The Nix: A novel

All told, The Nix is not the most extravagantly awful critically-acclaimed novel I’ve ever read—that would probably be one of Cormac McCarthy’s or Don DeLillo’s howlers. It’s just not very good. The plot is a real mess, with contrived framing devices, jittery narrative focus, and little

forward momentum. On a sentence level, Hill dutifully sprinkles unusual metaphors throughout his text in order to demonstrate that he is a serious literary stylist.

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User reviews

LibraryThing member lisapeet

As I feared, NYPL sucked my e-copy of this back into the ether today when I had 30 pages (out of 620!) left. And the thought drove me SO nuts that I ran all over the office until 15 minutes before I left for the weekend I found a copy I could borrow. I ended up liking it a lot, too. It was long and

a real shaggy dog of a story, but I think he pulled it off really nicely—it managed to avoid the same type of pitfalls that got annoying in The Goldfinch, which it reminded me of a little. There are some great interwoven story lines, about the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention protests and massively multiplayer online role-playing games and Norwegian mythology and conservative politicians and academia and publishing and Iraq and Allen Ginsberg and "Choose Your Own Adventure" books and Occupy Wall Street. It's jam-packed. But always fun and surprising, and my attention never flagged. So, recommended to all the usual suspects who like a big fat story.

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LibraryThing member RidgewayGirl

This book! I'm conflicted about what to say about Nathan Hill's debut novel. On the one hand, it's one of my favorite kind of book - a big, meaty novel full of heart, and it's well-written and there are characters who are so nuanced and fully realized that it's a pleasure to read about them. Hill

manages to humanize even the one truly bad man in this book - sure it's his wife's fault, but he's got layers. The Nix is a book about family, about how the ones you love are the ones who will hurt you, about the weight of the past, forgiveness and understanding.

And it's a messy, bloated book, in which one character is made to be the one we are all supposed to hate and, unlike every other character, drawn without depth to be the butt of jokes. It's a novel where women are the source of men's discomfort, the cause of their failure and their reward for successfully changing their ways. And it's a novel with everything neatly and nicely tied up at the end, no ambiguity allowed.

Samuel teaches English at a suburban university. He's not very good at it, preferring to put all his energy into not writing the book for which the advance has long been spent and playing an online World of Warcraft-style game. He's mad at his Mom for leaving him when he was eleven, which is also the year he made a good friend and developed a crush on his friend's talented sister. When his mother resurfaces - she's arrested for assaulting a presidential candidate - he agrees to write a nasty tell-all.

The Nix moves forward and back as it follows his mother's past, Samuel's childhood and their present, in a world almost, but not quite like our own. It's the kind of book that's hard to put down, at least when Hill sticks with his main and secondary characters. He does go off on tangents that detract from the story he's telling, but the parts that center on Samuel, his mother or the people in their immediate orbit, the book is fantastic.

I'm looking forward to what this author does next, and in seeing how he hones his craft.

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LibraryThing member santhony

This is just a very well written and highly entertaining work. The story ostensibly follows Samuel, an aspiring writer and college professor and the mother that abandoned him as a young child, through three timelines. First was the late 60s, when his mother was attending college in Chicago during

the 1968 Democratic Convention. Second was the early 80s, as young Samuel struggles through adolescence on the eve of his mother’s abandonment. Finally, mother and son are reunited under highly unusual circumstances near the present day. These threads alternate throughout the novel.

The underlying story is certainly interesting and engaging, but what makes the book so enjoyable for me are the little side stories and vignettes featuring very peripheral characters. There is the middle aged adult that has become so addicted to role playing video games that his life is a shambles. There is the beautiful co-ed (one of Samuel’s students) who has made cheating an art form, skating through high school and now college, doing no work whatsoever. The author treats us to the inner workings of their minds, as never-ending rationalizations, strategies and unfulfilled pledges prove to be highly entertaining. I’m not usually a fan of stream of consciousness, but at least as applied to these two characters, it worked for me. The writing style was very reminiscent of Tom Wolfe in such works at A Man in Full and I Am Charlotte Simmons.

A number of reviewers complain that “This book is SOOOOO long!!” So long, compared to what, a 300 page, double spaced book with wide margins and dozens of “chapters” resulting in numerous empty pages, consumable in about a day and a half? Yes; compared to Dickens, Michener, King, Clancy (and yes, Tom Wolfe), not at all. It is about 600 pages, hardly a doorstop. Is it asking too much to take a week to finish a good book? When I find a highly enjoyable, well written book, I don’t want it to end. This is one of the best novels I’ve read in a while.

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LibraryThing member BraveNewBks

Contrary to my first impression (based primarily on the title and a glance at the cover), this book has almost nothing to do with Nixon.

I'll wait while you finish laughing at me.

The Nix, it turns out, is the centerpiece of a dark Norwegian fable that threads itself through the book. The moral of

the fable may be that pride goes before a fall, or it may be something with more dire psychological consequences. Either way, it stands like a lamppost in the background of the novel, casting the actions of characters into light and shadow.

The most important of those characters are Samuel and his mother, Faye. Because the novel skips nimbly around in time, we see Samuel both as a college professor in his adulthood, and as a small child trying to earn his mother's affection. We see Faye as a young mother, as an older woman at the center of a strange but somehow believable political scandal, and as a teenager breaking out of her small-town roots and going off to the big city for college, right in the middle of hippies and war protests and the 1968 Chicago riots. Several minor characters flit around the edges of these vignettes, often as almost comically selfish villains. I also noticed that my sympathies as a reader seemed to be spread between Samuel and Faye in a sort of zero-sum game, as though understanding one necessarily involved despising the other a bit. That tells me that they were defined too much by the other, instead of existing independently.

This novel never quite made up its mind whether it wanted to be satirical and darkly comic, or sentimental and painfully earnest. There's a lot to unpack here, and it's well worth the time spent, but it didn't quite come together as a cohesive whole. 4 stars for ambition and lots of interesting ideas, but with a better editor, I think this had the capacity to be a 5-star novel, and it was disappointing to see that promise fall short.

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LibraryThing member Wickabod

What a zany joyride.

Fair warning: Nathan Hill has put a lot of stuff into this big novel. (He is not a writer lacking in confidence.) Things can get a bit manic, and it occasionally runs the risk of veering out of control. But it's also wise and intelligent, and suffused with humanity. And it is

very, very funny.

While reading, I was reminded of that classic exchange between Mozart and Emperor Joseph II in the film version of "Amadeus":

"EMPEROR: My dear, young man, don't take it too hard. Your work is ingenious. It's quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that's all. Cut a few and it will be perfect.
MOZART: Which few did you have in mind, Majesty?
EMPEROR: Well. There it is."

There it is, indeed. To offer just one example: there's a 20-page section that is nothing but a series of inventive excuses offered by a plagiarizing college student to her professor. Excessive? Perhaps. Necessary to the story? No. But it's also utterly hilarious. So I'm not suggesting any specific notes to cut. I can't help feeling that this could have been a leaner and tighter book, and maybe that it could have more effective as a result. But this is the book Nathan Hill gave us, and I'll gladly take it as it is.

Hill jumps back and forth in time and space, taking us on a wildly original romp through modern American history from the 1950s to the present. But at its core, this is a story of the relationships between three generations of an American family. And for all the craziness and hyperactivity, that thoughtful inner core is what makes his book special for me.

He had me hooked with his opening montage: a young mother leaves her family, but slowly, over a period of months. She removes her personal items from the house one by one, and it's so gradual that her husband and son don't realize what's happening. In the process, she is also removing herself mentally, bit by bit. Then one day, she disappears for good. It's a terrific image, and Hill writes it in a way that is both heartbreaking and funny. And that really sums up what's best about THE NIX for me.

This was mostly great fun, despite the occasional frustrations. In the end, it was the compassion and warmth of his novel that won me over.

It may have been a long haul, but I'm glad to have been along for the ride.

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LibraryThing member nivramkoorb

This book came with a lot of hype for a first novel, but it was worth it. One of the best debuts that I have ever read. Not sure if Hill will ever be able to top this one. A sprawling tale that does a great job of satirizing our times. There is an eerie resemblance to our current political

environment, playing video games, 1968, and so and so on. It is 620 pages so it drags just a little bit in certain spots, but it is so creative and the writing is excellent and entertaining. His take inside the mind of some of his characters is worth the price of the book. I highly recommend this book. I gave it 5 stars which I haven't done for awhile. There is an Irving, Franzen, Chabon feel to the book but it is really its own thing.

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LibraryThing member lycomayflower

*Well.* This is the best experience I've had reading literary fiction in yonks. Given my tendency lately to put books down without finishing them, I was a little wary of picking up a 700+ page piece of litfic, but I was also looking for some litfic that would kind of get me back into the groove of

litfic. Not sure exactly what about The Nix made me think it was the book to do that, but it sure did. It took me about three weeks to finish this with fairly steady reading, and that feels decidedly like an accomplishment to me these days. It was long and it took a minute to read and I still stuck with it to the end. Booyah! Hill would be on my "Yay!" list if for only that, but, you guys, this book. It's awesome.

The story revolves around Samuel Andresen-Anderson, a teacher of freshmen comp at a university, and his mother, Faye, who abandoned him when he was a child but has resurfaced in Samuel's life through some highly publicized legal trouble she's landed herself in. The narrative moves among the present (2011), Samuel's childhood (1988), and Faye's teenaged years (1968), and explores their family dynamics. Those narrative moves are extremely satisfying, but what most interested and impressed me about The Nix was the way it presents and examines American attitudes toward media, news, and politics. Over the course of the novel we see the protest/riot around the Democratic National Convention in '68 from the perspective of several characters protesting as well as from the police; from the perspective of Walter Cronkite covering it; from the perspective of "average Americans" watching the coverage. We see a very talented player of a MMORPG who is addicted to the game. We see a publisher trying to capitalize on a scandal before it leaves the collective American consciousness. We see family stories and how they do or don't stack up against reality. All these threads come together well, and as a whole they create this amazing look at narrative and story and news and reality and belief and how all those things play together to create individual and mass perceptions of the world that drive events but which are, to degrees we really can't even fathom from any one point of view, wildly untrue. You know that little frisson you get when you're reading a thriller or mystery or other puzzly book and you realize how it's all going to come together? I got that sensation in the last forty pages or so of [The Nix] at how he was bringing all his story and thematic threads together.

This is decidedly the best book I've read so far this year. It's engaging, entertaining, well written, and says what it has to say masterfully. Read it, read it, read it.

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LibraryThing member write-review

Tremendous Debut, Promising Future

For those who like their fiction long and winding, filled with propulsive twists and revelations, and interspersed with witty and often perceptive observations on human behavior and cultural lunacy, Nathan Hill’s debut delivers just the right balance. It is at

times funny, serious, and poignant, sometimes all simultaneously, even, when venturing into the political realm, when it is extremely cynical, though truthful, too. Ultimately, you’ll find it, at its heart, a novel of discovery, particularly of self-discovery, as the main characters Samuel and Faye, as well as a stellar cast of supporting characters, chief among them Bishop, Bethany, and Pwnage, as all must come to grips with their life decisions and the consequences engendered by them, leaving Periwinkle as the sole emotionally and intellectually stagnant character operating as the cynical stripper of civilization’s glossy varnish.

The story is fairly simple: young Samuel Andersen-Anderson labors as an unhappy literature prof in a small average college teaching students who see little value or relevance in what he has to offer. Really, as Laura Pottsdam, straight A student due to her excellent cheating skills, wonders how writing a paper on Hamlet will help her get a great marketing communications job. It’s a paper she has plagiarized, refuses to rewrite, and that affords Samuel, and readers, pages of hilarious arguments and rationales as to why she should either receive an A on her stolen submission or be excused entirely from the assignment. Readers will find the novel packed cheek to jowl with flights of observation and commentary like this on the problems and oddities of modern American life. Poor Samuel seeks refuge in online gaming, where he plays with Pwnage, a master gamer and the epitome of obsessive self-destructive behavior.

Samuel’s life changes when publisher Periwinkle calls him about his mother Faye who has been arrested for assault and battery on cornpone presidential aspirant Sheldon Packer. Once Samuel was a promising emerging writer whom Periwinkle had issued a lucrative advance against a first novel, one that years later, Samuel has yet to deliver, or even begin. Periwinkle offers to absolve him of his considerable debt simply by writing a tell-all, a damning book about his mother. Samuel, who knows little or nothing about her, agrees, on the condition he be given time to do research. Thus, he sets off to discover why his mother walked out on him and his father, a frozen-food salesman. It proves to be both a complicated and revelatory tale that romps through the Fifties, the Sixties, into present post-recession America.

This takes Samuel and readers back into Faye’s life in Iowa, where Hill makes some keen observations about life in the Decade of Conformity, the most jarring for modern types Home Economics class. You’ll wonder why anyone, and certainly why any woman, would ever want to regress back to those times. Later, her life in Chicago during the 1968 riotous Democratic convention does a good job of putting readers in the moment, while also illustrating the cynicism and hypocrisy of the whole affair, as well as political and protest life in general.

Samuel, deserted as he was at eleven, finds friendship and solace when Bishop Fall befriends him and introduces him to a wealthier section of town, but more profoundly, to his twin sister Bethany. A child musical prodigy, a vision of unnatural poise and beauty, she captures Samuel’s heart for a lifetime. Bishop, Bethany, and Samuel’s relationship grows into experiences that bind them perpetually and weave through the pages of the novel to the very last words. These moments with these characters represent the finest in the novel, particularly in terms of poignancy.

Because The Nix is such a long and sprawling novel, it would be easy to go on and on about the characters, the times, and commentary on contemporary life, all of which are best left for discovery by the reader. Suffice it say that most will find this among their best reading experiences in a while, with the only flaw being that Hill perhaps lingers a bit too long over some matters, especially in Chicago and toward the end.

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LibraryThing member gmmartz

Wow, what a book! For all of its intimidating heft (621 pages) and big classic themes (redemption, reinvention, finding oneself), The Nix was just a joy to plow through. This novel made it onto several 'best of 2016' lists and is certainly on mine.

The plot is quite inventive, the characters sad,

funny, and unforgettable, and the story moves across time and place in an effort to answer the many questions introduced throughout the chapters. It's a wild ride covering topics ranging from politics, college life, video games, Vietnam protests, rich folks, writing, book publishing, and about 10 others. It slows down just a bit, deep in the 2nd half, as the riots at the Democratic National Convention in '68 are addressed through the eyes of 2 of the main characters.

The writing in The Nix is so good... there are probably 10 or more quotable sentences or passages spread across the pages. I wouldn't call it 'experimental', but a highly memorable sentence describing of the demise of one of the videogamers was an entire chapter in length. Often, when I encounter a long sentence in a book I revert to my childhood and think about how such a sentence would be diagrammed.... decided after about the first page that it wouldn't be a productive use of time. It's a hilarious (in a macabre way) passage, though, and Nathan Hill's unique approach to writing it just illustrates his excellence in matching technique to content.

So, on the elements I generally 'rate' novels on, The Nix has a great plot and numerous contributing sub-plots, wonderful characters that are fully developed (hence the 621 pages), superb writing, a pace that may seem leisurely but moves quite quickly back and forth in time, and a nice ending. I tend to avoid 'big books with big themes' but am glad I made it through what's now my favorite book of the last year or so.

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LibraryThing member indygo88

Samuel is a college professor, single, who on his off time enjoys hiding away in his office at his computer playing Elfscape. He pines over his lost childhood love, and has never really recovered from the time his mother up and left his family when he was a young boy. When his mother suddenly makes

an unexpected return to his life by headlining the national news, he is forced to confront his feelings for her and must decide if he wants to help her.

This novel is a beast of a book at 600+ pages. It spans a large number of years, with the meat of the story taking place alternately in 1968 and 2011. There's a lot going on in this book, although it centers on present-day Samuel who is trying to figure out just exactly who his mother is and was, and his mother Faye as a high school teen and short-lived college student trying to find her place in the world.

This book has been hyped up a lot. The writing reminded me of both Jonathan Franzen and maybe Donna Tartt, and it appears some other readers may have felt the same. What it ultimately came down to, for me, was that the story was decent enough, but excessively longer than it needed to be. Nathan Hill loves long sentences. There were sentences in this novel that went on and on and on. This bothered me somewhat, although was not quite as noticeable in audio format (I switched back & forth). I did enjoy this novel, but I tend to think perhaps it's not necessarily worthy of all the hype it's gotten.

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LibraryThing member voracious

Samuel Andreson-Anderson is a man with a lot of baggage. His mother abandoned him when he was 11 years old, which he should have seen coming since household objects slowly vanished from the house in the months preceding her disappearance. Years later, Samuel is a second rate English professor at a

lesser known university with no real life friends, no dates, and an obsessive relationship to the internet game, Elfquest. Samuel had a brief moment of success and won a book contract after publishing a very successful short story. However, he squandered the money and never produced the book so his agent is planning to sue him. Oh, and he cries at the drop of a hat and has since childhood, an embarrassing personal flaw that embarrasses him at all the wrong times.

When Samuel's long lost mother becomes a political headline, after throwing rocks at a conservative presidential candidate, Samuel is granted one last chance to redeem himself and avoid financial bankruptcy by writing a biography about his mother's failed life. Samuel's mother, however, is very secretive and unwilling to share why she left him and as such, Samuel goes on a mission to find the answers and save himself from impending financial disaster.

The story bounces back and forth from the Vietnam protests in Chicago to modern day social media concerns, such as the degradation of the "real truth". I enjoyed the comparisons drawn between various levels of real and artificial social involvement, as well as the exaggerated scenes involving an entitled student who cheats in every class (and gets away with it) and an obsessive Elfquest player, who almost physically dies from his addiction due to malnutrition and lack of physical movement. There were parts of the story where I couldn't contain my laughter and thought it was the best book I've read. There were other times I became so bored of the story (particularly the Chicago university parts) that I wondered if I would even finish this 629 page novel. As others have mentioned, it reminded me of The Goldfinch, probably more because of the writing style and the fact that the primary character is a boy on his own without a mom.

There is a lot going on in this book, which will make for excellent discussion in a book club. However, I would have preferred more editing from around the halfway point to the 75% mark. I think this story could have been briefer and still a powerful novel. In all, though, it was pretty entertaining and a book worth reading.

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LibraryThing member Doondeck

Such an interesting mix of characters. Clever use of language as when Pwange goes on for an entire chapter in one sentence. Loved how the story all came together at the end.

LibraryThing member rglossne

Samuel Andresen-Anderson is a failing writer and college professor whose mother abandoned him when he was a child, without explanation. She comes back into his life in a most unexpected way, by committing a ridiculous but highly publicized crime. Samuel plans to seize the moment and write a

tell-all book to help pay off the advance for a book he has yet to write. It turns out, he knew very little about his mother, her parents, and the forces which have shaped him. Set in the present and the 1960s, Chicago and New York, The Nix explores the mother-son relationship and the secrets that shape families and friendships.

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LibraryThing member KatyBee

Great novel in so many ways: themes, structure, characters, and heart. Also in number of pages. Choose your own adventure in contemplating these interconnected chapters ranging from the 1960's to 2011... motherhood, protest movements, political theater, academics, gaming addiction, identity, and

more. Well done, Nathan Hill

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LibraryThing member porch_reader

I saw Nathan Hill read from The Nix at the Iowa City Book Festival. He had the audience rolling with laughter with his description of Pwnage, a friend of Samuel Andresen-Anderson who spends most of his time playing World of Elfscape. But this is only a small part of the plot of The Nix, a novel

that ranges from the Republican National Convention in Chicago in 1968 to Samuel's childhood in the 1980's to a present-day scandal in which a rock is thrown at a presidential candidate. Occasionally, the novel sprawls a bit too far, and the chapter that was written in a single sentence pushed my patience a bit, but the disparate threads come together to form a compelling story.

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LibraryThing member Kristelh

This book is about a mother/son relationship. It is also about politics from the sixties to the current time. The main character is Samuel, a school teacher by day and gamer by night. The book does capture the spirit and age of the sixties as well as the current time. First we have Samuel as the

narrator, college professor and his mother, a product of the sixties and we have Samuel’s students or at least one student who doesn’t see any benefit in studying literature but it is a mandatory class. It does capture the mood of the times with protests back then and protests now. Specifically it looks at the Chicago riots of 1968 and Occupy Wall Street. Having just read The Unwinding, by Packer and The Girls early this year. There seems to be a theme of revisiting the sixties. I felt that Nathan Hill captured that spirit both back then and the current period. The book looks at family relationships, issues of abandonment, issues of sexual abuse, the effects of excessive gaming, politics and injustices of politics.

The plot is a bit of wandering about with the current time, the sixties, thoughts of the mother, thoughts of the son, the college student, and thoughts of another gamer who will be Samuel if Samuel doesn’t do something. We also have the politician, the politics, and the manipulative use of media to influence public opinion. There are sections of dialogue about the computer game, feminine products, etc that I think could have been a lot less. I struggled a little with the second half of the book but overall it is enjoyable read. The characters are a little stereotyped from the politician, the game, the police officer. The college student could also be considered a stereotype of the millennium generation but I think these people are out there. The politician, the media, the gamer and the college student give us satire of the current age. Then there is the addition of ghosts and Norwegian fairy tales and the nix. I listened to the audio of this book and the reader’s Norwegian sounded more like Italian mafia than Norwegian.

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LibraryThing member wagner.sarah35

Some books truly capture the spirit of the current age and that is the case with The Nix, which includes references to child molestation, the Iraq War, Occupy Wall Street protesters, broken families, video game addiction, plagiarism, the entitlement of Millennials, gun politics, and presidential

elections. The complexity of our age is displayed in the pages of this book, which includes plenty of failures and a few implausible plot devices, but also humor and a worthwhile reflection on our time.

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LibraryThing member riverblendnc

This perspicacious first novel by Nathan Hill knocked my socks off! The synchronic tune to current events spoke to me without pedantry, but with a heartfelt, folk like quality not unlike the Nix, the "Norwegian" folk tale referred to throughout this story. I loved the "present day" reportage of

Chicago in '68- it had me turning to you tube for live documentation that confirmed the grasp the author had of the era and incident. Loved Allen Ginsberg's walk-ons, and references to his poetry were concise.
A couple of times my focus wandered, during the long treatises on Elfworld, which admittedly did open a world into which I've never entered. Another stream of conscious rambling- a few pages of continuous sentencing- tried my dedication, but it was late at night (can't remember where this was, somewhere in the last third of the book).
Samuel, Bishop & Bethany, of course Faye and Alice- wonderfully flawed characters, frustrating, earnest and so compelling. Their growth and development throughout the book was inspiring, and the theme of change not being easy, yet essential to growth resonated with me personally.
Oh yeah, I laughed out loud, a lot. Can't wait for Nathan Hill's next book.

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LibraryThing member amylee39

This book would have gotten five stars from me except for a couple of issues that I had with it. First, it's too long. Rambling soliloquies by some of the characters detracted from the book and made me wonder if I was just listening to a diatribe by the author himself. Second, it jumped around in

time, which I usually don't mind, but was sometimes disjointed. I really thought that the author is a talented writer and, despite his obviously wry and ironic take on society (which got a little old), I would like to read more from him.

I really wish Goodreads would allow 1/2 stars. I think 4.5 stars would have been appropriate.

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LibraryThing member sberson

Intermittently well written. Worthwhile reading.

LibraryThing member kremsa

One of the best books I've read in a long time!

LibraryThing member bookmuse56

A rambling twisty tale uses careful irony regarding the times of the 1950s to the present as a son who was abandoned by his mother seeks answers so he can reclaim his life. There is much to dissect here as the vast cast of characters whose lives intersect with the son and the mother get an

opportunity to tell their own stories as we the readers try to piece together what has scarred the son/mother duo.

Kudos to the author for being spot-on with the essence of the times – this is what kept me turning the pages. I enjoyed the introduction of the Nix and wish this concept was more present in the story. This story often had a documentary feel to me as the fictional characters were placed in true events and like a documentary interviewing varying participants I became invested in the many story threads and then was quickly plunged into another direction. This unexpected jarring often disturbed the story flow. But despite the multitude of these story threads, I was rewarded with the author closing the loops at the end.

This solid debut showcases the author’s ability to entice readers to enter his world through insightful observations and vulnerable characters.

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LibraryThing member Eyejaybee

This novel, Nathan Hill’s first, met with an amazing reception, with ecstatic plaudits from leading critics. Having had my fingers burned too often in the past from books heralded as an instant classic, I wasn’t sure what to expect. On this occasion, I had nothing to fear. This is a great

novel.

At times, it reminded me of Donna Tartt’s stunning ‘The Goldfinch’, and there were shades of Tom Wolfe’s ‘The Bonfire of the Vanities’ too, though the overall impact is wholly original. It spans nearly fifty years, with flashbacks to student protests during 1968, from the present day, and the travails of an academic, struggling to engage with lazy and disaffected students, and playing ‘Elfscape’, an online role-playing game that works along the lines of World of Warcraft. The narrative perspective moves around quite a bit in the first few chapters, but a strong theme quickly emerges.

Samuel Andresen-Anderson is the principal protagonist, and is a genuinely empathetic character. Far from perfect, he is beset with irritations, ranging from the cheating and ignorance of many of his students to the family upheaval suffered during his childhood, while still troubles him more than twenty years later. There are some marvellous secondary characters, too. Pwnage (apparently pronounced ‘poanage’) is a relentless gaming junkie, running a whole tribe of characters in Elfscape and committing ever increasing amounts of time and money to the game. Beset with fleeting moments of self-awareness, he regular promises himself that he will move away from this obsessive gaming lifestyle, lose weight and rehabilitate himself into a more orthodox way of life. As the novel opens, Pwnage is as far as ever from achieving this self-epiphany.

Laura Pottsdam is another gloriously drawn character. An ambitious but inveterately lazy student, she has managed to avoid any genuine work so far throughout her academic career, depending upon help from fellow students or, more frequently, her dexterity at cheating, downloading essays from sites on the internet. She spends her time flicking through a social media website, ‘iFeel’, hypothesising on stratagems to advance her career, and making decisions depending upon the feedback her ‘friends’ offer through the site.

Behind all this is the story of Faye, Samuel’s mother, who walked out on her family more than twenty years earlier, and who is catapulted into the public consciousness following a sudden impulsive act. This offer Hill the opportunity for some acute observations about the motives and actions of the student rebels from the late 1960s, while also exposing the hypocrisies of the establishment and the cruelties of some of the police during those troubles.

The writing is fine – clear and accessible - and Hill manages the complex storylines admirably. Moving backwards and forwards between the late 1960s, late 1980s and 2011, the plot never flags. This was a long novel, but very entertaining throughout.

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LibraryThing member Vicki_Weisfeld

A lot happens in the early pages of this multilayered novel set in the American Midwest: a woman throws a few bits of gravel at a right-wing presidential candidate; adepts play a round of the immersive multi-role-player game World of Elfscape; and untenured college professor Samuel Andreson

Anderson debates how to handle plagiarizing student Laura Pottsdam.
Then the pieces start to fit. The professor is one of the gamers, indulging in his e-addiction when he should be doing something productive, like working on the book he’s contracted to write, and for which he received a healthy advance. Another piece clicks into place when Samuel meets with his impatient publisher, who reveals the gravel-thrower was his mother Faye, who abandoned her son when he was 11. If he will only write Faye’s biography—how she came to be such a dangerous radical terrorist—all will be forgiven, and he won’t have to return the advance, long-since spent.
The problem is, he knows nothing about his mother. Once he starts asking questions, though, he realizes how badly he wants some answers. At first the clues are scant. The novel spends time on Samuel’s childhood and the Norwegian legends his immigrant grandfather and mother passed on to him. The one that gave the book its title is the household spirit—the Nix—whose mission is to foil a person’s plans. The lesson of the Nix is: “Don’t trust things that are too good to be true.” Once a Nix latches onto you, it never leaves. “A person can be a Nix to another person,” his mother explains, and pretty much everyone in this book has Nixes to contend with. That includes Samuel’s best childhood friends, Bishop and his twin sister, the violin prodigy Bethany.
Samuel learns that his mother was briefly a student in Chicago in 1968, as the radicals and the Establishment prepared for the Democratic convention. For a while, his mother’s story takes over the narrative, and though her students days were short, they were filled with incident and the outsize personalities of the counterculture and its foes. Faye had a Nix too.
Jason Sheehan for NPR said the lives of both Samuel and Faye were filled with “the small mistakes that become a life’s great tragedies,” or you could just say their Nixes keep getting in the way.
With its sly and at time hilarious commentary on American culture of the Sixties and today, The Nix was chosen by numerous publications as a Notable Book of 2016. Though the book is hard to describe without becoming entangled in its richly conceived plot, it’s author Hill’s writing—“looping, run-on, wildly digressive pages,” Sheehan says—and the on-point humor that pull you in. An early scene in which the plagiarist student Laura explains why she shouldn’t be penalized for her poor performance is a LOL model of self-absorption and self-justification.
Narrator Ari Fliakos does a fine job inhabiting the characters—not just the principals, but also the entitled Laura, the self-satisfied Chicago protestors, the insufferable publisher, and the World of Elfscape-obsessed Pwnage (pronounced Pone-aj). At almost 22 hours, it is rather a long book for listening, yet I enjoyed it a lot.

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LibraryThing member janismack

This book was way to long. i didn't like any of the caracters and kept wondering what was the point of this story. I was about to give up on it I kind of wanted to know why his mother left him in the first place.

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