The Nix
by Nathan Hill
Summary
Samuel Andresen-Anderson is an English professor at a college outside Chicago, still years overdue on a novel his publisher paid him to write, and spending most of his free hours losing himself inside an online game called Elfscape instead of confronting anything in his actual life. His mother Faye walked out on the family when Samuel was eleven, and he has not spoken to her since, until she reappears on the national news, arrested for throwing a handful of gravel at a hard line conservative presidential candidate nicknamed the Packer Attacker. Samuel's publisher, eager to cash in on the scandal, pressures him to write a tell all account of his mother in place of the novel he never delivered, and the assignment forces Samuel to actually investigate a woman he has spent two decades avoiding entirely. The book moves back and forth between Samuel's own account of the present, his childhood friendship with a strange, troubled classmate named Bishop Fall and Bishop's twin sister Bethany, and Faye's own buried past as a young woman caught up in the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots in Chicago, a formative, violent event Samuel never knew anything about. Piecing his mother's history together forces Samuel to see her not as the woman who abandoned him but as someone shaped by her own losses long before he was born, and the two of them move, slowly and unevenly, toward something closer to understanding than the anger he started with. Neither reconciliation nor Samuel's writing career resolves neatly; what the novel leaves him with, more than any single answer, is the harder recognition that his mother's disappearance was never simply about him.
Hill tells the story through a shifting, tragicomic collection of narrators and timelines, jumping between 1968, 1988, and the present with a satirist's eye for contemporary distraction, particularly Samuel's own compulsive gaming, and the shifting focus asks patience of a reader used to a single throughline; the payoff is less a plot twist than the accumulated weight of watching two people slowly become visible to each other after decades of not looking.
Historical Context & Significance
The Nix was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, its award for a best first book, in 2016, and it won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize's Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction that same year, the strongest formal recognition the novel received. Publishers Weekly praised how Hill skillfully blends humor and darkness, imagery and observation, and Kirkus Reviews called it a grand entertainment that promised good work to come from its author. It was named a book of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, the Guardian, and several other outlets, an unusually wide critical consensus for a first novel that arrived without a major literary prize behind it.
Knopf published The Nix in 2016, Hill's debut novel, folding a real historical flashpoint, the 1968 Chicago convention riots, into an entirely invented contemporary political scandal, a structure that lets him examine two very different eras of American anger through the same family without treating either one as more real than the other.