The Nix

Starred review from May 2, 2016
Hill’s first novel offers an ironic view of 21st-century elections, education, pop culture, and marketing, with flashbacks to 1988, 1968, and 1944. The action begins in 2011, when Samuel Anderson, an English professor who prefers playing World of Elfquest online to teaching Hamlet to college students, learns that Faye, the mother who abandoned him when he was 11, has been arrested for throwing stones at flamboyant ultraconservative presidential candidate Sheldon Packer. News media repeatedly show Faye’s photo from her young hippie days along with a video of the attack. In an attempt to help his mother and himself, Samuel digs into Faye’s past, focusing on the Iowa town where she grew up and 1968 Chicago, where she unwittingly became caught between protesters and police. Samuel’s search—with assistance from Pwnage, an Elfquest savant—uncovers a judge with a 50-year-old grudge, a grandfather with a 70-year-old secret, and a world where the official story and the truth often diverge. The Nix of Hill’s title is a Norwegian mythological being that carries loved ones away, a physical and metaphorical representation of fear and loss, much like the Under Toad in John Irving’s The World According to Garp. Like Irving, Hill skillfully blends humor and darkness, imagery and observation. He also excels at describing technology, addiction, cultural milestones, and childhood ordeals. Cameos by Allen Ginsberg, Walter Cronkite, and Hubert Humphrey add heart and perspective to this rich, lively take on American social conflict, real and invented, over the last half-century. 100,000-copy announced first printing. Agent: Emily Forland, Brandt & Hochman Literary.

Starred review from June 1, 2016
Sparkling, sweeping debut novel that takes in a large swath of recent American history and pop culture and turns them on their sides.The reader will be forgiven for a certain sinking feeling on knowing that the protagonist of Hill's long yarn is--yes--a writer, and worse, a writer teaching at a college, though far happier playing online role-playing games involving elves and orcs and such than doling out wisdom on the classics of Western literature. Samuel Andresen-Anderson--there's a reason for that doubled-up last name--owes his publisher a manuscript, and now the publisher is backing out with the excuse, "Primarily, you're not famous anymore," and suing to get back the advance in the bargain. What's a fellow to do? Well, it just happens that Samuel's mother, who has been absent for decades, having apparently run off in the hippie days to follow her bliss, is back on the scene, having become famous herself for chucking a rock at a rising right-wing demagogue, the virulent Gov. Sheldon Packer. Hill opens by running through the permutations of journalism that promote her from back to front page, with a run of ever more breathless headlines until a "clever copywriter" arrives at the sobriquet "Packer Attacker," "which is promptly adopted by all the networks and incorporated into the special logos they make for the coverage." Where did mom run off to? Why? What has she been up to? Andresen-Anderson is too busy asking questions to feel too sorry for what his editor calls "your total failure to become a famous writer." There are hints of Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys as Hill, by way of his narrative lead, wrestles alternately converging and fugitive stories onto the page, stories that range from the fjords of Norway to the streets of "Czechago" in the heady summer of 1968. There are also hints of Pynchon, though, as Hill gently lampoons advertising culture, publishing, academia, politics, and everything in between. A grand entertainment, smart and well-paced, and a book that promises good work to come.

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Starred review from July 1, 2016

When Samuel Andreson-Anderson was growing up, his mother, Faye, drew on folklore related by her Norwegian-born father to tell him about the Nix, a water spirit in the form of a white horse that carries too-trusting children to their deaths. The moral, she explained, is that "the things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst." That proves prophetic, for one day she simply walks out. Now a middling English professor and novelist manque who seeks escape through endless rounds of Elfquest, Sam learns that the 60ish woman who tossed rocks at a right-wing governor is his mother. He visits her, ostensibly because her lawyer laughably wants him for the defense, more obviously because his fed-up publisher wants him to write a seething best seller about his abandonment, but ultimately and bitterly to learn what happened. She's not forthcoming, but debut novelist Hill certainly is, spinning through nearly 700 pages of addictive, tightly packed prose that chronicles Faye's circumscribed upbringing and risky breakout in 1968 Chicago; young Sam's sustaining relationships with tough friend Bishop and Bishop's beautiful violinist sister, Bethany; and much more. VERDICT Offering engrossing prose, multiple interlocking stories, and deftly drawn characters, Hill shows us how the interlinked consequences of our actions can feel like fate.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 1, 2016
Growing up in a small, watchful Iowa town, Faye endures her brooding Norwegian immigrant father's frightening ghost stories, especially one about a spirit known as the nix, which can haunt a family for eons. This is the kernel from which Hill's accomplished, many-limbed debut novel germinates. Cartwheeling among multiple narrators, it spins the galvanizing stories of three generations derailed in unexpected ways by WWII, the Vietnam War, and the Iraq War. Faye inflicts the chilling tale of the nix on her hypersensitive son, Samuel, and then abandons him and his father. Twenty-three years later, in 2011, Samuel, a failed writer and English professor so disheartened by his cell-phone-addicted students and litigation-phobic administration that he routinely retreats into a multiplayer video game, is dragged back into the real world when his long-estranged mother is arrested for assaulting a right-wing presidential candidate. This precipitates a leap back to 1968 and Faye's wounding experiences during the infamous Democratic convention in Chicago. As more subplots build, including the mesmerizing tale of young Samuel's relationships with twins fearless Bishop and violin prodigy Bethany, Hill takes aim at hypocrisy, greed, misogyny, addiction, and vengeance with edgy humor and deep empathy in a whiplashing mix of literary artistry and compulsive readability. Place Hill's engrossing, skewering, and preternaturally timely tale beside the novels of Tom Wolfe, John Irving, Donna Tartt, and Michael Chabon.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)