The Nix by Nathan Hill review – a novel of extravagant appetite

Behold, another American monster is upon us, this one a novel of extravagant appetite that chows down a mighty spread of political history, social mores, media blague, online addiction, childhood grief, military misadventure, academic entitlement, and manages to make, if not light work of it, then something compulsive and crazily entertaining. One might tap Nathan Hill’s shoulders with the double-edged sword of “Dickensian”, given that his debut novel is stuffed with good jokes, family secrets and incidental pathos; it’s also windy with circumlocution and occasionally too intricate for its own good.

The story is kickstarted by a righteous convulsion of fury. While strolling in a Chicago park, Governor Sheldon Packer – authoritarian demagogue and presidential candidate – is abused and pelted with gravel by a middle-aged woman. The incident, caught on a video clip, goes viral, the TV coverage goes nuts and very soon the assailant is dubbed “the Packer Attacker”. Everyone is talking about it – everyone but Samuel Andresen-Anderson, a 30-ish literature professor too stressed with work and preoccupied by an online game (World of Elfscape) to notice what’s happening in the real world. So it’s quite a shock when a lawyer contacts him with the news that the Packer Attacker is in fact his mother, Faye, whom he hasn’t seen since she walked out of the family home over 20 years ago.

The lawyer wants him as a character witness, but Samuel’s publisher sniffs a commercial opportunity. Instead of suing him for non-delivery of a novel commissioned 10 years before, the publisher suggests he write a savage tell-all takedown of his long-lost mum and thus give the public a chance to indulge their sanctimony: “less empathy, more carnage” is his advice. So Samuel begins investigating his mother’s life in the years before she fled the family, during her own troubled youth in Iowa and then as a student in Chicago circa 1968. He particularly recalls his mother’s warning him about “the Nix”, a spirit of Norwegian legend that will usually appear as a person, for good and ill: “The things you loved the most will one day hurt you the worst,” she says. This seems to relate directly to the mysterious friends of Samuel’s boyhood, a bewitching concert violinist named Bethany, and her twin brother, Bishop, whose eventual fate as a soldier in Iraq is one of the novel’s most traumatic episodes. But the Nix may also be the very person who left Samuel to survive “a motherless childhood”.

Hill, hopscotching back and forth through a 50-year span, swaps the masks of comedy and tragedy so deftly you can’t always be sure which is which. He is very funny, for instance, about the way the modern American consciousness insulates itself from reality. Samuel’s nemesis is a student, Laura Pottsdam, whose plagiarism and cheating he has finally called time on. Yet instead of being cowed, Laura counterattacks her professor for triggering “negative feelings of stress and vulnerability”. In her world of self-pity and egomania all that matters is her “iFeel app”, by which she can broadcast her emotional weather at any given moment to her “vast network of friends”. Her short-term ambition will be satisfied by getting a degree without having to open a book or write an essay.

The novel’s other serious fugitive from real life is a gamer even more obsessive than Samuel about World of Elfscape. Hill has an instinct for loneliness and an eye for the repulsive excesses of American consumerism. At one point, a TV shows a man famous for eating grotesque quantities of food, his face puffy “in the way of someone who, all over his body, had a quarter-inch of extra muchness”.

That’s rather like The Nix. It has, on almost every page, a quarter-inch of extra muchness. No sooner has the reader’s sympathy settled on one character than Hill flicks a switch and another subplot assumes the spotlight. In the case of that lonely gamer it climaxes in a 10-page unbroken paragraph on the horrifying mental and physical decline of a man who simply can’t cope with “the wearying details of his life”. You may be reminded here of David Foster Wallace’s minute notation of things falling apart in his towering epic of dysfunction Infinite Jest (1996). Both novels make a feature of extended comic riffs whose larkiness suggests that the writer is having much more fun than the reader. Even the big set-piece climax at the 1968 Democratic national convention in Chicago, complete with cameos from Allen Ginsberg, Walter Cronkite and Hubert Humphrey, feels like something that could have benefited from a trim.

There is no denying the inventive wit and energy on display; but a writer needs to take an occasional step back to consider the reader, who may have a life of their own to be getting on with. Hill, to his credit, understands the risks of long-windedness. Samuel’s publisher tells him that his projected 600-page novel will most likely have about 10 readers. I would bet on The Nix having many, many more.