John Irving compared The Nix to works by Charles Dickens. Like Dickens, Hill has created an engaging tale of modern culture that’s profound, sad and intensely funny. The story of a man and the mother who abandoned him, The Nix is rich with inventive ideas and comic characters. The 625-page novel took Hill, an Iowa native, 12 years to produce. A former newspaper and magazine journalist, Hill is on leave from the University of Saint Thomas in Saint Paul, Minn., where he teaches literature and creative writing.
In a phone conversation in advance of his appearance here, he told CityBeat the story behind The Nix.
CityBeat: Where did the spark for The Nix come from?
Nathan Hill: One of my first impulses was to tell a story of two generations. I had just moved to New York in 2004, about the time the Republican National Convention was held in Madison Square Garden. It was (for) Bush-Cheney’s second term and I went down to watch the protests.
I heard people wondering whether this convention would get unruly like the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago (where thousands protested in opposition to the Vietnam War). That was the first inspiration to have two generations of protest — Samuel’s in 2004 and his mother’s in 1968.
CB: You’re only 40, so I assume you had to do quite a bit of research about 1968.
NH: I didn’t know much about the 1968 protest when I first started writing. I saw the ’60s through rose-colored glasses. Then I went through seven or eight boxes of letters, handbills, underground newspapers and photographs from the convention week at the Chicago History Museum’s research library. I had thought of the counterculture protest movement as a monolithic thing. But I came to see it as the combined effort of different groups, each with a slightly different agenda.
CB: How did that connect to the 2004 election?
NH: In 1968, we had two sides of a political divide who were not communicating. We had well-meaning activists, but cops and politicians just saw “hippie.” We had police officers who were trying to protect law and order, but to the student radicals they were fascist. Everyone was reduced to their worst stereotype. In 2004, it happened again. Americans weren’t speaking very clearly to each other. Maybe this year’s election is the quintessence of that problem.
CB: One character in The Nix is addicted to gaming. Another can’t stop checking her “iFeel” app. Why did you give digital devices so much prominence?
NH: Video games portray what happens when people adopt monolithic systems of thought. We live in a very diverse time with global communication and a multi-cultural society, yet our response seems to be to double-down on prepackaged systems of thought: “My political philosophy is right and yours is wrong.” I wanted to experiment with that. I gave one character a philosophy that came from video games. Another character can’t see past the electronic world she has created with her devices.
CB: In Scandinavian mythology, a nix is a water spirit that sometimes appears as a majestic white horse. It entices children but when they hop on, the horse gallops into the river and drowns them. Why did you include this folklore?
NH: My mother’s family emigrated from Hammerfest a few generations back, but we lost contact with Norway long ago. In the book, I decided to invent my own family history and included a character who told old Norwegian stories. It wasn’t until I was a good way through the novel that I realized the moral of the nix was happening with all my characters. They all were being undermined by the very things that meant the most to them.
NATHAN HILL speaks at downtown’s Mercantile Library 7 p.m. Thursday; 6:30 p.m. reception. Library members free; non-members $10. Reservations required. More info: mercantilelibrary.com.
