A review by irena_smith
The Nix by Nathan Hill
5.0
So you know that thing when you're reading a book that is totally immersive and absorbing and at a certain point the mass of the pages between where you're reading and the end of the book starts to dwindle and you go into a sort of mourning that the book will be over soon and oh my god, you will never again be able to frolic in its amazingly realized universe with the same exhilarating sense of discovery as you did the first time?
Yeah, I had that with The Nix about ten pages in. The last time I remember feeling that way was years ago, when I first read Bleak House, and I toiled for several hundred pages to get to that point.
Which is sort of apropos, because The Nix is in many ways Dickensian, particularly in the multiple plot lines that overlap and intersect and some of its over-the-top characters (one of them is a man of indeterminate age whose only known name is Pwnage—which happens to also be his screen name in a WoW-type massive multiplayer online game called Elfscape, where he spends most of his time). But ultimately (and putting aside all the other comparisons to Dickens and Jonathan Franzen and Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace (and, now that I think about it, Zadie Smith, because there's something in The Nix that evokes White Teeth)), it is utterly its own thing—a hybrid of Norwegian folklore, history (the 1968 Chicago riots are a major plot strand), and reflections on how those we love most are often those who do us the most damage.
And don't even get me started on the characters: apart from Pwnage, there's an unrepentant plagiarist, a judge with a grudge (and a doozy of a grudge at that), a disillusioned college professor unable to write the novel for which he has been paid a huge advance, a violin prodigy, mother who pulls a disappearing act, and Alan Ginsberg. And all of them together (plus legions of others) create a tapestry that is so vivid and human and alive and funny and heart-wrecking that, well, I'm still in mourning for having finished it. Go read it now so I can live vicariously through you.
Yeah, I had that with The Nix about ten pages in. The last time I remember feeling that way was years ago, when I first read Bleak House, and I toiled for several hundred pages to get to that point.
Which is sort of apropos, because The Nix is in many ways Dickensian, particularly in the multiple plot lines that overlap and intersect and some of its over-the-top characters (one of them is a man of indeterminate age whose only known name is Pwnage—which happens to also be his screen name in a WoW-type massive multiplayer online game called Elfscape, where he spends most of his time). But ultimately (and putting aside all the other comparisons to Dickens and Jonathan Franzen and Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace (and, now that I think about it, Zadie Smith, because there's something in The Nix that evokes White Teeth)), it is utterly its own thing—a hybrid of Norwegian folklore, history (the 1968 Chicago riots are a major plot strand), and reflections on how those we love most are often those who do us the most damage.
And don't even get me started on the characters: apart from Pwnage, there's an unrepentant plagiarist, a judge with a grudge (and a doozy of a grudge at that), a disillusioned college professor unable to write the novel for which he has been paid a huge advance, a violin prodigy, mother who pulls a disappearing act, and Alan Ginsberg. And all of them together (plus legions of others) create a tapestry that is so vivid and human and alive and funny and heart-wrecking that, well, I'm still in mourning for having finished it. Go read it now so I can live vicariously through you.