Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

My introduction to the fiction of Nathan Hill is his debut novel The Nix, a Great American Novel that at 620 pages, is a boat anchor. I came up for air and dropped it at 320 pages. Published in 2016, this literary epic is about a lot, mostly a reconciliation between a failed novelist named Samuel Andersen-Anderson and his mother Faye, who walked out on him and his father thirty years ago. Faye resurfaces during her fifteen minutes of fame chucking pebbles at a hardline governor running for president, which Samuel's publisher feels puts him in the unique position to crank out a tell-all memoir, if he can reconcile with his mother.

Oh, but this book is about so much more! Hill shares his opinion on the pitiful state of pop music, the ridiculous state of online gaming (a la World of Warcraft), the sad state of higher learning, the idiotic state of the 24 hour news cycle, the disgraceful state of publishing, etc. This all became very droll for me, not because I disagreed with Hill or didn't think he could write, but because I didn't want to read it. Elmore Leonard advised writers to cut out the parts of a novel that readers tend to skip. Leonard didn't mention anything specific about block paragraphs--that's more of a deal breaker for me.

Samuel always feels this way around his publisher: a little uneasy in comparison, a little derelict. Periwinkle looks about forty years old but he's actually the same age as Samuel's father: in his mid-sixties. He seems to be fighting time by being cooler than it. He carries himself in an erect and stiff and regal manner--it's like he thinks of himself as an expensive and tightly wrapped birthday present. His thin shoes are severe and Italian-looking and have little ski jumps at the tips. His waistline seems about eight inches smaller than that of any other adult male in the airport. The knot in his necktie is as tight and hard as an acorn. His lightly graying hair is shaved to what seems to be a perfect and uniform one-centimeter length. Samuel always feels, standing next to him, baggy and big. Clothes bought off the rack and ill-fitting, probably a size too large. Whereas Periwinkle's tight-fitting suit sculpts his body into clean angles and straight lines, Samuel's shape seems blobbier.

If you found that paragraph to be literary TNT, please don't let me dissuade you from reading The Nix. My eyes glazed over everything after the third sentence, which doesn't do what I want a good novel to do: tell me a compelling story. Hill expresses a lot of opinions but doesn't tell a story that I needed to read. A son doesn't need 620 pages to discover why his mother left him. He doesn't need 20 pages. Those who savor literary fiction might delight in the Writing here, but this book just wasn't for me. Point of view shifts from Samuel to an online gaming buddy to Faye put the novel in the "telling" mode rather than a "showing" mode. At this length, that's a lot of telling.

Length: 188,356 words