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The Nix A novel Nathan Hill 9781101946619 Books

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The Nix A novel Nathan Hill 9781101946619 Books

Samuel is an underachieving assistant professor of literature at a nothing college outside Chicago who dislikes his students, spends way too much time playing an online fantasy game, got a huge advance for a novel he never wrote, and is pining for the girl he loved when he was eleven. His life is stalled out big time, but he is dragged out of stasis when his estranged mother, who abandoned him when he was eleven and has never been heard from since, makes national headlines for throwing rocks at a Presidential candidate - she is the Packer Attacker! Through a ridiculous series of events, Samuel is tasked with writing his mother's life story, and is forced to investigate her life since leaving him. The Nix is the story of how mother and son came to where they are -- and where they might go from here.

But really, this basic plot description does not begin to do this book justice. Nathan Hill has a dazzling imagination, and the feats of writing that he performs are an absolute joy to experience. He writes one chapter from the POV of a gaming addict, an internal stream of consciousness in which the character makes elaborate plans to quit gaming, but talks himself out of it. This is ten pages, one paragraph, and it is absolutely mesmerizing -- funny and insightful and sad, about the stories we tell ourselves. Another chapter is just a conversation between Samuel and the lawyer who is representing his mother, nothing but dialogue, and it is hysterical. Another chapter is a Choose Your Own Adventure mini-bookl explaining how Samuel's relationship with a violin prodigy came unraveled, because Samuel does not choose wisely. Another chapter is...you get the picture.

The story of Samuel and his mother is a jumping-off point for Mr. Hill to write about a huge range of things: let's see, he covers second-rate higher education, gaming addicts, the ravenous news media, music prodigies, child abuse, child abandonment, thwarted love, the 1960s counter-cultural revolution, Allan Ginsberg, Walter Cronkite -- at one point, no joke, there is a sequence inside the head of Walter Cronkite where he imagines himself as a bird flying above the Chicago riots... and I still haven't skimmed the surface of all the things this book is really about.

And if I have a criticism, that's what it is. This book is about so many things, it is so wildly ambitious and imagined, that at times it seems to get a bit out of control. Around the time Walter Cronkite was imagining himself as a bird, I was thinking, hmm, a little editing might have helped some. Reading The Nix feels a bit like watching a wildly talented thoroughbred run -- and win -- its first race. You see the immense beauty of the animal, the strength, the speed, it easily outpaces the rest of the field, you know you're at the beginning of something special. Yes, the horse is a little wild, a little undisciplined, maybe veers around the track a bit, maybe tires at the end, but my gosh. You want to turn to everyone around you and say "Did you SEE that?"

And one last thing. So many books these days are being written with a lot of technique, but they're lacking in heart. What makes this book special, to me, is that Mr. Hill's heart is as generous as his talent. He writes fantastic sentences, he has astonishing craft, but beyond that, he has true empathy, compassion and hope, He sees the insanity of the world, but he also has hope for our future. And I have tremendous hope for his.


Tags : The Nix: A novel [Nathan Hill] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. <b>Winner of the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction A New York Times </i></i>2016 Notable Book Entertainment Weekly's </i>#1 Book of the Year A Washington Post </i>2016 Notable Book A Slate </i>Top Ten Book NEW YORK TIMES</i> BESTSELLER “The Nix </i>is a mother-son psychodrama with ghosts and politics,Nathan Hill,The Nix: A novel,Knopf,110194661X,Historical,Humorous - General,Literary,Domestic fiction,FICTION Family Life,FICTION Humorous,Family secrets,Family secrets;Fiction.,Mothers and sons,Mothers and sons;Fiction.,Self-realization,Self-realization;Fiction.,AMERICAN FIRST NOVELISTS,AMERICAN HISTORICAL FICTION,FICTION Family Life General,FICTION Historical General,FICTION Humorous General,FICTION Literary,Family Life,Fiction,Fiction - General,Fiction-Literary,FictionFamily Life - General,FictionHumorous - General,GENERAL,General Adult,Literature; Literary fiction; Political fiction; politics; fiction; literary; novel; satire; culture; pop culture; dark comedy; tragicomedy; family; abandonment; Norwegian folklore; Family story; mother-son; Love; education; abuse; Video gaming; Video games; Internet gaming; Chicago; New York City; suburban Midwest; 1968 riots; 1968 convention; Democratic Convention of 1968; Republican Convention; Democratic Convention; 21st-century elections; Hubert Humphrey; Allen Ginsberg; Walter Cronkite; funny books,Literature;Literary fiction;Political fiction;politics;fiction;literary;novel;satire;culture;pop culture;dark comedy;family;abandonment;Love;education;abuse;Video gaming;Video games;Chicago;New York City;Hubert Humphrey;Allen Ginsberg;Walter Cronkite;literary fiction;funny books;comedy;humorous books;funny gifts;novels;humor;fiction books;humor books;literature;books fiction;satire fiction;realistic fiction books;coming of age;american literature;friendship;relationships;identity;marriage,Mothers and sons,Mothers and sons;Fiction.,Self-realization,Self-realization;Fiction.,United States,FICTION Family Life General,FICTION Historical General,FICTION Humorous General,FICTION Literary,Family Life,FictionFamily Life - General,FictionHumorous - General,Fiction - General,American First Novelists,American Historical Fiction,Fiction

The Nix A novel Nathan Hill 9781101946619 Books Reviews

This is my goodreads review
It's been awhile since I've been as affected by a book as I am by The Nix. Jason Sheehan reviewed the book for NPR, and captures some of my feelings
http//www.npr.org/2016/08/31/4901018...

"After 10 pages of Nathan Hill's debut novel, The Nix, I flipped to the dust jacket. I wanted to see what the author looked like because I was thinking to myself, Jesus, this guy is gonna be famous. I wanna see what he looks like. At 50 pages in I smiled when my train was delayed — a few extra minutes to read about Samuel Andresen-Anderson, the assistant English professor and gone-nowhere writer who'd failed to live up to a tiny bit of early promise. At around 100 pages, Samuel is in 6th grade — lonely, panicky, a crier at the least little thing — and I know I'm going to miss anything like a reasonable bedtime. At 200, it is stories of Samuel's mother that keeps me turning pages A teenager in 1968, driven, tightly wound. It is the sketched background of the woman who will abandon Samuel at 11 years old and wreck him in all the million ways that such a thing will wreck a delicate boy; the woman who will float back into his life years later on cable television — briefly notorious for throwing a handful of rocks at a conservative republican presidential candidate in a Chicago park....The Nix is 620 pages long. My last dog-ear is on page 613. It's nothing important. Just a funny story told by one character to another about the Northern Lights and the burden of expectation. It is lovely in precisely the same way that a thousand of Hill's other paragraphs are lovely — these looping, run-on, wildly digressive pages which, somehow, in their absolute refusal to cling together and act like a book, make the perfect book for our distracted age."

This book fits our time like David Foster Wallace was able to do with Infinite Jest, and Nathan Hill has that same brilliant, challenging writing style, on top of a satirical eye that covers the range of our modern world's obsessions. I have so many sticky notes in the book that it's hard to choose, but here are some of the lines that will stay with me, as he skewers everything from politics and journalism to materialism and obsessions. Mainly, all I can say is READ THIS!! -)

He opens with one page of the old Buddhist tale of the blind men and the elephant--which is woven so creatively into the book. These characters--especially the mother, Faye, and her son, Samuel--are all "blind", in the way of humans to be limited in our perceptions of both life and ourselves. Faye says, on p. 565
"In the story of the blind men and the elephant, what's usually ignored is the fact that each man's description was correct. What Faye won't understand and may never understand is that there is not one true self hidden by many false ones. Rather, there is one true self hidden by many other true ones. Yes, she is the meek and shy and industrious student. Yes, she is the panicky and frightened child. Yes, she is the bold and impulsive seductress. Yes, she is the wife and mother. And many other things as well. Her belief that only one of these is true obscures the larger truth, which was ultimately the problem with the blind men and the elephant. It wasn't that they were blind--it's that they stopped too quickly, and so never knew there was a larger truth to grasp."

Parts of the book make my heart ache--for the abused boy Bishop, for the stinging descriptions of what went on at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, for my favorite character Pwnage--lost in a video game since real life has become unbearable.

But also, at times I was laughing out loud and saying, "Right on!" when Hill uses satire as viciously as Vonnegut and Twain ever did. Here, on p. 65, he nails road rage as Samuel explains why he hates to drive in Chicago
"The closer he gets to the city, the more the highway feels malicious and warlike--wild zigzagging drivers cutting people off, tailgating, honking horns, flashing their lights, all their private traumas now publicly enlarged.

On p. 107, he captures all the inane, ludicrous qualities of a shopping mall, beginning with a long list of meaningless merchandise
"With its hundreds of stores and booths, the mall seemed to make a simple promise that here you would find everything you needed....the mall's overwhelmingness was meant to replace your imagination. Forget trying to dream of your desires; the mall had already dreamed them up for you."

On p. 530, he captures the despair of Walter Cronkite, trying to make sense of what is happening in Chicago in 1968. Even though Hill says he wrote the political sections a few years ago, the chilling timeliness of these lines is disturbing
"It's a chilling thought, that politicians have learned to manipulate the television medium better than the television professionals themselves. When old Cronkite first realized this was happening he imagined the kinds of people who would become politicians in the future. And he shuddered with fear."

I could go on and on--but I want to get at the reason for the unusual title. At the beginning of chapter 5, Faye explains the old myth of the Nix from her Norwegian heritage--a beautiful white horse that allows a child to ride it, and then the child wants to show off to others--and "when they most wanted to be celebrated for it and thus felt the most vanity and arrogance and pride" the horse jumps off a cliff and are drowned. Then she tells Samuel
" 'The Nix used to appear as a horse,' she said, 'but that was in the old days.'
'What does it look like now?'
'It's different for everyone. But it usually appears as a person. Usually it's someone you think you love.'
Samuel still did not understand.
'People love each other for many reasons, not all of them good,' she said. 'They love each other because it's easy. Or because they're used to it. Or because they've given up. Or because they're scared. People can be a Nix for each other.' "

I must tie this up, but need to mention two conventions of the book that worked so well, imho. Samuel loves "Choose Your Own Adventure" books as a child, and one entire chapter is titled "You Can Get the Girl" and is written in the format of those books. The other is the chapter about Pwnage, which is 11 pages of one sentence, and it works powerfully.

Because I'm a grandma who plays Wizard 101, Pwnage's escape into a video game held special poignancy for me (in gaming, "Pwn" means you "own", or have beaten, an opponent. (And if it seems strange that a 76 year old would know that tidbit, it is! -) This whole chapter is his attempt to break free of the addiction. Just read it straight through to get the total effect.

I'll conclude with some of the blurbs from

"A mother-son psychodrama with ghosts and politics, but it’s also a tragicomedy about anger and sanctimony in America. . . . Nathan Hill is a maestro.” —John Irving

“A fantastic novel about love, betrayal, politics and pop culture—as good as the best Michael Chabon or Jonathan Franzen.” —People

“It broke my heart, this book. Time after time. It made me laugh just as often. I loved it on the first page as powerfully as I did on the last.” —Jason Sheehan, NPR.org

“Hill has so much talent to burn that he can pull of just about any style, imagine himself into any person and convincingly portray any place or time. The Nix is hugely entertaining and unfailingly smart, and the author seems incapable of writing a pedestrian sentence or spinning a boring story. . . . [A] supersize and audacious novel of American misadventure.” —Teddy Wayne, The New York Times Book Review

“Irresistible. . . . A major new comic novelist . . . . Hill is a sharp social observer, hyper-alert to the absurdities of modern life. . . . his enormous book arrives as one of the stars of the fall season. . . . readers will find this novel. And they’ll be dazzled.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post
Samuel is an underachieving assistant professor of literature at a nothing college outside Chicago who dislikes his students, spends way too much time playing an online fantasy game, got a huge advance for a novel he never wrote, and is pining for the girl he loved when he was eleven. His life is stalled out big time, but he is dragged out of stasis when his estranged mother, who abandoned him when he was eleven and has never been heard from since, makes national headlines for throwing rocks at a Presidential candidate - she is the Packer Attacker! Through a ridiculous series of events, Samuel is tasked with writing his mother's life story, and is forced to investigate her life since leaving him. The Nix is the story of how mother and son came to where they are -- and where they might go from here.

But really, this basic plot description does not begin to do this book justice. Nathan Hill has a dazzling imagination, and the feats of writing that he performs are an absolute joy to experience. He writes one chapter from the POV of a gaming addict, an internal stream of consciousness in which the character makes elaborate plans to quit gaming, but talks himself out of it. This is ten pages, one paragraph, and it is absolutely mesmerizing -- funny and insightful and sad, about the stories we tell ourselves. Another chapter is just a conversation between Samuel and the lawyer who is representing his mother, nothing but dialogue, and it is hysterical. Another chapter is a Choose Your Own Adventure mini-bookl explaining how Samuel's relationship with a violin prodigy came unraveled, because Samuel does not choose wisely. Another chapter is...you get the picture.

The story of Samuel and his mother is a jumping-off point for Mr. Hill to write about a huge range of things let's see, he covers second-rate higher education, gaming addicts, the ravenous news media, music prodigies, child abuse, child abandonment, thwarted love, the 1960s counter-cultural revolution, Allan Ginsberg, Walter Cronkite -- at one point, no joke, there is a sequence inside the head of Walter Cronkite where he imagines himself as a bird flying above the Chicago riots... and I still haven't skimmed the surface of all the things this book is really about.

And if I have a criticism, that's what it is. This book is about so many things, it is so wildly ambitious and imagined, that at times it seems to get a bit out of control. Around the time Walter Cronkite was imagining himself as a bird, I was thinking, hmm, a little editing might have helped some. Reading The Nix feels a bit like watching a wildly talented thoroughbred run -- and win -- its first race. You see the immense beauty of the animal, the strength, the speed, it easily outpaces the rest of the field, you know you're at the beginning of something special. Yes, the horse is a little wild, a little undisciplined, maybe veers around the track a bit, maybe tires at the end, but my gosh. You want to turn to everyone around you and say "Did you SEE that?"

And one last thing. So many books these days are being written with a lot of technique, but they're lacking in heart. What makes this book special, to me, is that Mr. Hill's heart is as generous as his talent. He writes fantastic sentences, he has astonishing craft, but beyond that, he has true empathy, compassion and hope, He sees the insanity of the world, but he also has hope for our future. And I have tremendous hope for his.