"The Nix" is a big novel in more ways than one. It weighs in at a pound and a half, with over 600 pages in quite a large page format.
John Irving has compared the author to Dickens--others have compared him to John Irving. There are also many shades of David Foster-Wallace (think of the thousand odd pages of "Infinite Jest") and of Thomas Pynchon. I quail at the task of outlining the plot: the various threads are so intertwined, and some of the minor characters have long chapters devoted to them. Examples--a long digression from the main story line by an undergraduate who has cheated in almost every academic endeavor she has undertaken, and an eleven page chapter in one continuous sentence (I estimate about 5,500 words) inside the warped mind of an obsessive gamer playing a fantasy game called Elfscape on his computer.
The locales and time periods give you some idea of the scope of the narrative: we are in 2011 at a small college outside Chicago, in 1968 at the Chicago Democratic Convention with all the tear gas and police beatings of hippies, inside the minds of Hubert Humphrey and Walter Cronkite at the Convention, at a high school in the 'sixties in a small town in Iowa, we take a brief visit to Norway, and we watch from a window the Occupy Wall Street crowd in New York. And, of course, we are very much in the minds of all the characters, with their various personality disorders (from the acknowledgements, the psychology has been carefully researched) and their interactions with each other. Central to the novel is the relationship between Samuel and his mother, Faye, who abandoned him and his father when he was a child--already subject to weeping jags with intensities of one through five. What kicks the story off in 2011 is Faye getting arrested for throwing a stone at an extreme right-wing governor with Trump-like presidential aspirations. This brings Samuel into contact with his mother for the first time since she left home, and off we go...
Here is a quote from a very good review in the New York Times:
"First, the good news: Hill has so much talent
to burn that he can pull off just about any style, imagine himself into any
person and convincingly portray any place or time. “The Nix” is hugely
entertaining and unfailingly smart, and the author seems incapable of writing a
pedestrian sentence or spinning a boring story.
One gets the sense that 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. Maybe he was also
disinclined to write a straightforward, quieter novel for fear — as Periwinkle, a
publisher who plays a key role in the story, says critically of the beginning of Faye’s story that Samuel sends
him — of slipping “into some familiar coming-of-age conventions.” "
The book is funny, it is satirical, and it points towards the Trump frenzy we are now experiencing. It varies enormously in style, from second person narration, to total stream of consciousness, and to straightforward narrative written with a wonderful sense of the right word and of the emotional measure of the characters.
Thoroughly recommended--but you may at times begin to lose patience, and in the end I am not sure that we do reach satisfactory resolution of the emotional conflicts. I hung in there, and I am an impatient reader. I think the end is a bit gimmicky but it is certainly enjoyable getting there.
Not surprisingly, the book took the author ten years to write.