This is my goodreads review:It's been awhile since I've been as affected by a book as I am by The Nix. Jason Sheehan reviewed the book for NPR, and captures some of my feelings:http://www.npr.org/2016/08/31/4901018..."After 10 pages of Nathan Hill's debut novel, The Nix, I flipped to the dust jacket. I wanted to see what the author looked like because I was thinking to myself, Jesus, this guy is gonna be famous. I wanna see what he looks like. At 50 pages in I smiled when my train was delayed — a few extra minutes to read about Samuel Andresen-Anderson, the assistant English professor and gone-nowhere writer who'd failed to live up to a tiny bit of early promise. At around 100 pages, Samuel is in 6th grade — lonely, panicky, a crier at the least little thing — and I know I'm going to miss anything like a reasonable bedtime. At 200, it is stories of Samuel's mother that keeps me turning pages: A teenager in 1968, driven, tightly wound. It is the sketched background of the woman who will abandon Samuel at 11 years old and wreck him in all the million ways that such a thing will wreck a delicate boy; the woman who will float back into his life years later on cable television — briefly notorious for throwing a handful of rocks at a conservative republican presidential candidate in a Chicago park....The Nix is 620 pages long. My last dog-ear is on page 613. It's nothing important. Just a funny story told by one character to another about the Northern Lights and the burden of expectation. It is lovely in precisely the same way that a thousand of Hill's other paragraphs are lovely — these looping, run-on, wildly digressive pages which, somehow, in their absolute refusal to cling together and act like a book, make the perfect book for our distracted age."This book fits our time like David Foster Wallace was able to do with Infinite Jest, and Nathan Hill has that same brilliant, challenging writing style, on top of a satirical eye that covers the range of our modern world's obsessions. I have so many sticky notes in the book that it's hard to choose, but here are some of the lines that will stay with me, as he skewers everything from politics and journalism to materialism and obsessions. Mainly, all I can say is READ THIS!! :-)He opens with one page of the old Buddhist tale of the blind men and the elephant--which is woven so creatively into the book. These characters--especially the mother, Faye, and her son, Samuel--are all "blind", in the way of humans to be limited in our perceptions of both life and ourselves. Faye says, on p. 565:"In the story of the blind men and the elephant, what's usually ignored is the fact that each man's description was correct. What Faye won't understand and may never understand is that there is not one true self hidden by many false ones. Rather, there is one true self hidden by many other true ones. Yes, she is the meek and shy and industrious student. Yes, she is the panicky and frightened child. Yes, she is the bold and impulsive seductress. Yes, she is the wife and mother. And many other things as well. Her belief that only one of these is true obscures the larger truth, which was ultimately the problem with the blind men and the elephant. It wasn't that they were blind--it's that they stopped too quickly, and so never knew there was a larger truth to grasp."Parts of the book make my heart ache--for the abused boy Bishop, for the stinging descriptions of what went on at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, for my favorite character Pwnage--lost in a video game since real life has become unbearable.But also, at times I was laughing out loud and saying, "Right on!" when Hill uses satire as viciously as Vonnegut and Twain ever did. Here, on p. 65, he nails road rage as Samuel explains why he hates to drive in Chicago:"The closer he gets to the city, the more the highway feels malicious and warlike--wild zigzagging drivers cutting people off, tailgating, honking horns, flashing their lights, all their private traumas now publicly enlarged.On p. 107, he captures all the inane, ludicrous qualities of a shopping mall, beginning with a long list of meaningless merchandise:"With its hundreds of stores and booths, the mall seemed to make a simple promise: that here you would find everything you needed....the mall's overwhelmingness was meant to replace your imagination. Forget trying to dream of your desires; the mall had already dreamed them up for you."On p. 530, he captures the despair of Walter Cronkite, trying to make sense of what is happening in Chicago in 1968. Even though Hill says he wrote the political sections a few years ago, the chilling timeliness of these lines is disturbing:"It's a chilling thought, that politicians have learned to manipulate the television medium better than the television professionals themselves. When old Cronkite first realized this was happening he imagined the kinds of people who would become politicians in the future. And he shuddered with fear."I could go on and on--but I want to get at the reason for the unusual title. At the beginning of chapter 5, Faye explains the old myth of the Nix from her Norwegian heritage--a beautiful white horse that allows a child to ride it, and then the child wants to show off to others--and "when they most wanted to be celebrated for it and thus felt the most vanity and arrogance and pride" the horse jumps off a cliff and are drowned. Then she tells Samuel:" 'The Nix used to appear as a horse,' she said, 'but that was in the old days.''What does it look like now?''It's different for everyone. But it usually appears as a person. Usually it's someone you think you love.'Samuel still did not understand.'People love each other for many reasons, not all of them good,' she said. 'They love each other because it's easy. Or because they're used to it. Or because they've given up. Or because they're scared. People can be a Nix for each other.' "I must tie this up, but need to mention two conventions of the book that worked so well, imho. Samuel loves "Choose Your Own Adventure" books as a child, and one entire chapter is titled "You Can Get the Girl" and is written in the format of those books. The other is the chapter about Pwnage, which is 11 pages of one sentence, and it works powerfully.Because I'm a grandma who plays Wizard 101, Pwnage's escape into a video game held special poignancy for me (in gaming, "Pwn" means you "own", or have beaten, an opponent. (And if it seems strange that a 76 year old would know that tidbit, it is! :-) This whole chapter is his attempt to break free of the addiction. Just read it straight through to get the total effect.I'll conclude with some of the blurbs from Amazon:"A mother-son psychodrama with ghosts and politics, but it’s also a tragicomedy about anger and sanctimony in America. . . . Nathan Hill is a maestro.” —John Irving“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“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 sharp social observer, hyper-alert to the absurdities of modern life. . . . his enormous book arrives as one of the stars of the fall season. . . . readers will find this novel. And they’ll be dazzled.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post