USA TODAY International Edition
Many roads are traveled in deft, nimble ‘ The Nix’
Debut novelist Nathan Hill is your astute guide
A Nix is a creature out of Norwegian folk tales that enthralls children, only to carry them off to be drowned. Though no actual supernatural monsters hit the pages of his dazzling debut novel, Nathan Hill finds broad use for the Nix as metaphor. That “the things you love the most can hurt you the worst” could serve as a subtitle for this rich and multilayered book.
The Nix ( Knopf, 620 pp., eeee out of four) jumps viewpoints and time periods with delightful abandon: there’s sixthgrader Samuel in 1988, prone to crying jags, as if sensing that his mother is about to forsake him; video game addict Pwnage in 2011, obsessed with playing the fictional World of Elfscape; Samuel’s mother Faye, caught up in the riots of 1968; and finally the grown- up Samuel, an embittered professor who “secretly likes when he gets to fail a student. It’s like revenge for having to teach them.”
A once- rising literary star, Samuel is years overdue with the manuscript of his novel. When his long- lost mother makes national news by pelting a presidential candidate with stones, Samuel meets with his publisher and agrees “to deliver a book that told ( his) mother’s story while also ripping her to shreds, rhetorically.”
Hill is an uncommonly profound observer, illuminating much about the relationships between parents and children. Yet amid all its searching and yearning, The Nix remains impressive- ly light on its feet, finding humor in its characters’ plights without ever getting snide about them.
Though The Nix captures the 1960s and the 1980s with impressive authority, the novel reaches its greatest heights in depicting our modern moment. Pwnage’s obsession with his game world is comical but never derided, and his story takes on surprising poignancy with his aching wish that “the real world operated like Elfscape.” So, too, does the characterization of Laura Pottsdam, a college sophomore so entitled that she poses a screamingly funny set of arguments for why she should not be failed for buying her term paper. (“I own it. It’s mine. It’s my work.”)
This is a stylistically agile book, and Hill has an impersonator’s uncanny ability to take on wildly different registers from chapter to chapter. The Nix’s pleasures are similar to those of a short- story collection: Each shapely chapter is a rich journey in its own right. Hill clearly knows the pleasure of a plot twist, and readers looking to the larger story for their enjoyment will find plenty to keep them hooked as well.
This looks to be the debut of an important new writer, able to variously make readers laugh out loud while providing a melancholy, resonant tale that argues “there is no greater ache than this: guilt and regret in equal measure.”