If you've got the time you'll enjoy The Nix, Mike Crowl writes.
THE NIX
Nathan Hill
Picador/Macmillan
The Nix is the story of Samuel, professor of literature, whose mother walked out on him when he was a child. It’s also the story of the mother and her puzzling relationship with her perpetually angry immigrant father.
Behind these two stories is a string-pulling, masterminding minor character who switches occupation at the drop of a hat. Overlaid on these is the satire of pretty much every fad and absurdity in the US. And the student movement from the '60s and the Occupy movement from 2011, and peculiar Norwegian folk tales and their ominous spirits. And more.
Nathan Hill’s 620-page novel is full to the brim. Everything is presented in enormous and often very funny detail. Nothing is too small to be included. But this means we struggle to maintain an emotional connection with the main characters, Samuel and his mother Faye. By the time all the strands are tied up, some of them quite improbably, Faye in particular remains distant.
Hill is a talented writer. Somehow he’s found a publishing house that was willing to take this mass of material and publish it. Readers have varied in their reactions: more than a few have enjoyed the endless word-spinning for its own sake, while others comment that it’s as if Hill wanted to include every "anecdote, observation and turn of phrase he ever conjured up or heard, and was loath to prune any from the finished product". (At an earlier stage, the book was more than 1000 pages.)
Hill tells you so much that when you just want to know where the story is going he’ll interrupt with the thoughts of minor characters, his own philosophising, and other tangents. In some conversations, characters wind round and round like an Abbott and Costello routine: hilarious, but going nowhere fast.
Novelist John Irving compares Hill to Dickens, and there is that sense of sprawling, grab-bag writing that made Dickens a star in Pickwick Papers and other earlier books, but the quirky characters here don’t quite match the majesty of Dickens’ best creations.
Nevertheless, if you’ve time to relax and soak up all the wordiness, you’ll enjoy this book.
- Mike Crowl is a Dunedin author, musician and composer.
