NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS

Nathan Hill’s audacious and panoramic debut is the sweeping story of the last half century of American history and pop culture told through the lives of three generations of a mid-western family. Juggling multiple storylines and narrators, The Nix is a hugely entertaining, compulsively readable, smartly observed, sparklingly written novel that manages to be simultaneously edgy and deeply empathetic.

One of the more popular books of the last year for Iowa City Public Library cardholders, a native Iowan, and his appearance at the 2017 Iowa City Book Festival helped him locally as well.

Inventive, comic, highly entertaining – a brilliant first novel.

Released several months before our “incredible” US presidential election, The Nix presents a political history of Chicago politics from the 1940s to current day with both humor and appropriate darkness. A loaded novel in terms of both plots and characters, The Nix follows Samuel Anderson, an English professor who prefers playing a specific video game, from a time when he is told his mother, Faye, who deserted him as a child, has been arrested for throwing rocks at an extremely conservative presidential candidate. Faye’s life, and eventually Samuel’s, become intertwined in flashbacks, before the reader views certain parallel circumstances between mother and son, reality and fantasy,  politics and daily life. Nathan Hill manages to weave historical and cultural details together in The Nix, to present an accurate portrait of not only US politics, but a global study of what make politicians and their non-followers tick and compete.