![]() When his long-lost mother makes national news by pelting a presidential candidate with stones, Samuel meets with his publisher and agrees “to deliver a book that told (his) mother’s story while also ripping her to shreds, rhetorically.” ![]() ![]() It’s like revenge for having to teach them.”Ī once-rising literary star, Samuel is years overdue with the manuscript of his novel. The Nix (Knopf, 620 pp., **** out of four stars) jumps viewpoints and time periods with delightful abandon: there’s sixth-grader Samuel in 1988, prone to crying jags, as if sensing that his mother is about to forsake him video game addict Pwnage in 2011, obsessed with playing the fictional World of Elfscape Samuel’s mother Faye, caught up in the riots of 1968 and finally the grown-up Samuel, an embittered professor who “secretly likes when he gets to fail a student. ![]() That “the things you love the most can hurt you the worst” could serve as a subtitle for this rich and multilayered book. ![]() Though no actual supernatural monsters hit the pages of his dazzling debut novel, Nathan Hill finds broad use for the Nix as metaphor. A Nix is a creature out of Norwegian folktales that enthralls children, only to carry them off to be drowned. ![]()
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