The Nix Review

 The Nix (2017) written by Nathan Hill is 732 pages of sheer entertainment. It’s written in ten sections   combining two significant years 1968 and 2011 to bridge the gap in politics and culture in the twenty first and one half century. Interestingly, published in 2017, but written with years of 1968 and 2011 in mind, it seems like the politics in 2022 is just the same it was 11 years ago. Perhaps, 2011 politics exploited politics in 2022 which has exasperated counterculture, tragedies, technology, culture, customs, and exposure to ideologies that were just a mere thought in 1968. Nonetheless, everyone in every decade or era has a story to tell, and Hill’s is The Nix. 

 Samuel Andresen-Anderson, an assistance English professor and writer, is in search of his mother who abandoned him as a child because she is in some trouble with the law and need’s Samuel’s help. Hill takes his readers’ on an epic journey detailing Samuel’s frustrations with his teaching career with students who exploit sexual harassment to wrongly accuse a professor to get what she wants—a passing grade. Samuel loses sight of his professionalism by escaping reality by playing the online video game, Elfescape, which ultimately distracts him from his writing career leaving his publisher to threaten Samuel with a lawsuit to terminate his book contract. However, after hearing news that Samuel’s mother is in trouble and needs Samuel’s help, Samuel’s research takes on more than just a moment of truth to help his mother, Faye, facing legal consequences; rather he discovers the truth of humanity. People lie. Hurt people hurt people. All lies, cover-ups, shame, embarrassment due to circumstances require forgiveness to move past the hurt to embody the most sought out emotion in creation—love. But, first he has to go through trial by fire to expose Faye, by writing a tell-all novel of who she was and wasn’t to him piling on the shame and embarrassment to make a very public statement.  

 

The Nix is an epic novel due to the multiple variables that creates character development, plot, symmetry, facts, and exaggeration which is the ultimate recipe for fiction. At about page 530, although thoroughly engaged in this novel, I am ready for the ending to be revealed and for Hill to answer my most pivotal question: What happened to Faye? While he cleverly, and genuinely peels back the layers of the a politically heated event of Faye throwing rocks at a conservative republican presidential candidate  which lands Faye on national news  as a far left radical rioting her way to jail, I want to know the ending before I get to the ending, but when I get to the ending it’s not exactly the ending I was anticipating all these pages ago. Instead I am fed with such wisdom and understanding that flows from the human heart on page 726:

    “Samuel does not miss teaching students like Laura Pottsdam, but he does regret how he taught them. He winces at it now, how much he looked down on them. How eventually he could only see their flaws and weaknesses and shortcomings, the ways they did not live up to his standards. Standards that shifted so that the students would never meet them, because Samuel had grown so comfortable being angry. Angry was such an easy emotion to feel, the refuge of someone who didn’t want to work too hard. Because his life in the summer of 2011 had been unfulfilling and going nowhere and he was angry about it. Angry at his mother for leaving, angry at Bethany for not loving him, angry at his students for being uneducated. He settled into the anger because the anger was so much easier than the work required to escape it. Blaming Bethany for not loving him was much easier than the introspection needed to understand what he was doing that made him unlovable. Blaming his students for being uninspired was so much easier than doing the work required to inspire them. And on any given day, it was so much easier to settle in front of his computer than to face his stagnant life, to actually face in a real way the hole inside him that his mother left when she abandoned him, and if you make the easy choice every day, then it becomes a pattern and your 

patterns become your life: He sank into Elfscape like a shipwreck into the water.”

 As far The Nix is concerned, you will have to read the book to get the story behind it’s name sake. The one question I am left with: Is The Nix Samuel Andresen-Anderson’s memoir or is it Nathan Hill’s?