After reading Nathan Hill’s Wellness (2023), I wanted to read his first book–this one from 2016. Both are 600+ pages, making his novels a commitment, and while both are longer than they need to be, Hill’s writing and character development keeps us turning pages. What’s remarkable is that there are really only two main characters–Samuel and his mom, Faye–and two main time periods: 1988 when Samuel is a child and his mom leaves him, and 2011 when Samuel is an professor, and his mom, whom he has not seen since 1988, throws stones at a presidential candidate and is suddenly on every news channel labeled the Packer Attacker.

The 1988 sections focus on Samuel growing up without a mom, becoming friends with Bishop and his twin sister Bethany, a violinist who becomes the unrequited love of Samuel’s life, and of navigating school and life wanting to be a novelist and wanting to understand why his mom walked out the door one day and never came back, though even as a child he thought “how his father married to his mother was like a spoon married to a garbage disposal.” 

In the 2011 sections, Samuel is a professor uninspired by his students or by teaching and escaping into the videogame World of Elfscape for untold hours a day. I about fell out of my seat laughing in the opening scene of Samuel the professor confronting a student who cheated on her Hamlet essay, which goes on for 20+ pages of first all the lies Laura Pottsdam tells him and then all the excuses and then how she’ll turn the tables and get him fired for calling her dumb and she’ll report to the dean that his classroom is not a “safe space to learn” because it “feels abusive.” After all, Laura felt reading Hamlet was “such bullshit” because she “knew for a fact that when she interviewed for executive vice president of communications and marketing for a major corporation they would not ask her about Hamlet…which kept getting all gummed up in her brain.”

And then this long scene of Laura’s cheating and stupidity and accusations gets interrupted by news of Samuel’s mom, now middle-aged, “attacking” the Republican presidential candidate, though all she really did was throw a handful of gravel toward him while sitting in a park. But this charge leads to digging up his mom’s past as a “radical hippy prostitute” who protested at the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention while a student for a brief time at Chicago Circle–all information Samuel has never heard as he thought his mom had never left Iowa and married his dad right out of high school. 

So that is the essence of the story–Samuel learning about his mom’s past, her protest days, why she left the family, and where she is today. And also Samuel growing up in a changing America where his best friend died in Vietnam as a teenager, where students in 2011 can cheat and get away with it and the professor is the guilty one, and where adults escape into online gaming when they are disillusioned by their careers and lives. It’s a story about loss and love and failed relationships and learning and reconciling and starting over. 

And though there are side stories and digressions (a few too many–thus requiring patience of readers), we get so many gems like these: “Margaret’s quasi-fiance is one of those intolerable boys who’s a star at everything…He pins his medals to his school jacket, then gives his jacket to Margaret, who walks around school clinking like a wind chime.” Or later when Bethany is explaining to Samuel how she felt when her twin, Bishop, died in Vietnam: “I just felt numb…like when you’re at the dentist and they give you some really serious painkillers. You feel fine, but you’re pretty sure underneath it all you still hurt. The hurt is simply not registering. That’s how life felt.”

The word “Nix,” according to Faye, refers to a ghost or a haunting (of Norwegian origin) whose victims love those that hurt them most. Both Samuel and Faye spend much of their lives trying to flee the curse of the Nix.

This book is worth the commitment of its 620 pages. Settle in for some good reading.