I guess if you need to blame something for your life not turning out as you'd hoped, a Norwegian ghost--a nix--is as good a scapegoat as any even when trauma inherited from the old country and passed down through two generations of Americans is the more likely explanation.
It takes decades--and overblown accusations of political violence--for panicky Faye who has abandoned Samuel, her all-too-similar only child, a cry baby, to reach this conclusion in a well-plotted novel whose action toggles between between Samuel's Occupy Wall Street era and his mother's experience as a Chicago undergraduate during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Their shared passivity and blandness--which could be read more charitably as Midwestern decency--makes it hard to relate to either one. Still, Faye's passion for poetry (especially Sunflowers by Allen Ginsberg) really says all you need to know about this haunted, unfulfilled woman.
Fortunately Hill's on-point and sometimes polemical observations about American society--particularly during the new millennium-- are more compelling than either of his main characters.
There is no place less communal in America—no place less cooperative and brotherly, no place with fewer feelings of shared sacrifice—than a rush-hour freeway in Chicago. And there is no better test of this than watching what happens when there is a hundred-car line in the far-right lane, which there is when Samuel reaches his exit. How people bypass the line and dive into any available cranny in front, skipping all the drivers patiently waiting, all of whom are now enraged at this because they each have to wait incrementally longer, but also a bigger and deeper rage that the asshole didn’t wait his turn like everyone else, that he didn’t suffer like they suffer, and then also a tertiary inner rage that they are suckers who wait in lines.
The split and somewhat complicated story, supplemented by characters in Samuel's life who are more convincing as types than actual people also gives Hill an opportunity to riff on his own lived experiences (he's 50), including this killer analysis of how kids once accessed analog porn.
Because for kids his age, for kids hitting adolescence in the eighties, in those days before the internet, before the web made pornography easily accessible and therefore banal, for this last generation of boys for whom porn was primarily a physical object, possessing pornography was like having a superpower. One that made you immediately legitimate and popular among the other boys. This happened roughly once per semester, some obscure boy locating his father’s collection of dirty magazines and suddenly finding himself elevated socially for as long as he didn’t get in trouble, which might take a day to several months, depending on the constitution of the boy. The ones who were transparently desperate and begging for attention and craving to be liked tended to steal the whole pile in exchange for a one-time flash of celebrity, bright stars who burned out in a day when their fathers noticed the disappearance of all their pornography and put two and two together. Other boys, the ones with more impulse control and less desperation for approval, were more judicious in their porn approaches. They might remove only one magazine from the pile, say the second or third from the bottom, an edition that had presumably been perused, enjoyed, digested, and abandoned. They brought that one magazine to school and let everyone look through it before replacing it in the pile a week or two later, then removing another edition from near the bottom, and then repeating the pattern. These boys maintained a consistent popularity for, sometimes, months before a teacher noticed a group of boys sitting still in a huddle on the playground and came to investigate, because when grade-school boys weren’t running around like spazzes it meant something was definitely wrong.
When I could relate to Samuel's childhood experiences--which Hill renders much more convincingly than Faye's--I enjoyed The Nix a lot more than when I couldn't. He goes on at such length about Samuel's nemesis at the college where he teaches, an entitled white student (EVERYBODY in this book is white) that I almost skipped the chapters describing the execrable machinations of this novel's villainous heir apparent, as well as those that detail, endlessly, the pathetic existence of his well-meaning video gaming buddy.
Had I done so, however, I would have missed Hill's tour-de-force account--told in a chapter-long sentence--of the gamer's psychotic breakdown and the method behind the novelist's narrative tedium: he persuasively demonstrates how little difference exists between the arbitrary rules of Elfscape's virtual world and Samuel's real one, between the internet-based behavior of today's players and the actions taken by yesterday's naive protesters and club-happy pigs.
Then, in a remarkably executed twist with a huge thematic pay-off, Hill tips his apolitical hand through a very slippery character, an avatar of American success who, like Faye, now off on a kind of vision quest, bridges both eras.
What’s true? What’s false? In case you haven’t noticed, the world has pretty much given up on the old Enlightenment idea of piecing together the truth based on observed data. Reality is too complicated and scary for that. Instead, it’s way easier to ignore all data that doesn’t fit your preconceptions and believe all data that does. I believe what I believe, and you believe what you believe, and we’ll agree to disagree. It’s liberal tolerance meets dark ages denialism. It’s very hip right now . . . We are more politically fanatical than ever before, more religiously zealous, more rigid in our thinking, less capable of empathy. The way we see the world is totalizing and unbreakable. We are completely avoiding the problems that diversity and worldwide communication imply. Thus, nobody cares about antique ideas like true or false.
Hill may be a be a better prophet than a novelist: he wrote The Nix before you-know-who was elected the first time.
