Summary: Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of the Avid Reader. Today our guest is Nathan Hill, author of The Nix just published on the 30th by Knopf. It has so much prepublication publicity that the press kit I received took me an hour to read. And before it was even released, it has been translated into German, Dutch, French, Spanish/Catalan, Danish, Swedish Norwegian (important), Italian, Finnish Hebrew, Hungarian, Korean, Polish, and Chinese. I mean what the hell is up with that? I can only imagine the feeding frenzy for the movie rights. So Nathan is an Associate Professor of English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, from which position he is taking a break in order to pursue his writing (that seems logical to me) His short stories have been published in The Iowa Review, Fugue, The Gettysburg Review and many others, He lives in Naples, Florida but spent most of his life in the Midwest. The NIX is a novel with a roadmap for its epigraph. Which is the story of the blind men and the elephant as originally recounted by the Buddha. What we as individuals take for reality is not that which others do. It may be true for us but so there are many truths. And in a more inductive sense, many of us, undiscerning, unrealizing let one drop of water be our universe when that drop can fall into a bucket and that bucket can be poured into an endless sea. Whether one is lost in a video game, a doppelganger for “real” as opposed to a virtual life, or whether one lives in a past that inhibits growth, that shames or paralyzes future movement, we all live inner lives not necessarily of quiet desperation, but many of the characters in this book sure do. What make the nix different that other novels that deal with mother-son estrangement, or with the political process in America, or with unrequited love, or with dark secrets, too secret to reveal, or with missed opportunities is that it seamlessly weaves all of these themes into a work that exceeds the sum of its parts. In so doing we find ourselves caught up in a web of words and with a story so resonant, so close to home that when we finish, we as readers have the opportunity and yes the responsibility of reexamining our own lives, sometimes painfully and provide us the Pandora like opportunity to discover our own Nixes.
