There is much to savour in The Nix, and Hill should be fully credited for his heedlessness.

Hill’s attempt to tie up all the stories - and tie them together - results in a wheezing creak of authorial intervention.

Readers will be uncertain of how to react, confused as to just what, exactly, they are reading. By the time the novel wraps up, after 600 pages, it has shifted direction so many times, it seems to lose its way. And with an extended cameo from poet and radical Allen Ginsberg, it’s a rich buffet of a novel.Ī little too rich, unfortunately. It is, by turns, wickedly funny, shockingly wise, touching and thought-provoking. It also incorporates a multitude of styles and approaches, from straightforward coming-of-age stories to a satire of modern media and publishing, from plain narrative to standard undergraduate essay format to a deliberately flawed Choose Your Own Adventure. As Faye warns him of the Nix, “‘the things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst.’” It’s an audacious premise for a novel that not only spans more than half a century, from Faye’s Iowa girlhood to Samuel’s suburban early adolescence, from the Chicago riots of 1968 to the Occupy movement, with the presence of a Nix, a mischievous figure from Norwegian folklore, lurking in the shadows of both their lives. Samuel strikes a new deal with his publisher: he’ll deliver a scathing biography of his estranged mother, in return for forgiveness of his long-spent advance. His publisher is demanding the return of his advance for his unwritten novel at the same time his mother, Faye, who abandoned he and his father when Samuel was just a boy, has been arrested for attacking a right-wing presidential hopeful in a public park in Chicago. This is hardly surprising for the thwarted writer and frustrated college professor, life is a perpetual state of low-level crisis that not even a near addiction to an online multiplayer game can fully assuage. As The Nix, the ambitious debut novel from Naples, Fla., writer Nathan Hill, opens, Samuel Anderson is in crisis.

The nix nathan hill review