Nathan Hill’s debut novel, The Nix (2016), is a multigenerational family saga that is as much the story of an American immigrant family rent by betrayal and abandonment as it is a panoramic cultural biography that examines more than 50 years of America’s social, political, and pop culture from Vietnam to the rise of Donald Trump. Little was known about Hill at the time of the novel’s publication; his short stories had only appeared in small, if prestigious, literary journals. The novel, an immediate best seller, was compared to the works of American social realists such as John Updike, Jonathan Franzen, Tom Wolfe, and John Irving. Hill’s novel was included on numerous best-of-the year lists, most notably The New York Times, The Guardian, USA Today, and The Washington Post. The novel was awarded the Art Seidenbaum Award for Best First Novel, awarded by The Los Angeles Times, and was shortlisted for the best first novel award by the National Book Critics Circle.

Plot Summary

The book opens in 2011. Samuel Andreson-Anderson, a once promising writer now in his thirties, suffers from stubborn writer’s block. Unable to deliver a book manuscript for which he accepted a huge advance, he marks time as an adjunct professor of literature at a small college outside Chicago in between long nights spent enveloped within the online game world of Elfscape. He struggles with memories of his mother, Faye Andreson-Anderson, who, with no warning and no explanation, abandoned Samuel and his father when Samuel was only 11 and living in Iowa. Faye had simply disappeared.

During an emotionally charged political event centered on the presidential candidacy of Sheldon Packer, a controversial alt-right Wyoming governor, news cameras record an older woman tossing rocks at the candidate. Samuel comes to realize that the woman in the video—a woman quickly decried by the conservative media as a dangerous homegrown terrorist and leftover hippie—is none other than his long-lost mother. The woman is arrested. In a hasty negotiation with his publisher, Guy Periwinkle, Samuel is given a choice: He can either return the huge advance (which he cannot do) or agree to pen a vicious inflammatory memoir of his mother that will feed the national frenzy by depicting her as an unhinged domestic terrorist (the publisher is certain the tell-all book will capitalize on Faye’s sudden notoriety and help Packer’s campaign).

We then shift back to 1988, the days leading up to Faye’s abandonment of her family. Samuel is a whiny child, given to inexplicable crying jags. He has few friends but does bond with a strange classmate named Bishop Fall, who has an odd predilection for war and violence. The two become friends. Samuel is introduced to Bishop’s twin, the beautiful Bethany Fall, and young Samuel quickly becomes obsessed with her. Bishop pulls Samuel into a bizarre plot to murder the headmaster of a local academy where Bishop had been a student—the two teenagers dissolve highly toxic deer poison in the headmaster’s hot tub (we find out much later the headmaster abused Bishop as a child). The morning the headmaster is found dead, coincidentally, Samuel’s mother disappears.

As part of his research, Samuel returns to Iowa. He visits his grandfather, a first-generation Norwegian immigrant, who as a chemical engineer worked on developing napalm during the height of the Vietnam War. He now suffers from dementia and lives in a nursing home. Sam rummages about his grandfather’s boxes of papers and finds that his mother left Iowa briefly in 1968 to attend college in Chicago but returned within a few months and married her childhood sweetheart, Henry, Sam’s father, only to abandon the family some 20 years later. Samuel decides the key to understanding his mother centers on why she left Chicago so abruptly.

In Part 4, we return to 1968. We learn that Faye, as a restless teenager, dreamed of breaking out of her Iowa childhood world to attend college in Chicago despite her parents’ objection, who cited the dangers of a city and all the political unrest rocking campuses. Even her boyfriend, Henry, threatens to join the military if she leaves for college. Ironically, wildfire rumors that she is pregnant (all untrue) drive her out of her family. She leaves for Chicago vowing never to return.

In researching his mother, Samuel receives a distressing email from Bethany. She pleads with him to come to New York—there he finds out that Bishop, who joined the army after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, was killed in Iraq. Bethany invites Samuel to join her in the Occupy Wall Street movement protesting the unequal distribution of wealth in America. Bethany is engaged to a financial whiz she does not love. Bethany begs Samuel to save her, but a note from Bishop that Bethany shares with Samuel, written shortly before Bishop’s death, begs Samuel to leave his sister alone. Conflicted, Samuel departs.

Samuel is increasingly engaged by his research into his mother. Through a lead provided by a fellow gamer, known only as Pwnage, Samuel meets Alice who, he discovers, was his mother’s lover briefly during the time Faye spent in Chicago during the summer of 1968. Alice recalls how Faye came under the powerful sway of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, then a charismatic visiting professor at the same college Faye attends. Faye found herself involved with Sebastian, a brash, cocky journalist whose provocative editorials fanned student unrest. Alice, for her part, was engaged in a kinky relationship with a Chicago cop named Charlie Brown. When Brown discovers that Alice and Faye were lovers, he uses his position as a cop to have Faye arrested on charges of prostitution. Sebastian, who Faye discovers is actually working for the cops, secures Faye’s clandestine release from jail, much to Brown’s chagrin. Faye returns to Iowa and settles down to married life.

Back in 2011, Charlie, now a judge, waits eagerly to preside over Faye’s case to enact revenge. Samuel, informed by Alice, tracks Charlie down to save his mother. Charlie threatens Samuel and continues to antagonize Faye. Samuel decides to flee the country with his mother before she is sentenced, but he is stopped at the airport and bids her farewell. When the judge is convinced not to pursue charges against Faye, she returns to Iowa where she and Samuel begin the work of restoring their family. Samuel, his position at the college terminated, reaches out to Bethany now married to the financier. We learn that Samuel’s publisher, who had offered Samuel the original generous first-book contact and then steered Samuel into writing the vicious memoir of his mother (which had been finished by ghostwriters) is none other than Faye’s college lover Sebastian. With Faye’s help, Sebastian engineered the elaborate book-writing scheme to restore Faye to her lost son. It is for mother and son a new beginning.

The text cited here is the May 2017 Vintage paperback.