The Nix

Fair warning: I’ve been procrastinating and falling behind on my reviews, so this is going to be ridiculously out of date. I read this book almost 3 months ago. In writing this review, I went back and looked at some other reviews, like this one by the New York Times, to inform my recollection.

One of my favorite novel formats is the long family saga, but they are incredibly hard to pull off in a convincing manner. Nathan Hill’s The Nix manages to craft a tale that is spellbinding, taking turns through moments in history—interweaving past and present—and relating the story of Samuel Andresen-Anderson, a disillusioned college professor in 2011. Samuel’s story is one that takes him back through his family’s history and in all sorts of unexpected directions.

Nathan Hill was an author who was new to me, which is something that I regret took so long to rectify. This book had already come out to wide acclaim in 2016 and will hopefully see some resurgence after Hill’s success with Wellness, which is also in my sights. I became interested in this one because it dealt with two things I care a lot about—Midwestern American cities and the protests surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention (which is somehow merely one of the many main features of this enormously rich book).

This is a novel that deals with remembrances, family ties, and crafting one’s legacy as an intentional act against one’s fate or ancestral history. In essence, the age-old question of determinism vs. free-will, how much our actions are actually under our purview. Perhaps I’m getting a bit too grandiose here for this novel, but if so, it is only because it delves into such themes. Yet, it is also strictly grounded in reality—especially the counterculture movement of the 1960s as well as down to modern political protests, like Occupy Wall Street. There is a core element of realism to the novel which reflects itself in our contemporary political issues and is as relevant as ever.

The protagonist, Samuel Andresen-Anderson, is sort of a wimpy character; he has fallen behind on his book deal and was once thought to be the next greatest up-and-coming writer. He teaches as an adjunct professor (alas) at a local college to students who try to convince him they should be allowed to plagiarize. (Seriously, the scenes with Laura Potsdam are a work of art in and of themselves—a bit unconventional in style, but wholly realistic satire).

Hill based Samuel, and the other characters in the book, on real figures, including himself; apparently, he even had to reassure his family that the book was indeed fictional, even if it did seem uncannily familiar. This lends the characters a great degree of depth to them. They have their individual personality quirks that make them seem like real human beings, flaws and all. Samuel isn’t necessarily the most likeable, but he certainly can be relatable; ditto for the rest of the cast—including Pwnage, Samuel’s gamer buddy, and Faye, whose upbringing is familiar to anyone who has grown up in the confines of a small town and a claustrophobic family with unsettled trauma.

The plot is epic in scope and starts all the way back at Faye’s father immigrating to the United States from Norway. We eventually end up in modern times and find ourselves, along with Samuel, unraveling this mysterious family history. Initially, it may seem disjointed with the initial scene, which shows Faye’s ‘protest’ and subsequent arrest; but Hill manages to weave these disparate strands together beautifully in a way that makes complete sense.

Then there is also the matter of Samuel’s own childhood lost love and what led him to make the choices he did—and to have settled for his current station in life, which is something that brings him great dissatisfaction. We see these broiling questions intersect with those of his mother’s past, and Hill suggests, in a way, that no matter how much we might like, we are inevitably tied to our family’s history. (I know, it gives me no great joy to accept that, either.) In a book this length, you have to be a skilled writer to keep my attention sustained, especially when there are as many moving pieces here as a shogi board. Hill achieved this to great effect and does so seamlessly.

As I’ve hinted, the novel contains some interesting and well-developed thematic concerns, such as family history, inherited trauma, the nature of memory and remembrance, and what shapes our knowledge of person, to name a few. It also touches on the idea of agency, and to what degree we are responsible for our current state of affairs (as opposed to the actions of others). One of the central issues in the novel is that Samuel’s idea of his mother is but a fraction of who she really is, and in large part, his discovery of the rest of his mother’s identity is integral to his own self-understanding. I don’t know how he does it, but Hill manages to craft a narrative that ties together these wide-ranging themes in a way that just… clicked. Nothing is drawn out or overly bearing; Hill understands that he can show subtle hints or signs and trust the reader to figure out the connections. Kudos.

This is undoubtedly contemporary literary fiction at its best, and I can see why Nathan Hill has become a respected author so quickly after this novel was published. It is so grand in scope that I initially didn’t believe it would come together at the end… but it does. And for the time I was reading it, I was entirely gripped by this story; it is one I am glad to own (thanks to a giveaway, no less). If you are at all curious about the novel, give it a go; I am pretty sure it is hard to resist the alluring call of The Nix. (Also, kudos to Hill for choosing such an enigmatic yet intriguing symbol—the Nix, or Nixe, is one of my favorite Germanic myths. Interestingly, “Nix” is masculine whereas “Nixe” is feminine; one has to wonder who the Nix/Nixe in this story may be—and there are multiple possibilities.)

Disclaimer: Thank you to Goodreads and Vintage for providing me with a complimentary copy of this book, which I received in a Goodreads Giveaway. My review reflects only my honest opinions.

Favorite quotes:
※ ‘The things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst.’
※ ‘Because one thing she’s learned through all this is that 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.’
※ ‘You never even decided your life would be this way—it’s simply the way life has become. You’ve been carved out by the things that have happened to you. Like how the canyon can’t tell the river which way to shape it. It just allows itself to be cut.’
※ ‘Everyone loves a prodigy [...]. Prodigies get us off the hook for living ordinary lives. We can tell ourselves we're not special because we weren't born with it, which is a great excuse.’

This is a sprawling coming-of-age novel about a boy abandoned by his mother, and the man he becomes when he seeks her out years later to try and write a book about her life and history. It’s also about the girl she was before she gave up and married his father.

It jumps back and forth between 2011 and Chicago in the late 1960s, when the city was on the verge of erupting into riots at the Democratic National Convention.

The Nix reminded me a bit of The Goldfinch at points, but the end result wasn’t nearly as masterfully done. I enjoyed the book, but there were several points where Hill spends long chapters on characters completely secondary to the main plot, and I found myself asking why those scenes were relevant.

The only real justification is that they cross paths with the main character, and Hill wanted to paint a bigger picture of their lives. It didn’t help that the audiobook narrator chose to narrate those chapters in the voice of the characters, which made the time spent with them even more annoying.

I also felt like the ending wrapped things up just a little bit too smoothly, especially after so much strife and struggle.