The Nix

PROLOGUE
 
Late Summer 1988
 
If Samuel had known his mother was leaving, he might have paid more attention. He might have listened more carefully to her, observed her more closely, written certain crucial things down. Maybe he could have acted differently, spoken differently, been a different person.
 
Maybe he could have been a child worth sticking around for.
 
But Samuel did not know his mother was leaving. He did not know she had been leaving for many months now in secret, and in pieces. She had been removing items from the house one by one. A single dress from her closet. Then a lone photo from the album. A fork from the silverware drawer. A quilt from under the bed. Every week, she took something new. A sweater. A pair of shoes. A Christmas ornament. A book. Slowly, her presence in the house grew thinner.
 
She d been at it almost a year when Samuel and his father began to sense something, a sort of instability, a puzzling and disturbing and some-times even sinister feeling of depletion. It struck them at odd moments. They looked at the bookshelf and thought: Don t we own more books than that? They walked by the china cabinet and felt sure something was missing. But what? They could not give it a name this impression that life s details were being reorganized. They didn t understand that the reason they were no longer eating Crock-­Pot meals was that the Crock-Pot was no longer in the house. If the bookshelf seemed bare, it was because she had pruned it of its poetry. If the china cabinet seemed a little vacant, it was because two plates, two bowls, and a teapot had been lifted from the collection.
 
They were being burglarized at a very slow pace.
 
Didn t there used to be more photos on that wall? Samuel s father said, standing at the foot of the stairs, squinting. Didn t we have that picture from the Grand Canyon up there?
 
No, Samuel s mother said. We put that picture away.

Nathan Hill

A New York Times Notable Book Entertainment Weekly's #1 Book of the Year A Washington Post 2016 Notable Book A Slate Top Ten Book

If any novel defied an elevator pitch in 2016, it was The Nix. Acid critique of millennial entitlement, videogame addiction, and clueless academia; tender meditation on childhood friendship, first loves, and maternal abandonment; handy tutorial on 60s radicalism and Norwegian ghost mythology: Nathan Hill s magnificently overstuffed debut contains multitudes, and then some. . . .  the story surges, ricocheting from sleepy 80s suburbia and the 1968 DNC riots to WWII-era Norway, post-9/11 Iraq, and beyond. It s not just that Hill is a brilliantly surreal social satirist in the gonzo mode of Don DeLillo or Thomas Pynchon (a male news anchor s face is smooth as cake fondant ; one doomed union is like a spoon married to a garbage disposal ), it s that he does it all with so much wit and style and heart. Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly (Best Book of 2016)

A fantastic novel about love, betrayal, politics and pop culture as good as the best Michael Chabon or Jonathan Franzen. People

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. Jason Sheehan, NPR.org
 
Funny, endlessly inventive. . . . [a] wild tragicomic tangle of [Hill s] imagination. Entertainment Weekly (A-)

Hill has so much talent to burn that he can pull of just about any style, imagine himself into any person and convincingly portray any place or time. The Nix is hugely entertaining and unfailingly smart, and the author seems incapable of writing a pedestrian sentence or spinning a boring story. . . . [A] supersize and audacious novel of American misadventure. Teddy Wayne, The New York Times Book Review

Irresistible. . . . A major new comic novelist . . . . Hill is a