It broke my heart, this book. Time after time. It made me laugh just as often. I loved it on the first page as powerfully as I did on the last, and I think I was right, right from the start. Because Nathan Hill? He's gonna be famous. This is just the start.
Not since the 1996 and 1997 double-header of John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral has a novel emerged that presents a more comprehensive and perceptive portrait of the personal and political American psyche than Nathan Hill’s wise, rueful, and scathingly funny début.
...[an] ambitiously panoramic and humane debut ... It sounds dizzying, but the multiple story lines are dexterously juggled and well paced, even if the joints between the novel’s 10 sections are a little creaky ... Hill has so much talent to burn that he can pull off just about any style, imagine himself into any person and convincingly portray any place or time. The Nix is hugely entertaining and unfailingly smart ...But the novel Hill has assembled is so diffuse in its tones, settings and cast that it never gives the reader a chance to plant himself in its emotional soil.
The novel has real strengths, especially Hill’s ability to integrate historical detail smoothly into a well-orchestrated plot. But The Nix isn’t a complete success. It’s a cliché to say that a first novel could use a good pruning, but this one really could ... The prose also is uneven. When Hill strains after metaphor, he often fails ... The Nix is a good but not great novel.
...we’re in the presence of a major new comic novelist ... The Nix presents that strain of gigantism unique to debut novelists who fear this will be their only shot. The book practically tears off its own binding in its desperation to contain every aside, joke, riff and detour ... hundreds more pages could have been sliced away from The Nix. And yet there’s no denying what a brilliant, endearing writer Hill is.
...[a] great sprawling feast of a first novel ... [Hill] packs The Nix with cultural commentary that manages to be both darkly satirical and uproariously funny. While wildly original, Hill is clearly the spawn of Thomas Pynchon and Stanley Elkin.
...compulsive and crazily entertaining. One might tap Nathan Hill’s shoulders with the double-edged sword of 'Dickensian,' given that his debut novel is stuffed with good jokes, family secrets and incidental pathos; it’s also windy with circumlocution and occasionally too intricate for its own good ... Hill has an instinct for loneliness and an eye for the repulsive excesses of American consumerism ... There is no denying the inventive wit and energy on display; but a writer needs to take an occasional step back to consider the reader, who may have a life of their own to be getting on with. Hill, to his credit, understands the risks of long-windedness. Samuel’s publisher tells him that his projected 600-page novel will most likely have about 10 readers. I would bet on The Nix having many, many more.
Plenty of doorstop-length novels promise to be what The Nix is: capacious enough to find sympathy for its most comically deplorable characters, specific enough to precisely skewer specific societal ailments, funny and cleverly written enough to sustain a length that could easily pall if readers had to power through many flabby or dull segments. That it’s so entertaining, so full of energy, and packed with social and political observations that adroitly destabilize our comfortable assumptions about modern life is a triumph.
...wickedly funny, shockingly wise, touching and thought-provoking ... a rich buffet of a novel. A little too rich, unfortunately. By the time the novel wraps up, after 600 pages, it has shifted direction so many times, it seems to lose its way.
...[a] sad, funny, endlessly inventive debut ... At 600-plus pages, some of those threads inevitably snag or run on too long, but Hill weaves it all into the wild tragicomic tangle of his imagination.
The Nix is a durable, entertaining, at times harshly skeptical novel ... aspires to both the sweep and social critique of the past generation’s big-book authors — Tartt, Franzen, Eugenides. Hill has the style and bravado to belong in that company, and a candor that, if he can sustain it, suggests a brash new path as well.
...[a] dazzling debut novel ... Hill is an uncommonly profound observer, illuminating much about the relationships between parents and children. Yet amid all its searching and yearning, The Nix remains impressively light on its feet, finding humor in its characters’ plights without ever getting snide about them ... The Nix’s pleasures are similar to those of a short story collection: each shapely chapter is a rich journey in its own right.
...we need the restorative space of books more than ever, especially the kind of deceptively profound and rollicking entertainment that Nathan Hill delivers with his debut novel, The Nix, a feat of levitation that wears its seriousness lightly and functions almost as smelling salts for the imagination ... this novel is no ponderous book-length think piece. Above all, it’s a deliciously fun excoriation of so much that demands to be excoriated ... This is a book to get one excited not only about Hill and his future as a novelist, but also about the power of writing to blot out background-noise banality and vault us forward into the new and wondrous.
I didn’t find the characters sympathetic and found myself wondering, on more than one occasion, why I should care. The only character I felt sorry for was Pwnage, the leader of his guild in Elfquest, a game obsessive that reminds me of too many people I know. In the end, I did want to know what happened to Samuel. I didn’t hate it — I wanted to love it, but it didn’t quite get there.
Nathan Hill’s grand and sprawling debut immediately brings to mind books by the likes of John Irving, Tom Wolfe, Michael Chabon and Donna Tartt ... Hill never really involves the otherworldly figure of the Nix with full-on magic realist conviction. Instead, it is little more than a plot device that affords a bit of Nordic exotica while providing convenient explanations for bad luck, fatalistic worrying and hallucinations ... Hill’s grandiose plays with history and politics and famous people are fine and impressive but also sort of familiar and forgettable. He offers more lasting matter with his late, quiet evocation of an ageing daughter tending to her aged father, with mercy and hard-earned forgiveness.
Regardless of the myriad settings, Hill builds a vivid sense of place in each city, state, and country ... The Nix is most reminiscent of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize winning The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt ... Hill’s star is just rising—and if The Nix is any indication, it will continue a steady climb in years to come.
The best thing a reviewer can do when faced with a novel of this calibre and breadth is to urge you to read it for yourselves – especially if your taste is for deeply engaged and engaging contemporary American prose fiction of real quality and verve ... Many chapters feel like separate novel fragments that have been skilfully woven together over time and – since Hill’s talents as a writer are so abundant – the resulting 200,000-word leviathan is replete with a great many passages of lush reading pleasure ... The writing is a delight; Hill is an assiduous selector of words whose artistic concentration seldom lapses. He is also a very musical stylist – the book is full of long, beautifully counterweighted sentences and subtle cadences that change from voice to voice as different characters take up the narrative ... For all its mighty accomplishments, though, The Nix suffers from several missteps and a few things that – to my mind at least – don’t quite work. It is overlong to its own detriment. Description reoccurs. There are many sections that the novel could have done without ... There are also several narrative hinges that do not hang right ... And yet, in the final analysis, none of this matters because The Nix outflanks its own weaknesses with such copious strengths and collusive warmth that...well, let me urge you again to read it for yourselves.
While The Nix isn’t a campus novel like Richard Russo’s Straight Man or Francine Prose’s Blue Angel, Hill deftly satirizes academia over the course of a tour de force sequence of arguments ... The Nix is smart without being pretentious ... But in addition to being a smart novel, The Nix is an empathetic one.
Sometimes in the course of Nathan Hill’s The Nix, you sense you’re reading a film script, only in past tense (mostly) and without camera angles. That’s because Hill’s sharp dialogue sculpts characters—and to some extent situations and settings—while the narration often set-dresses, prescribing what should be scattered around a room more than describing what’s in it ... None of this is to say that the novel is a weak series script—just that it’s easy to see how it lends itself to adaptation into what will likely be a less nuanced series. Hill’s cinematic narration has the offhand flair and attention to ironic detail you find in Kurt Vonnegut or George Saunders, the bemused gaze on cruelties like subdivisions named for the animals and landscapes they destroy, and on the crudeness of life lived in modern media’s banal blare. And Hill can be at times both comic and poignant, with a feel for how psyches either function or collapse in each mode.
