remus The Nix is £1.19 on Kindle, but I’m afraid it only answers long!
4. The Nix by Nathan Hill
Well I quite enjoyed this. It follows Sam, an English lecturer and failed writer, whose mother left the family when he was a child. When she appears on the news, arrested for an act of political protest, he is drawn into finally resolving the mystery of her disappearance and her past before his birth, addressing the ways in which it has affected his own life. “The Nix” of the title is a malevolent household spirit that appears in their family storytelling, passed down from one generation to the next. Its function as a metaphor here is fairly transparent. The novel reminded me somewhat of Middlesex and the Goldfinch - multigenerational, with a family haunted by grief and regret, trying to survive in the modern world whilst being pulled back into the past, stuck in old grooves of familial obligation and guilt. It did not quite reach the heights of either of these, in my opinion, but perhaps that isn’t fair. It also had shades of Ready Player One as it touches on role playing games and internet addiction, and includes an homage to the Choose Your Own Adventure books which was quite poignantly written. Hill wrote this over ten years, and yet the political landscape he describes, and the impact of social media etc, is so pertinent to the current scene it is hard to believe that he didn’t bash it out in the past two years; it is uncannily prescient on the forces at play to bring about a Trump-like ascent to the presidency. Also he explores the way misogyny manifests itself in society and how that impacts on individual women and their available choices in a way that feels relevant to contemporary issues, though I did feel he was less successful in writing the female characters, he gives it a good shot. It is a big mixed bag of things - some delightful, some sad, some disturbing, and some hilarious. He deals with the different perspectives he takes on well, and handles both comedy and pathos deftly in his writing, but still there were some characters, and indeed whole storylines, that I felt were there simply because he’d written something he thought too good to leave out, but would have affected the whole not a bit had they been omitted. However, for a long book it was an easy read, and whilst I got bored of some of the gaming stuff, and found some of the characters overdone, it was entertaining enough. The high comedy of the beginning gives way to some darker themes in the middle of the book when it alludes to abuse, and this was somewhat jarring and I was a little disappointed it went there - but it wasn’t dwelt on and it did contribute to a significant plot point later on. There were some great lines in it, and some interesting ideas, but I don’t know if it really nailed it as far as emotional realism goes, and whilst I enjoyed some of the comic set pieces, at times they threatened to destabilise the whole operation. The last section was good and insightful, but I wasn’t overly keen on how it all wrapped together, though it did keep me reading to find out. So, to quote cote, “I’m fine with having read it”, but not an unalloyed hit for me. Having had a day or two to mull it over, I can see a lot of its flaws, but if you want a big American coming of age novel, that takes in quite a few themes and time zones, then you could do a lot worse - it is very cheap on Kindle at the moment and there is certainly plenty in it to chew over.