As Faye warns him of the Nix, “‘the things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst.’”
It’s an audacious premise for a novel that not only spans more than half a century, from Faye’s Iowa girlhood to Samuel’s suburban early adolescence, from the Chicago riots of 1968 to the Occupy movement, with the presence of a Nix, a mischievous figure from Norwegian folklore, lurking in the shadows of both their lives. Samuel strikes a new deal with his publisher: he’ll deliver a scathing biography of his estranged mother, in return for forgiveness of his long-spent advance. His publisher is demanding the return of his advance for his unwritten novel at the same time his mother, Faye, who abandoned he and his father when Samuel was just a boy, has been arrested for attacking a right-wing presidential hopeful in a public park in Chicago. This is hardly surprising for the thwarted writer and frustrated college professor, life is a perpetual state of low-level crisis that not even a near addiction to an online multiplayer game can fully assuage. As The Nix, the ambitious debut novel from Naples, Fla., writer Nathan Hill, opens, Samuel Anderson is in crisis.
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