photo : dreamy cormorant in Marahau (windy gardens), sand bar

Hill, Nathan, The Nix,  Knopf, 2016, 752p. Yes, you read correctly, 720 pages!

Nathan Hill is a  newcomer on the American literary scene (and worldwide, since the book has been translated into 30 languages) was  published in 2016.   Nix refers to a Norwegian legend which seems to be the key to the story but  delivered at the very end. It is impossible to summarize a 752 page book in a few lines, but one can try: a presidential candidate has been attacked in public by a woman in her sixties: Faye Andresen-Anderson. Samuel Anderson, English teacher and Shakespeare specialist, is not aware of this event spread across social medias because he is busy playing  The World of Elfscape online. The woman in question happens to be  his mother, who abandoned him when he was a child. Having nonetheless become a promising writer, after the publication of a short story, he got  a substantial advance for his next book, of which he still has not written a line, but he spent the advance  money.

This starting point is the pretext that Hill uses to talk about the difficulty of living and growing up in the United States especially, or elsewhere for that matter, through two generations, his own and that of his mother, and to a certain point, that of his grandfather too, although this angle was not developed to the same extent. I can understand he had to stop at some point, because it would probably have taken a hundred more pages to treat this subject with the detail that Hill showed elsewhere and then, really, but no, that would have been too much. This is nevertheless a little disappointing because the title makes us think that everything starts from Norway, when the grandfather left Norway to emigrate to the United States, when in fact, the novel really focuses on the following generations.

This book could easily have bored me to death. The first chapter takes us into the head of an online video game player and I was tempted to say no thanks, I don’t particularly want to know what’s going on in there. We then dive into the childhood and adolescence of Samuel Anderson and again, fortunately he changes the subject, just as I am about to give up. There’s a limit to my desire to know what’s going on in someone’s head, and having already recently delved into Jon Fosse’s book and Gerald Munrane’s book, I couldn’t cope with too much more of that. I still managed to get through these moments that were a little too detailed for my liking because he writes really very well and he has a sense of humour. What kept me going, however, was the chapter where Samuel Anderson calls a student into his office to tell her that she cheated and that her assignment will be a failure. The student doesn’t see it that way and she will end up winning her case, but the reader has the pleasure of seeing how  this result can be achieved  and get the teacher fired as a bonus. Obviously, this made me laugh because it reminded me of my academic  life, which I would not now want to return to under any circumstances. Otherwise, the book goes in all directions: political history, media influence, addiction, unhappy childhood, military life and so on. However, even if the book is very, very well written and often amusing, it seems to me once again (this is not the first time I have said it) that the book would have benefited from some cuts. Or, if I had been Hill’s editor, I would have suggested that he cut some unnecessarily detailed passages to better develop the grandfather’s story, which really left me wanting more.

But the book left me wanting to read more from him, when his next book (624  pages this time) arrives at the library (hopefully I am not too far on the waiting list).