Fast-food scarfers may be sneer-worthy, but health-foodies can be self-righteous snobs.īut it’s inventive storytelling rather than opinion that makes this long novel seem shorter than it is. Bumble’s declaration, in “Oliver Twist,” that “the law is a ass.” Mindlessness was just as pervasive among ’60s radicals, Hill shows, as it is among today’s social media-fixated teens. The opportunistic Periwinkle rebrands book publishing as “multimodal cross-platform synergy.” Rogers’ robotic language reminds us of Mr.
Hill’s targets may be familiar, but his aim is unerring.
He’s Jonathan Franzen wearing a smile for a change. While wildly original, Hill is clearly the spawn of Thomas Pynchon and Stanley Elkin. In doing so, he packs “The Nix” with cultural commentary that manages to be both darkly satirical and uproariously funny. To answer these questions, Hill sweeps back and forth between the pivotal years of 2011, 19. Ashamed for having written nothing since, still brooding over his mother’s abandonment, he buries himself in the alternate reality of video games.īy clicking Sign up, you agree to our privacy policy. Ten years earlier he had written an autobiographical short story that earned him critical acclaim and a fat contract for a novel. She forsakes her only child, her husband, Henry, and the Chicago suburbs she has come to loathe, disappearing like an evil spirit into the mists.īy 2011, Sam is an assistant professor of English at a third-rate college in Chicago, enduring students who would rather text and sext than grapple with Shakespeare. One day in 1988, without any explanation, Faye Anderson tells her 11-year-old son, Samuel, that she’s leaving. “The Nix” will make anyone comprehend that endless, hopeless ache, and a whole lot more.
But I swear you don’t have to have suffered this elemental loss to appreciate Nathan Hill’s great sprawling feast of a first novel. The pain of losing your mother during childhood is nearly impossible to get over.
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