(Originally posted March 15, 2020 on Facebook)
I finished The Nix a few weeks ago, and I miss it. It’s a 22 hour listen on Audible or a 600+ page read – perfect for avoiding Sabbatical writing or the constant barrage of pandemic news. The heartbreaking yet hysterical life of Community College English Professor Samuel Anderson-Andreson entertained me every day while Poppy and I journeyed through several of Edmonton’s dog parks. Frequently dog companions gave me side looks as I passed them literally laughing out loud. Poor Poppy was forced to walk countless extra kilometres when we would get back to the car, then suddenly take another lap because I couldn’t take off my headphones until I digested one more chapter.
Nathan Hill is an extraordinary master of satire who somehow manages to weave three different yet coherent stories of comedic tragedy into this intergenerational exploration of college life during the distinct eras of the Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials. My favourite scene involves Samuel’s struggle to address a plagiarized paper with Laura Pottsdam, a stereotypically entitled millennial student who manages to unconsciously utilize every conceivable logical fallacy in her attempt to avoid consequences. She eventually gets away with it when she convinces Samuel’s Dean that he caused her to experience “negative feelings of stress and vulnerability.” Samuel’s only escape – from his students, from the book he is supposed to be writing (and for which he already received an advance), from the pain of his mother abandoning him, and from the loss of the only girl he will ever love – is a video game called ElfScape. His best friends are people he has never met in the real world. But then his mom re-enters his life through the television via a ridonkulous political drama that plays out on the national American stage, and which engulfs him in a pilgrimage to understand his past. The story moves back and forth in time as the mysteries of Samuel’s genealogy illuminate his tragic life. Hill manages to weave a tapestry integrating themes like friendship, love, addiction, abandonment, loneliness, identity, vocation, female oppression, frozen food, war, and politics in settings as far-ranging as pre-World War II Norway, the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, post-911 Iraq, and the Occupy Wall Street movement.
The Nix is fitting pandemic reading because Hill has a way of illustrating the paradoxes of our contemporary world through the developing eyes of childhood, young adulthood, middle age, and senility. As we social distance for the sake of our parents and grandparents, this novel may be a helpful lens to consider what is truly important in life – and what is not.
Michael Ferber 