Name: Daphne Li-Chen's review of The Nix by Nathan Hill
Item: The Nix
Rating: 3
Author: Daphne Li-Chen

Nathan Hill

A "novel about a son, the mother who left him as a child, and how his search to uncover the secrets of her life leads him to reclaim his own"--

The Nix

Ashlyn Barrett

Any real change should make you feel, at first, afraid.

When you suddenly recognize that not only are you living a life you never intended to lead but also you are feeling assaulted and punished by the life you have. You begin searching for those early wrong turns. What moment led you into the maze? You begin thinking the entrance to the maze might also be the exit, and if you can identify the moment you screwed up then you can perform some huge course correction and save yourself.

Just give up on it now, the idealism, doing the right thing. Then you’ll have nothing to regret later.

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. 

Sometimes fantasies can be more persuasive than one’s own life. Something does not have to happen for it to feel real.

Seeing ourselves clearly is the project of a lifetime. 

possibility of many selves existing together 

There is not one true self hidden by many false ones. Rather, there is one true self hidden by many other true ones. 

tomorrow will be full of consequences, but this moment is consequence free. Whatever happens right now will happen without repercussion.

Anyone who thinks television can bring the nation together to have a real dialogue, and begin to understand one another with empathy and compassion is suffering a great delusion.

The reality they are seeing on television is not Reality. Imagine a single drop of water: that's the protest. Now put that drop of water into a bucket: that's the protest movement. Now drop that bucket into Lake Michigan: that's Reality. The danger of television is that people begin seeing the entire world through that single drop of water. How that one drop refracts the light becomes the whole picture. 

Because isn't one reason men are moved to greatness partly the nced to respond in a grand way to the people who cut them most deeply? 

exploitation of young girls for old men’s’ momentary pleasure 

Those girls had it coming… The cops drag the girls by their clothes, which gets the uncles jazzed up because maybe their hippie dresses will rip and they’ll catch a little skin. 

One cannot react to violence with violence - only a machine things like this. Or a president. 

He seemed on the verge of something substantial: crying or violence. You could never be sure with men.

 And so instead of enjoying the happy relaxed feeling while I'm having it, I feel this huge sense of dread about the moment I will no longer feel happy or relaxed. Which of course is the very thing that obliterates the happiness. 

"I thought you were liberated," he said, by which he meant that she should indulge all his various wants and like it.

Nature has certain boundaries -perfect human empathy being one of them - that will always be slightly beyond our reach. 

And so his job was simple: Target and annoy the bad elements of the city as far as the law allowed. 

What a treacherous thing a body was, how it so blatantly acted out the mind’s secrets.

The things we love the most are the most disfiguring. Such is our greed for them.

It’s no secret that the great American pastime is no longer baseball. Now it’s sanctimony.

“Poor dead flower? When did you forget you were a flower?” When had she forgotten that she was capable of bold things?

Figure out the kind of man you want to marry, and arrange your life to make it happen. 

Szymon

every character was so unlikable 🔪🔪🔪 very memorable and interesting writing style but i need someone to cheer for or at least feel any positive feelings about

also male characters were kind of perverts

Daphne Li-Chen

every character was so unlikable 🔪🔪🔪 very memorable and interesting writing style but i need someone to cheer for or at least feel any positive feelings about

also male characters were kind of perverts

Wes Michaud

this book helped mw understand my humanity better as well as humanity as a whole the story was engrossing and gave many different perspectives on life

The writing is superb, the characters are interesting, their storylines are intriguing, but holy hell this book is looong. Thinking back, it is hard to even summarize because I felt like I read 3 books in 1. Overall really enjoyed this novel though, especially the ending, where all the storylines seemed to tie back together, but not in a way that is cliche or predictable. 

Kaitlyn Wendler

Kyle Curry

Best new book of the year so far. And from a debut author. Damn

'The best new writer of fiction in America. The best.' - John Irving Nathan Hill's brilliant debut takes the reader from the rural Midwest of the 1960s, to New York City during Occupy Wall Street; from Chicago in 1968, to wartime Norway: home of the mysterious Nix. Meet Samuel: stalled writer, bored teacher at a local college, obsessive player of online video games. He hasn't seen his mother, Faye, in decades, not since she abandoned her family when he was a boy. Now she has suddenly reappeared, having committed an absurd politically motivated crime that electrifies the nightly news, beguiles the Internet, and inflames a divided America. The media paints Faye as a radical hippie with a sordid past, but as far as Samuel knows, his mother was an ordinary girl who married her high-school sweetheart. Which version of his mother is true? Two facts are certain: she's facing some serious charges, and she needs Samuel's help. As Samuel begins to excavate his mother's - and his country's - history, he will unexpectedly find that he has to rethink everything he ever knew about her - a woman with an epic story of her own, a story she has kept hidden from the world.

Jeff James

This is a sprawling coming-of-age novel about a boy abandoned by his mother, and the man he becomes when he seeks her out years later to try and write a book about her life and history. It’s also about the girl she was before she gave up and married his father.

It jumps back and forth between 2011 and Chicago in the late 1960s, when the city was on the verge of erupting into riots at the Democratic National Convention.

The Nix reminded me a bit of The Goldfinch at points, but the end result wasn’t nearly as masterfully done. I enjoyed the book, but there were several points where Hill spends long chapters on characters completely secondary to the main plot, and I found myself asking why those scenes were relevant.

The only real justification is that they cross paths with the main character, and Hill wanted to paint a bigger picture of their lives. It didn’t help that the audiobook narrator chose to narrate those chapters in the voice of the characters, which made the time spent with them even more annoying.

I also felt like the ending wrapped things up just a little bit too smoothly, especially after so much strife and struggle.

Dana Kraft

This was a fun read with more than a few laugh out loud moments for me. I also liked the idea that we try to make things too easy for ourselves and that sometimes we need to embrace difficult situations and work through them rather than avoiding them. The one quote I'll remember is "How easily a simple facade can become your life, can become the truth of your life." (p. 553).

this book helped me understand my humanity better as well as humanity as a whole the story was engrossing and gave many different perspectives on life

Amy Maddess

** spoiler alert **
           -	Multi-layered story that spans many subjects using the perspective from various characters from different generations at alternating times in their lives. Usually, a story like this would confuse readers and make them unsure of what they are reading but Hill has a few skills that make this much easier. First, each of Hill’s characters have their own unique voice which is expressly distinguishable from others in the novel. This helps us get through each perspective change quickly. The second of Nathan’s skills that make this book cohesive and possible are his organization skills. It is very clear that he worked very hard on the layout of this novel. Hill is also very informed about the political activity and economic conditions of each time period he is writing about – knowledge so sharp that it shows Hill’s interest in history. Through the protests in 1968, the attitudes and ideals about the world, the future, free love, the 80’s, economic downturns of the 2000’s, Hill shows that he knows what he is talking about.
-	Now, while I do praise Hill’s uncanny ability to make one feel that whatever time one is writing about is actually the current time, that whatever catastrophe is happening in the world of his characters is also happening for the reader in the real world and should not be forgotten about, it seems as though he wanted to do more with these allusions to the presidential candidacy of Nixon in the title and with numerous scenes involving important protests, rioting, and the proclamation of free thought. Also, a presidential candidate is also introduced, briefly and pointlessly, as a character, and this makes it hard to deny the possibility that Hill originally wanted this novel to go in a more political direction. Perhaps an intergenerational story about the various protests and moral building of each character, and an overarching look at how views, and the strength of the mass youth change over time? Although I love that this book is steeped with emotion and realistic family relations, it doesn’t seem like it was intended to be this way.
-	Because of how hard Hill clearly worked on every detail of this book, I feel a little cheated by the conveniences. Why does Faye get to overzealously pursue a closure to the relationship with her father, when she never actually thought much about how her son must be yearning for the same thing? The fact that her father left his first family and then hers in the same manner she left Samuel almost makes it sees like abandoning behaviour can be inherited – this feels like a bit of a cop out. Also in regards to leaving, we never really get a true concrete sense of why Faye goes. We get a wispy, thoughtless attempt at reasons why she may have left, but no explanation that feels good enough. And yes, I do get that that is the point. I understand that Samuel explicitly expresses his disappointment at being unable to understand her and attempts to do so by recreating her life events through a novel. I understand that we are supposed to be soothed from our non – understanding using acceptance and forgiveness. I understand that much like Samuel, and like many adults who were once abandoned children, we must give up the hope of full understanding and decide, instead, to move forward. We are supposed to ‘hang in there’ with Samuel, and accept as much as we can get about his Mother’s life from all of this research and through making small talk that occasionally turns monumentally profound before returning to mundane for the rest of our lives. I get it. Accepting that we don’t have the answer is the answer. Totally get it. But, for me, I didn’t feel the forgiveness that Samuel was starting to feel. Understanding, sure. A yearning to reconnect with his Mother regardless of anything that happened, absolutely. But reckless forgiveness? From Henry/Samuel and the ridiculously named Sebastian/Guy Periwinkle? No one is a little bit angry? We’re all just like ‘she leaves cause a leaver, no big deal? Happens to the best of us.’ It seems a little bit unfair to the universe that Faye never has to answer to anyone but herself. Sure, her own introspections haunt her, as do everyone’s when a monumental life choice is made, but she is never really shown aching. She’s never shown really yearning for the life she left, only moving to the next one in search of her absolute self- which she finds out doesn’t exist. I think that’s a great lesson to learn, but for Faye it seems too easy. Samuel, Henry, or Guy should have made her face her selfishness in an undeniable way, instead of letting her slither away with her sense of nobleness and pride in tact. Even her Father spent everyday brooding over the family she left behind. She left a freaking child, a son, a first born son in order to chase some nostalgic version of herself that she thought she was when she was with Sebastian. Even when he realized she made a mistake and was no closer to her truest form, she still didn’t go back to her son! What the hell. Romantic, idealistic soul with no sense of loyalty and duty.
-	Also, the ghost. I feel like it was thrown in there to make Faye, or the book, in general, deeper, and also to justify the title. Should have been solidified wholly and completely as a central concept or discarded completely.

Samantha Seeman

**3.75 rounded up


It was...good. But I have to agree with the five reviewers I looked at- this was just unnecessarily long in some parts. There were, in my opinion, some chapters that could have been completely omitted and passages that could have been shortened because the level of details were not needed.
But! It did have some really great, currently accurate political commentary. I was a little shocked at first and then realized that the political landscape the US is in has been around for a while now, if not recycled from years and decades prior.

Again. It was good. I didn’t hate it. It was just very very long, and overly detailed (which I hate). I’m glad I was forced to read it though. And that I stuck with it, even when it messed up my reading goals.

Julie Berman

Loved. Will be on my list of all-time favs.

Les Reynolds

An enthralling book, so interesting, so well written. Explores some of the depths of joy and pain that mark the human experience, and has a wonderful ending.

Szymon &
The Nix by Nathan Hill

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