.

Sam is not exactly having a great life, numbing the pain of his failure with endless hours playing an interactive role-playing game, Elfscape, in which his name is, appropriately, Dodger. He had a story published some years back, even got a book deal. The only problem is that he has been unable to produce a book. His publisher wants that hefty advance back, and Sam, needless to say, is a touch light at the moment. Maybe the root of his problem has to do with his mother leaving him and his father when he was nine-years-old, never to be seen again.


Nathan Hill - from his site

In Chicago, a particularly toxic Wyoming politician by the name of Sheldon Packer, with his entourage and media wake, is heading through Grant Park when a sixty-year-old woman picks up a handful gravel and heaves the lot in his general direction, with the vocal accompaniment, “You Pig.�� The press being what the press is, she is instantly labeled The Packer Attacker. Soon identified as having attended a Chicago protest during the 1968 Democratic Convention, she is quickly labeled a terrorist. It is learned, also, that she had been charged with prostitution back then. The judge assigned to her case, it turns out, has a personal vendetta against her. She is Sam’s mother.

Check, please. Faye Andreson-Anderson, now a teaching assistant, had given her all to getting the life she wanted. But the thing she most wanted turned out to wield the sharpest blades, and so she fled. No, not Sam and her husband, before that. Bailing on Sam and Henry came later. But of course she had learned her lessons somewhere. Seems that bailing was a bit of a family tradition, and just why was it that her father had always seemed so sad?

She remained in people’s good graces by being exactly who they wanted her to be. She aced every test. She won every academic award the school offered. When the teacher assigned a chapter from a book, Faye went ahead and read the whole book. Then read every book written by that author that was available at the town library. There was not a subject at which she did not excel…Everyone said she had a good head on her shoulders…She was always smiling and nodding, always agreeable. It was difficult to dislike her, for there was nothing to dislike—she was accommodating, docile, self-effacing, compliant, easy to get along with. Her outward personality had no hard edges to bump into. Everyone agreed that she was really nice. To her teachers. Faye was the achiever, the quiet genius at the back of the room. They gushed about her at conferences, noting especially her discipline and drive.
It was, Faye knew, all an elaborate game.

From the opening epigraph, which recounts the familiar tale of several blind men being asked to evaluate an object, but only being allowed to touch one part of it, and coming up with diverse notions that somehow do not combine to form the elephant they touched, we can expect that the characters in The Nix will have different perspectives on the events about to unfold. And so Nathan Hill shows us the beast, part by part, until the whole gray, wrinkly hide and pachydermy shape becomes a bit clearer.

The Nix covers this estranged mother and son, looking at Faye’s 1968 journey, Sam as a kid in 1988, a teacher, obsessive gamer, and failed writer in 2011, with a quick side trip to 2004. Hill ties these together with notable protests, the 1968 Democratic Convention events, or police riot, the 2004 demonstration in New York City against the Republican Convention, and the Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park. Hill clearly did a lot of homework for his descriptions of the Chicago events. His tale of that time sings. Much less so for the latter demos, although he does toss in some nice details of both. It is the Chicago one that matters most.

The Nix of the title is a tricky beast, in two varieties, a legend Faye’s Norwegian father brought across the ocean with him, along with a penchant for silence, a sour take on life, and a large secret. It is a house spirit, a basement-dwelling, slimmed-down Santa-looking sort that is easily offended. Once you insult this ghost, once you piss off a nisse, it will torment you wherever you go, for the rest of your days. When Faye passes on the nisse legend to Sam, it has become a beautiful white horse, a most desirable thing, that, once achieved will cause your destruction.

This is a novel of both ideas and feeling. Sam and Faye are damaged people, carriers of a family curse, seemingly doomed to go through lives rich with both hope and dreams and the crushing disappointment that inevitably follows. For those of us who have not found non-stop success in our lives, it is not hard to relate to folks who have been hurt so deeply by forces beyond their control, and who have made things even worse with their own mis-steps. Sam likes to think of life as a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book in which it would be really great if you could mark the page where each decision was made, and go back to make a different choice, if the one you made the first time did not work out as hoped. How many of us would pass up a chance at that? Sam, as a teacher, being beset by a clearly dark force in the form of a horror of a student, works well to get us on his side as well.

Faye endures a sequence, starting with a less than supportive set of parents, who drive her to a place she really does not want to go. While one may take issue with her decisions, and how she goes about them, one can certainly appreciate the pain and stresses that drive her choices. Most of the characters, primary and secondary, guard core secrets that drive their lives. It does make one stop and think about what secrets might drive ours.

The ideas piece covers a lot of turf. This is very much a social satire. The media and its manipulation comes in for a particularly searing look, most pointedly where it intersects with politics. Of course it’s getting harder and harder to write satire these days, as events and the surreality of the real keep leap-frogging whatever writers dream up. A 1968 cop who doffs his badge and name tag to whale on protesters without being identifiable seems a lesser version of the current spate of blue on black (and blue on protester) violence. A sociopathic student with political aspirations could hardly seem more ridiculous than the results of the 2016 election. And the ideology-free media whoredom of one of the characters has already been far outshone by Steve Bannon, although it is clear that Bannon is far from ideology-free. A 1960s home ec teacher does for feminism what Donald Trump does for honesty.

Hill knows a thing or two about his subject matter. Sam’s gaming certainly sings with the siren song of familiarity. Hill was a young writer taking his shot in New York, and enduring the all-too-familiar writerly experience of finding no takers for his work, well, not enough anyway. Twenty to forty hours a week with World of Warcraft eased or at least distracted him from that pain. He has done some time as a college instructor so can speak to some of the horrors that entails, even if the horror he describes, in what we take to be satire, feels a little too true, certainly behavior that would not be beyond many a contemporary politician. Even his choose-you-own entry has a personal root.

Mr. Hill knew from the time he was in elementary school that he wanted to be a writer. In second grade, he wrote a choose-your-own-adventure story about a brave knight trying to rescue a princess from a haunted castle. He titled it “The Castle of No Return�� and illustrated it himself. (“The Castle of No Return�� still sits in a box somewhere in his parents�� attic, but Mr. Hill sneaked the story into “The Nix,�� during a pivotal flashback to Samuel’s childhood.) - from the

And Hill has worked as a journalist as well, so has good touch-and-feel for that end of things.

There is also an aroma of the cynicism and false equivalence that has made a mockery of much of modern journalism, and that detracted from the story. I took the following to indicate more than the cynicism of the character but to indicate the author’s take as well

“What’s true? What’s false? In case you haven’t noticed, the world has pretty much given up on the old Enlightenment idea of piecing together the truth based on observed data. Reality is too complicated and scary for that. Instead, it’s way easier to ignore all data that doesn’t fit your preconceptions and believe all data that does. I believe what I believe, and you believe what you believe, and we’ll all agree to disagree. It’s liberal tolerance meets dark ages denialism. It’s very hip right now. ��
“This sounds awful.��
“We are more politically fanatical than ever before, more religiously zealous, more rigid in our thinking, less capable of empathy. The way we see the world is totalizing and unbreakable. We are completely avoiding the problems that diversity and worldwide communication imply. Thus, nobody cares about antique ideas like true or false.

Actually, there is a definite tilt in how the sides of the political spectrum view reality. One side actually cares about facts, about the truth. The other side does not. And I am not talking about the Bernie bros who seem to equate Hillary with the Donald. Within the mainstream of the Democratic Party and what used to be the saner elements of the Republican Party, facts matter. With what has become the dominant strain of the Republican Party, they do not.

So, while this element does make my blood boil a bit, the elevated mercury level does not take away from the fact that The Nix is a pretty amazing book. It covers a lot of territory, without losing its human element. It offers intriguing and well-woven themes, relatable characters, thoughtful (if sometimes questionable) social analysis, a fair bit of grim humor and that satisfying feeling, once one has read its 620 pages (trimmed down from over a thousand), that you have read a major work. If you haven’t read this one yet, you should. And I am outta here. Check, please.


Review first Posted �� December 9, 2016

Publication Date �� August 30, 2016

=============================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s , and pages

Essay by Hill for Powell’s on

of Hill in the NY Times �� August 27, 2016

He pilfered so much from his own life that he had to reassure his mother that Faye was not based on her. “I had to warn my mom, ‘Some of this is going to sound very familiar to you,’�� he said.

Interviews
-----Print - - this one is a cornucopia of insight into the novel. Must read if you want to dig into this book. For example:

I was also writing this during our great recession, which was in part caused by the things we thought were so safe they were eventually risk-free. Things like mortgage-backed securities, AAA-rated sovereign debt. The retirement that you’ve been working all your life for suddenly gone in a flash. And so one of the things I was thinking about was that kind of economic anxiety that was happening in the country while I was composing the novel and it seemed to be that, yeah, the reason why the financial crisis was a crisis was because we believed that things were so safe as to be risk-free. We thought they were too good to be true, so the housing market could never fail, you know, and so I guess that helped me connect the personal stories with the political, it helped me see what’s happened between this mother and this son is happening writ large in the rest of the country.

-----Video - - 11:20
-----Audio -
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January 27, 2017 - I know, I know, say it ain't so, but here we are offering a link to a George Will column, one that speaks to the stress Samuel encounters in attempting to apply academic standards to his toxic student. We take our common ground where we find it. - .