46 pages • 1 hour read
Nathan HillThe Nix
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Corrosive Power of Regret
Hill’s principal characters are haunted. They are trapped by the past, evidence of how life does not follow our best-laid plans and that as we grow older our life becomes an accumulation of regrets. If regrets here are inevitable, they are also counterproductive. As Samuel perceives his own life, its narrative should have followed the enthralling logic of his favorite childhood reading: a series of adventure books in which the reader selects a course of action for the main character, step by step. That decision and its consequences then compel the storyline and always end happily. Now in his thirties, Samuel wants his life to be like that—a series of step-by-step events following a selected path and leading inevitably to a happy ending.
Of course, Samuel learns a different conception of life as he digs into his mother’s past and learns of her complex motivations for leaving her family. As an adult, his emotional and psychological development is stunted by his inability to understand his life and to deal with his accumulation of regrets. Festering in regret, Samuel struggles to find any sort of rewarding, even functional, present. He clings to his regrets over his mother’s abandonment, the estrangement from his father, his awkward friendship with Bishop, and his obsession with Bethany. Faye also deals with an accumulation of regrets: her father, her marriage, her son, and her lover. Now in her sixties, Faye has yet to find her way to contentment. Across more than 30 years, she has moved restlessly about the cultural environment of Chicago always collapsing into regrets over what she couldn’t do, or decisions she didn’t make.
Initially, both Samuel and Faye succumb to the elaborate logic of regret. Abandoning any sense of the urgency and opportunity of the present or the invitation to grow and develop suggested by the future, they both stew in regret, unable to understand how their lives, crafted by decisions they made, could turn out so entirely not like a child’s adventure story where, in the end, everything works out. Both are reintroduced to the complex and open-ended energy of the present because, as Faye explains, “[W]hen all you have is the memory of a thing […] all you can think about is how that thing is gone” (164). In the end, both Samuel and his mother reject the bitter logic of regret, embrace forgiveness, and tap the possibilities of a life in the present. The alternative, Hill cautions, is embodied in the character of the wheelchair-bound Judge Charlie Brown whose heart is corroded and his regrets twisted into an elaborate, ugly scheme for revenge.
The Prison of the Self
During Faye’s brief time at the university, the centerpiece of the intoxicating gospel with which the charismatic Beat poet Allen Ginsberg inspires her (and the others in his poetry seminar) is his urgent message to use whatever available avenues—poetry, chanting, drugs, free sex—to liberate the self from the burden of the self. He encourages Faye to explore, to deepen her soul until it (and she) expand to embrace the very cosmos: “There is no me,” he tells his enthralled students, “There is only the universe” (517).
In college, Faye struggles unsuccessfully to find her way to that expansive sense of the self. Like most of the other students, she is mired in her need for the self. The promise implicit in Ginsberg’s message of self-liberation, however, drives Hill’s narrative. The central characters here settle into and suffer from the withdrawal into the self, convinced of the toxicity of relationships, uncertain over the dynamics of family and friendship. One by one, each too happily evacuate into distractions that masquerade their sad and lonely surrender to the prison of the self: Samuel in his pretense to write; Pwnage through the world of Elfscape; Faye in her lifelong restless investigations of avenues of spirituality and fulfillment; Bethany in her music; Bishop in his penchant for theatrical violence; and Faye’s father in his drift into the fog of early dementia. Love is at best problematic and always complicated by lust; marriages here are convenient at best, suffocating at worst; friendships are measured in distance; and parents struggle just to talk with their children. Each character then begins alone.
Hill’s characters, nevertheless, struggle to step entirely away from the self, to find that significant other who will ensure the harrowing joys and sorrows inevitable in life will be better endured with someone else. As the novel draws to its close, these characters find their way to that someone else, to a friendship that promises a way beyond the confines of the self. Turning to another is difficult, and the gesture leaves characters vulnerable. What Samuel at long last whispers to Bethany can stand as Hill’s solution to the contemporary existential angst that defines us in the new millennium, an era when we are more connected than ever and yet lonelier than ever: Please, he whispers to Bethany, “please, I was hoping you could help me” (720).
The Impact of Culture
The interconnected stories of the Anderson and Fall families are compelling. Although the characters Hill creates are psychologically layered, and their actions at once complex and riveting, Hill’s narrative interest is far wider: He draws on the impact of our cultural moment. We are shaped by the era when we live and its political, social, and cultural events. The Nix is something of a cultural biography, a panoramic look into America from the Vietnam War to the new millennium.
In addition to the storylines of Samuel and his quest for his mother, we are given asides into a range of cultural phenomena from the last 50 years of American culture: disquisitions on, among many other topics, Disney World, music videos, prom night, terrorism, video games, the Occupy Wall Street movement, television news, airport security, the rise of frivolous litigation, conservative talk radio, frozen foods, advertising jingles, social media, feminine hygiene products, the Chicago Cubs, the etiquette of playground water fountains, and scanners in grocery store checkout lines.
Hill shapes the characters against the backdrop of this political, social, and cultural environment. In a narrative strategy that recalls the grand works by the giants of 19th-century social realism (among them, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy), Hill draws clear lines of influence between what his characters are, how they think, and how they respond to the culture around them. His characters have one of two reactions to their cultural moment: As Guy Periwinkle glibly explains to a dubious Samuel, “In the face of national calamity and utter annihilation of their personal prospects, people generally go in one of two directions […] They either get righteously indignant and hyperaware […] or they’ll sink into a somewhat comfortable ignorance” (337). We either engage or we retreat.
The Virtue of Empathy
When Samuel at last completes his emotional and psychological evolution into mental health and spiritual healing, and when he accepts his mother and seeks the help of Bethany, he finds his voice again and the creative urgency to write. In his attempts to explain how he has so completely recovered, Samuel offers empathy as a virtue vital to his reclamation. Indeed, using the vehicle of the novel itself, Hill investigates the sweeping power of tapping into the virtue of empathy.
Hill offers as remedy for contemporary loneliness the powerful engagement of another; his characters (with the exception of Judge Charlie Brown) move toward the tectonic moment of accepting another. This works for most of his characters: Faye reunites with her dying father; Samuel returns to his mother; Bethany seeks out Samuel; Alice is content with her life partner and her five rescue dogs; and Sebastian uses his considerable influence as an editor to choregraph the reunion of his ex-lover, Faye, with her estranged son.
The Nix, however, offers more than a series of happy reunions. Hill’s panoramic vision of a half century of American culture reveals schisms that cannot be bridged by friendships, love affairs, marriage, or families. Rather, we need to transcend the boundaries that separate us: race, religion, gender, economic class, age, and politics. These are deep lines cut into the American experience, dividing us since Vietnam, the results of which—discontent, paranoia, anger, suspicion—cannot be remedied by individuals finding their way to love. Rather, we need to catapult across such boundaries and engage emotionally and psychologically with people who are not anything like us; only then, Hill reveals, can a culture at last come together. As Allen Ginsberg explains to his students, “Real empathy is the actual corporeal feeling of someone else’s emotions […] the body vibrating like a tuning fork to the sadness and suffering of another” (485).
Hill maneuvers through a variety of characters—mothers, cops, crusading journalists, Secret Service details, political activists, not to mention a washed-up writer, a career chemical engineer, a book publisher, a Norwegian farmer, a Millennial college student, a video gamer, as well as a trio of historic figures (Hubert Humphrey, Walter Cronkite, and Allen Ginsberg)—each with a significant and individual backstory. Each is brought into the narrative without comprising the integrity of their persona. Each maintains a complex psychological makeup, coming to us with an individual perspective. Each character demands Hill transcend the limits of his own life story to understand, experience, and vicariously create the emotional and psychological experiences of these radical Others. That sort of empathy, the novel suggests, is a promising remedy for the social, political, and racial divides in post-millennium America. As Samuel learns, “[I]f you dig deep enough into anybody, if you really look under the hood of someone’s life, you will find something familiar” (728).
