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"Seeing ourselves clearly is the project of a lifetime."
- Nathan Hill, The Nix

Even though I don’t read a ton of contemporary fiction, I do a pretty good job of knowing what’s out there. In fact, I spend roughly as much time reading about reading as I do actually reading. And I have the sagging bookshelves of yet-to-be-read titles to prove it. Based on what I’d read about Nathan Hill’s The Nix, I had a single thought: nope. Everything about it is everything I don’t like in literature.

A lengthy novel weighted with important themes (bad parents, betrayal, and self-deception) written by a first time novelist whose previous contributions were short stories in “literary journals� (which reeks of the insufferable and pretentious) and filled with quirky affectations (a character who literally can’t stop himself from crying), silly names (Guy Periwinkle), a protagonist who is a struggling writer (pure navel gazing) and a self-consciously complicated structure of interlocking plotlines? No thanks.

Bottom line: this is typically a hard pass for me.

Then it was chosen by the Eastern Nebraska Men’s Biblio & Social Club. If there’s one thing the ENMB&SC likes, it’s drinking beer and talking books. If there’s one thing the ENMB&SC doesn’t like, it’s when a member doesn’t even try to read the month’s selection. Before each meeting we have a ritual shaming session. Anyone who hasn’t read the book is liable for a round or two at the bar. Since I am cheap, and since I like having an opinion at book club, I decided, grudgingly, to give this a try.

By now you’ve probably figured that I ended up loving it. (Burying the lede is a thing I do). Well, it’s true. I loved it! This is a big and brilliant romp filled with indelible characters, one tremendous action set-piece, sharp comedic bits, and more than a few moments of exquisite poignancy.

(The title, taken from Norwegian folkore, is also explained, but I’ll leave that to you and your own book club to discover and parse).

The Nix begins in 2011, with the kind of ridiculous plot-inciter that worried me in the first place. A woman named Faye Anderson has “assaulted� the conservative governor of Wyoming, Sheldon Packer, who is planning a run for the presidency. Immediately dubbed the “Packer Attacker�, Faye finds herself in some serious legal trouble.

Faye’s notoriety draws her back into the life of her estranged son, an English professor named Samuel Andresen-Anderson, who she abandoned at a very young age. For reasons that are too convoluted to explain � and which I don’t want to spoil � Samuel embarks on a journey to unearth his mother’s past, and to determine why she left him.

Hill tells his story by utilizing several different timelines. The book’s “present� is in 2011, with Samuel searching for clues, and Faye biding her time with an attorney with hyperhidrosis. (Like I said, there are affectations aplenty). The second major timeline takes place in 1968. This reveals Faye’s journey from her small hometown to Chicago, where she arrives at college just in time for the Democratic National Convention. There are also flashbacks to Samuel’s motherless childhood, focusing on his relationship with the Fall twins, Bishop and Bethany.

Hill is a fantastic and accessible writer. His descriptions are mesmerizing, his grasp of detail impeccable. His characterizations are great, even though some of his characters come off a bit one-dimensional. Take, for instance, his portrayal of Pwnage, a gamer obsessed with World of Elfscape, an online swords-and-orcs game modeled after World of Warcraft. Pwnage is a man whose brain chemistry has been rewired, and Hill takes us through his mental processes in brutal and hilarious fashion. In one passage, Pwnage is meditating on his use of a smartphone app to eat healthier:

[T]he smartphone app analyzed the nutrients and metanutrients he consumed and compared them to FDA-recommended dosages of all the important vitamins, acids, fats, etc., and displayed the results in a graph that should have been a soothing green if he were doing it all correctly but was actually a panic-button red due to his alarming lack of really anything necessary for the maintenance of basic organ health. And yes he had to admit that lately his eyeballs and the ends of his hair had acquired a disconcerting yellowish hue, and his fingernails had become thinner and more brittle and had a tendency, when chewed, to suddenly split right down the middle almost all the way to the base, and recently his nails and hair had stopped growing completely and now seemed to recede in places or even curl back on themselves, and also he’d developed a more or less permanent rash on his arm at the place a wristwatch would go. So while he was typically far under his 2,000-calorie daily maximum he understood that the calories he needed to consume in order to “eat better� were totally different kinds of calories, namely the organic fresh whole-food kind that were prohibitively expensive given the monthly credit card payments he was making on his smartphone and its associated text and data plans. And he grasped the paradox of this, that it was somewhat of an ironic bind that paying for the device that showed him how to eat right prevented him from having the money to actually be able to eat right�

The Nix is filled with such passages, which do a remarkable job of mimicking the interior mechanics of each particular character.

I'm under no illusion that this will be universally beloved. The Nix is a flawed masterpiece. There are times when Hill’s talent is a bit too evident. He is, in other words, showing off. At one point he writes a sentence that goes on for a page or two. During the 1968 Democratic Convention sequence, Hill starts randomly popping into the minds of Walter Cronkite and Hubert Humphrey, seemingly for no other reason than to dazzle us with his cleverness. There are certain subplots (a cheating student in Samuel’s class) that don’t really pay off, at least not in terms of how much time is devoted to the setup. I also found some of his observations to be a bit trite. Online gaming, cable news, and the modern airport are pretty low-hanging fruit as targets for biting critiques. At one point, a character feels some vague despair at watching Americans line up for a meal at McDonalds. Seriously? Can we call a moratorium on fast food as a symbol of ennui and existential crisis? It’s not that bad! Especially not the breakfast!

When I think about how these things bothered me, I am instantly reminded of all the parts of The Nix that soared. For every broad flourish, there are ten or twenty perfectly realized scenes of grace, of heartbreak, of love and war, of betrayal, of false starts, of stunted dreams, of belated realizations. There is a scene between young-adult Samuel and Bethany (with whom Samuel is in love) in New York City that is constructed with such tenderness and fragility that it felt like I read it under a spell. Hill can be a bit obnoxious in displaying his gifts. He can also be a freaking word-magician.

This is a novels that reads downhill. The deeper you get into it, the more momentum it builds. The different timelines start to communicate with each other across time and space; things that had one meaning take on another; people we viewed one way, suddenly require a second look. When you finish, you’re a bit exhausted, but you’re left wanting to return, to know what these characters will do with the knowledge they have gained.