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Originally Posted by kioshk
Reading The Nix now, it's fantastic. Like a cross between a great John Irving novel and a great Jonathan Franzen novel, but for these times.
I just finished this, and I wound up quite liking it though I had some reservations while reading it, in part because I felt it dragged in places.
It's a young man’s novel (Hill was born in 1985) that could be naïve at times (for example, the story of the blind men and the elephant shows up as if it were fresh). And the narrator is more homiletic than any I've seen in literary fiction—but the homilies are mostly engaging and entirely well-intentioned.
I was amused by the protagonist in his interaction with a young female student who has plagiarized her English essay; though it initially felt predictable, Hill elaborated it nicely. And although I was bothered by Samuel’s condescension toward his students in general, I was pleased to see that he later recognized that as a fault and realized he should have found a way to teach to their needs.
The subplot of a minor character as gaming addict (to a WoW-type game) was striking, as was the depiction of the protagonist's mother suffering from panic attacks. The climax of the narrative is set in chaos of the Chicago Democratic Convention, which I found mostly illuminating of an event that shaped my life.