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The Nix

Nathan Hill

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Jan 31, 2017 jo rated it it was amazing

Shelves: boozy-brawling-broken-boys

23 days of my life. oh, nathan hill. and yet.

i do not think i would have stuck around till the end if i had read this on the page. i blame the internet brain for this. i am a less patient reader. i am a less tenacious reader. but the audiobook version is great, read very nicely, and it sort of lulled me along, eased my transitions between wake and sleep, gave me a good story to hang on to when the miseries of the day (and these last 23 days, are you kidding me?) would have permanently sealed me 23 days of my life. oh, nathan hill. and yet.

i do not think i would have stuck around till the end if i had read this on the page. i blame the internet brain for this. i am a less patient reader. i am a less tenacious reader. but the audiobook version is great, read very nicely, and it sort of lulled me along, eased my transitions between wake and sleep, gave me a good story to hang on to when the miseries of the day (and these last 23 days, are you kidding me?) would have permanently sealed me off the gentle balm of oblivion. to put it bluntly, this book erected a nightly barrier between me and trump, and it is thanks to this book that every night in the past 23 days trump dissipated and sleep was allowed to flood my brain ganglia.

the one thing you need to know about this book is that it's chock full of words. i'm talking an avalanche of words. it is however fantastic language, sort of millennial, fast and snappy and clever and funny, but also eminently story-telly, easy to sink into, easy to abandon yourself to. if you are not in a hurry. which you, absolutely, must not be. it's as wordy as Jonathan Lethem is wordy, as Richard Russo is wordy, except, hmm, more. more wordy than these two. i know, it's crazy. truth is, both lethem and russo annoy me. they are so male-centric. nathan hill is a bit male centric, but mostly in the sense that this fast-moving language tends to be associated, in general, with descriptions of male lives -- boys and then young men and then old-young men who feel they have gone to seed even though they haven't yet cleared their thirties.

this is the description of a man's life -- childhood to already-going-to-seed-early-thirties -- but it's also the description of the evolution of american culture from the heady days of the vietnam protests to the soul-killing days of suburbia to the soul-and-body-atrophying days of internet addiction. i found myself not quite taken by the narrative of samuel's childhood, probably because of genre -- the genre of kids navigating adolescence/friendships/school/isolation/bullying/first loves speaks to me just about NOT AT ALL -- and since this was at the beginning there were rocky times, times in which the idea of giving up on the book was not so distant from the surface of my consciousness. but i hung in there and then the story got pretty damn good, so good that i forgave nathan hill all the words.

in fact, i started LIKING the words. i started appreciating the words when i realized that this book would eventually come to an end, and with it my buffer against the misery of daily news. i started hanging on to every word, also because by then the story had gotten amazingly good.

there is a scene that takes place during the chicago democratic convention of 1968. as you may know, it didn't go so well. there were protests, and the police handled the protests very very badly, and people got hurt. the night i listened to this story was the same night that crowds were shouting LET THEM IN at airports all over the country, the night that poor people who had traveled a long way on crowded airplanes found themselves locked in airport rooms with minimum access to water and no access to food for HOURS. i went to bed with my heart all swollen with pride because my fellow americans had come out to protect innocent people held illegally, even though they had nothing in common with these people. but then, when i listened to nathan hill's description of the chicago riots of 1968, i felt chilled to the bone, because i realized that peaceful take-overs of airport terminals won't happen for long, that soon the powers that be will get the hang of all the protesting and the crackdown will be brutal. that night it took me a long time to sleep.

nathan hill is a beautiful writer. some of the set pieces are simply amazing (the one about the riots being one of them; another one is the breathtaking description of what videogaming 20 hours a day does to your body and mind). above all, there is so much heart in this book. gentleness. hope. there is hope that injuries will be mended and wrongs righted, and that things will turn out okay. for everyone. somehow. i honestly didn't think i would end up liking this book this much. i honestly didn't think i would end up considering it a damn fine book. ...more

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Jul 15, 2017 Liz rated it liked it

Too much of a good thing... is too much. Nathan Hill can certainly write, and write well. But not so much with the editing.

I can understand why so many people love this book, and since it came highly recommended from sources that I trust, I stuck with it through the end. But the sub-plots are rambling and while *technically* tie in to the ending, really feel like vehicles for the author to provide his perspective on some of the less-delightful types of people inhabiting the world currently. I f ...more

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Sep 08, 2020 Laura rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction

This novel is all over the place, in a good way. You might even say epic. Well, epic isn’t the right word, I suppose. But there’s a lot going on here, most of it good.

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Jan 14, 2020 Chrissie rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: t-reads, project-clear-out

This was pretty uneven. Parts of it were amazing--I particularly enjoyed the first 60ish pages, and some of the characters' more internally reflective moments--but parts of it felt unnecessary and inauthentic. It vacilated between a 3 and a 5.

I liked the book's focus on critical turning points and trying to think about how one decision might change the course of someone's life. The ending was a little too easy (no character got exactly what they wanted, but they all got to go back to an importan ...more

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Jan 28, 2017 Leslie rated it it was amazing

A sprawling, enthralling novel about love and identity and family and secrets and… sprawling. If I could have given it 4.5 stars I would have.

I was completely immersed in the story and it's characters. However, by about two-thirds of the way through I began to tire of the author's tendency to write paragraphs and paragraphs that were actually just one sentence. (A skill, to be sure, and sometimes effective, but when it was "used" by several different characters it became a hindrance for me). ...more

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