The Nix by Nathan Hill

I really enjoyed about the first thirty pages of Nathan Hill's The Nix -- it was funny and engaging. Here's how Teddy Wayne described it in a review in the Times.

“The Nix,” Nathan Hill’s ambitiously panoramic and humane debut novel, oscillates between the poles of the 1968 Chicago protests and 2011. Its backdrop includes Occupy Wall Street, insipid pop singers and a reactionary, ­revolver-carrying Wyoming governor ready to run for president. Hill zeros in on the failures and discarded idealism of the boomers, a generation that pivoted, in less than two decades, from motorcycles to minivans, from socialism to sushi.

But wait, as they say in the infomercials “The Nix” might lampoon — there’s more! The novel also tours 1940s Norway, suburban Chicago in the ’80s and the Iraq war, and it goes inside the heads of Hubert H. Humphrey; a cynical book publisher; a collegiate plagiarist; a hippie-bashing cop; and a video game addict, as well as a plethora of other characters, locales and eras.

It sounds dizzying, but the multiple story lines are dexterously juggled and well paced, even if the joints between the novel’s 10 sections are a little creaky, with flashback-priming segues out of a hokey screenplay.

But Wayne also points out a central flaw of the novel:

But the novel Hill has assembled is so diffuse in its tones, settings and cast that it never gives the reader a chance to plant himself in its emotional soil. As soon as we get to know one character and time period, we are whisked off to another person, decade and mode of expression, often for relatively inconsequential purposes, like a tangent devoted first to the Elfscape addict (through a very “Infinite Jest”-sounding 11-page chapter basically composed of a single sentence) and then the plagiarist, minor players in an already overstuffed ensemble. The relationship between Faye and Samuel, the crux of the novel, doesn’t have the intended payoff, nor does the resolution of Samuel’s longing for Bethany. The strands all converge at the end, but so neatly as to seem more like the elegant solution to a puzzle than an expression of real life.

One gets the sense that Hill wanted to include every anecdote, observation and turn of phrase he ever conjured up or heard, and was loath to prune any from the finished product. Maybe he was also disinclined to write a straightforward, quieter novel for fear — as the publisher says critically of the beginning of Faye’s story that Samuel sends him — of slipping “into some familiar coming-of-age conventions.”

Which is too bad ...

At about page 275, I decided to not finish the book. There is no shame in stopping a book I no longer enjoy.