This debut work of fiction from the American writer Nathan Hill falls into the category of the Big Novel – the American predilection for which, as Martin Amis wrote in the early 1980s, British critics have tended to regard as a kind of “vulgar neurosis – like the American predilection for big cars or big hamburgers. Oh God, we think: here comes another sweating, free-dreaming maniac with another thousand-pager; here comes another Big Mac.”
Yet, as Amis also remarked, the American appetite for the Big might more charitably be viewed not merely as a foible, but as a response to the scale and the variety of the country itself: “American novels are big all right, but partly because America is big too.”
While this argument does not account for the vitality of the Small American Novel, it does carry a certain force. And it is of clear relevance to this inaugural offering from Nathan Hill, which (in addition to being Big) almost immediately announces itself as a book that wants to capture and examine the nature of America in the 21st century.
Hill ignites his narrative by describing an attack on Governor Sheldon Packer – a populist presidential candidate who carries a revolver “in a leather holster at his hip” and compares “immigrants taking American jobs to coyotes eating livestock” – as he walks around a Chicago park in the late summer of 2011. In the course of his progress, a handful of gravel is flung at him by a middle-aged woman. A video of the assault races around the internet and fills television screens and conversations across the country. Everybody knows about the events unleashed by the figure the media are calling the “Packer Attacker”.
‘World of Elfscape’
Except, that is, for Samuel Andresen-Anderson, a disaffected professor of literature in his thirties who has missed the story of the attack while indulging his obsession with an online game named World of Elfscape. It is only when he receives a phone call from a lawyer asking him to act as a character witness that he learns about the the assault on Packer – and that the perpetrator was his mother, Faye, who abandoned him 20 years ago.
At this point it emerges that Samuel is about to be sued by his publisher for non-delivery of a book. Ruin beckons. Until the publisher, realising that Samuel is the son of Packer’s assailant, commissions him to write a remorselessly candid account of her life. This project provides Samuel with an opportunity to seek an explanation for his mother’s disappearance. He locates her, visits her, finds no answers. And so, later in the novel, he attempts to investigate and reconstruct the story of her life.
But before proceeding with this element of his story, Hill takes us back to Samuel’s childhood in the late summer of 1988, weeks before his mother’s departure. We are here introduced to his friendship with the preternaturally assured Bishop Fall; to Samuel’s burgeoning infatuation with his first (and most enduringly devastating) love, Bethany, a bewitchingly talented violinist who happens to be Bishop’s twin; and a story his mother told him about the “the Nix”, a spirit from a Norwegian legend on to which Faye has grafted her own lesson: “The things you loved most will one day hurt you the worst.”
Protracted
With these strands of his narrative in place, Hill gets on with the protracted business (planting us in various times and places over a period of about 50 years) of chronicling Samuel’s attempt to tell his mother’s story, which, in the springtime radicalism of 1968, featured its own moments of crisis and rejection.
Hill handles most of this with appealing exuberance and comic spirit, and it is an indication of his strength as a writer that he is able to keep these qualities subtly and decorously alive in even the book’s most sombre and affecting moments. (The fate of Bishop is especially moving.) He is also a gifted satirist of the lineaments of contemporary America: of its lust for indignation and outrage; of students who regard academic appraisals as a violation of their right to a “safe space”; of its hunger for a constant feed of atrocity news, preferably with accompanying video.
Some of this feels too powerfully like the comedy of correction, and the book as a whole is excessively long, slackly and frustratingly digressive, and marred by instances of inattentive and clumsy prose. But Hill is also capable of writing with precision and resonance, and of dealing in the literary descendant of purely corrective satire, the comedy of forgiveness. When he does so, The Nix feels nutritiously thoughtful, stylistically bracing, enlargingly empathetic. What a pity about its appetite for the Big.
Matthew Adams is a literary critic
