The Nix by Nathan Hill

Amy    
Lynnie 

historical fiction, mystery

The Nix covers the lives of a mother and son: Samuel Andreson-Anderson, a college English teacher, and his mother, Faye, who has been missing from Samuel's life since she walked out when he was 10.  It's 2011 and Samuel must confront his mother after discovering that she has attacked a presidential candidate and is facing a trial and prison time.  Samuel's life is not what he dreamed it would be.  Faye's life was not what she dreamed it would be either.  By going back in time to Samuel's childhood, Faye's high school and college days, and even to the point at which Faye's father came to America from Norway, we learn the family history and the settings in which poor decisions were made alongside rotten luck. 

Amy's Review

This novel was recommended by a friend. Overall, I liked this novel. It made me smile at times despite the non-comical topics. And, at first, I loved the exaggerated, detailed way Nathan Hill described the characters in such a realistic and flawed way that I felt like I've known people who were exactly like these characters. His sentences, at times, flow on seamlessly to the point where they reveal the characters’ more dire, depressing circumstances. And, thankfully, the futility of their situations are described with a little humor! However, I eventually got tired of the lengthy descriptions, run-on sentences, and extensive listings. I got the author’s point after a paragraph or two but he sometimes went on for pages, getting more and more detailed and/or exaggerated. So, I started skimming those descriptive segments which were adding nothing to the forward motion of the story.

The political commentary seemed timely in our current climate from the lying leaders to the college protests to the media trying to remain impartial to the farmers in Iowa not understanding the city life realities to the police brutality. It’s sad to think that we’ve been here before and learned nothing. At times, I could have been reading a story about what is going on today instead of 1968. I particularly found this passage (from 2011 in the novel) topical:
“What’s true? What’s false? In case you haven’t noticed, the world has pretty much given up on the old Enlightenment idea of piecing together the truth based on observed data. Reality is too complicated and scary for that. Instead, it’s way easier to ignore all data that doesn’t fit your preconceptions and believe all data that does. I believe what I believe, and you believe what you believe, and we’ll agree to disagree. It’s liberal tolerance meets dark ages denialism. It’s very hip right now.”
“This sounds awful.”
“We are more politically fanatical than ever before, more religiously zealous, more rigid in our thinking, less capable of empathy. The way we see the world is totalizing and unbreakable. We are completely avoiding the problems that diversity and worldwide communication imply. Thus, nobody cares about antique ideas like true or false.”

Some things I really enjoyed: the musical descriptions in the section about Bethany's childhood, Disney World described from a cynic’s point of view, the sad details of the life of a computer gaming addict, the fact that the story was told from three main different time periods. Some things I really didn’t like was that one of the main characters ended up surviving his medical emergency (I won’t say more or will give things away)—was the author too attached to just kill him off? I also didn’t like what another of the characters from Faye’s college days became (again, I’m being vague on purpose).

However, I thought the book was well-done overall. I didn’t really love any of the characters but they were interesting and hopeful and that is what kept me going.  

Lynnie's Review

I am the only person I know who didn't really like this book. Honestly, it was a chore for me to finish and admittedly I skimmed a great deal of the last half.

The writing is really wonderful and maybe with some good editing I would have appreciated it more. Rather I found myself distracted by things that were completely superfluous to the story (the entire Elfscape thread in the book for instance). Those moments made me dread reading the story, which made it harder for me to appreciate the really wonderful parts.

I really enjoyed the second section about Samuel's childhood and the sections about Faye's life in the '60s, but generally I only tolerated the rest. There's a lot of navel gazing in this book and while Hill paints a really vivid picture, sometimes it's obnoxiously over-explained. We don't just get a description of a room (for example), we get the smells, the lighting, a description of the way the dust motes float in the lighting, the way it makes Samuel feel and the memories it evokes before we ever get to learn what he's doing in the room and by then I no longer really care all that much.

I think I would have enjoyed this book more if I were on vacation and had both the time and inclination to completely immerse and lose myself in a story. Unfortunately I read it during the holiday season when my patience is already thin. Sometimes a book finds you at the wrong time and I think that was the case with me and The Nix.