‘The Nix’ is a freewheeling, funny and compelling debut
Nathan Hill’s whirling debut novel, “The Nix,” blasts off with an assault on Gov. Sheldon Packer, a fire-breathing, antiimmigrant presidential candidate who may remind you of a certain reality-TV star with size anxiety. A video clip shot by some modernday Zapruder shows a middle-age woman shouting, “You pig!” and throwing something at Packer, who, by the grace of God, survives. (The “weapon” was just a handful of gravel, but
still!) In the breathless coverage that consumes the nation, the would-be assassin — “The Packer Attacker” — is quickly identified as a teaching assistant at an elementary school, which, the governor’s allies note, “shows how the radical liberal agenda has taken over public education.”
That splashy blend of violence and farce is the first sign that we’re in the presence of a major new comic novelist. Hill’s enormous book arrives as one of the stars of the fall season.
“The Nix” is set in motion by that video clip of the governor’s gravel gash. Everybody in the country watches it, except English professor Samuel Andresen-Anderson, who is too depressed about his job and too stressed about his finances to notice — until he gets a call from a lawyer and learns that the Packer Attacker is his long-lost mother. The lawyer wants Samuel to be a character witness, but Samuel’s publisher has a more lucrative if equally absurd idea: Investigate his mother’s radical past and write a scathing exposé of Gov. Packer’s assailant.
This seems like a great opening to a political satire — the cable-news lunacy is particularly spot-on — but Hill has something broader in mind for his rapacious novel, which roves from 2011 to the 1950s, from America to Norway, and from our world to the cyber realm of “Elfscape.”
Hill, 40, spent a quarter of his life working on “The Nix,” and it shows. He’s the Will Rogers of narrators: He’s never met a subject he didn’t like. “The Nix” presents that strain of gigantism unique to debut novelists who fear this will be their only shot. The book practically tears off its own binding in its desperation to contain every aside, joke, riff and detour.
And yet there’s no denying what a brilliant, endearing writer Hill is. If there’s an excess of “The Nix,” it’s an excess of wily storytelling. Beneath the book’s highly improbable, overarching plot about an attack on a presidential candidate and a son’s search for his mother, you’ll find an inexhaustible collection of smart, witty scenes.
As much as Samuel once loved his mother, Faye, we see that she was an unhappy woman, trapped in a conventional life she never wanted. Before abandoning Samuel, she frightens him with tales of the nix, a Norwegian ghost that carries little children away.
Moving further back in time, the chapters set in 1968 thrum with the grind and groove of the Age of Aquarius. There, we see college-age Faye leaving her repressive home in Iowa for the wilds of Chicago just before the Democratic National Convention. While Faye struggles to understand what she wants, the riots erupt, the police attack, Allen Ginsberg chants, and Walter Cronkite despairs. It’s a scene both nostalgic and prescient, one that traces the roots of our current political morass and the media that feed off it.
No matter where you are in this novel, comic touches jump out: the cringe-inducing hygiene lesson in a 1950s homeec class; the grotesque architecture of the 1960s college campus; the modern-day iFeel app that allows “friends” to “Autocare.” In fact, with its cascade of humor, “The Nix” sometimes reads like an anthology of irresistible sketches.
Hill is a sharp social observer, hyper-alert to the absurdities of modern life, but if there are any life lessons, they’re uncomfortable ones about the way a son and his mother have been crippled by history and their own longing. The best wisdom Faye can offer is to warn Samuel that “the things you love the most can hurt you the most.”
So, given this capacious handbag stuffed with “everything out in the world,” what’s the prognosis for “The Nix”?
Cutting awfully close to the bone, Samuel’s editor predicts, “It’s going to be like 600 pages, and 10 people will read it.” But that seems far too pessimistic for such a mountain of cleverness. As surely as Samuel finds his mother, the right readers will find this novel. And they’ll be dazzled.
Beneath the highly improbable, overarching plot is an inexhaustible collection of smart, witty scenes.