The Nix

The only time Grandpa Frank was ever really animated was when he told them stories of the old country – old myths, old legends, old tales about ghosts he'd heard growing up where he'd grown up, in far-north Norway, in a little fishing village in the arctic that he left when he was eighteen. When he told Faye about the Nix, he said the moral was: Don't trust things that are too good to be true. But then she grew up and came to a new conclusion, which she told Samuel in the month before leaving the family. She told him the same story but added a new moral: “The things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst.”

The Nix starts with an epigraph – the story of a group of blind men who are each presented with just one part of an elephant and a brawl ensues when they disagree about what they are feeling – and indeed, author Nathan Hill is so hoping that we understand this is the theme of his book that he has a character (actually, Walter Cronkite) narrate the story once again to himself later on in order to mentally understand the gulf of understanding between the Chicago PD and the hippie protesters outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Put aside the likelihood of Cronkite telling himself this story while interviewing the Mayor of Chicago in the middle of a riot, and put aside the mild annoyance I felt while encountering the epigraph reappearing within the body of the book I was reading, and I will grant that Hill has chosen the perfect metaphor for this novel: As a first time novelist – a project he apparently worked on for ten years – Hill seems to have fallen for the common trap of putting in every big idea he's had over the years; and while the individual parts were as perfect and fascinating as a trunk and a tusk and a huge leathery ear, I really don't know if these parts add up to an elephant. I don't mind reading a 600+ page book if it has big things to say, but I think this would have worked better as a few shorter projects.

Time heals many things because it sets us on trajectories that make the past seem impossible.

Nathan Hill writes excellent sentences and interesting stories, and as he jumped back and forth between 2011 and 1968, there were many characters that I adored: the safe-space princess who expects to get a powerful job someday without ever doing any college work; the MMORPG addict who intends to work on his real life tomorrow, once he finishes a few more quests; the eleven-year old boy who can get away with anything and his beautiful twin sister the violin protege; the politically active hippie chick who wants to experience everything that interests her (and any one of these characters could support a book of their own). The thread holding all of this together is Samuel Andresen-Anderson and we meet him in his life of today – as a part-time literature professor, videogame obsessive, and would-be novelist – relive his childhood in a Chicago suburb, and as the plot of The Nix involves Nathan investigating the past of the mother who abandoned his family when he was a child, we follow her from an Iowa farming community to a Chicago college campus. But again, as really very well written as these different parts were, they didn't add up to a novel for me.

You're not choosing your own adventure; the adventure has been chosen for you. Even the decision to come to New York in the first place wasn't really a decision so much as a reflexive and impulsive yes. How could it be a “decision” when you never considered saying no? The yes was there already, waiting for you, inevitable, the sum of all those years of pining and hoping and obsessing. 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.

So, the book starts in the present (of 2011), and then flips back and forth between the past and the present, until the mother's entire life is revealed. And in a cliche commonly found in books about writers, near the end Nathan has a scene where he explains that he's about to start writing a book about her: voila The Nix. Sigh. Meanwhile, Hill totally captured the 1968 counterculture for me. And he nicely captured some really zeitgeisty things about today's culture for me. And by bridging the two times periods, he was able to show the evolution of institutions, such as the US military (from Vietnam to Iraq), journalism, protest movements, women's sexuality (and how the evolution of porn has changed men's sexuality for that matter), pop music, and education. All good and interesting stuff. But then there are some cartoonish characters (Guy Periwinkle and Governor Packer and, sigh, Charlie Brown) and some unresolved questions (I still don't really know why Frank left Norway or why Faye married Henry). And the quotes I chose for this review weren't necessarily my favourites, but more meant to illustrate the way that Hill tends to speak in aphorisms that might not survive scrutiny or reveal larger truths:

This is who we are.

Men's bathrooms that required you touch nothing but yourself. Automated dispensers that pooed little globs of pink generic soap onto your hands. Sinks that did not run enough water to fully wash. The same threat-level warning issued ad nauseam. The security mandates – empty your pockets, remove your shoes, laptops out, gels and liquids in separate bags – repeated so many times that eventually everyone stopped hearing them. All of this so reflexive and automatic and habituated and slow that the travelers were a little zoned out and playing with their phones and just simply enduring this uniquely modern, first world ordeal that is not per se “difficult” but is definitely exhausting. Spiritually debilitating. Everyone feeling a small ache of regret, suspecting that, as a people, we could do better. But we don't. The line for a McRib was quiet and solemn and twenty people deep.

And yet...I'm going to give The Nix four stars because I loved its parts. I loved the trunk and the tusks and the huge leathery ear; I just wish Hill had found a way to make an elephant out of them.