Nathan Hill, _The Nix_

I WAS SLOW to pick this one up, because novels that get the kind of build-up this one did last year are often disappointing, but I took a chance, and whaddaya know, it's excellent. I will definitely get Hill's next.

We start with a quick chapter in which a woman in her early sixties, fed up with the mendacity and bad faith of a (Trump-ish) presidential aspirant in her vicinity, heaves a rock at him. She instantly becomes an object of national fascination and (among the Trump-figure's followers) odium.

Here we meet Samuel Andresen-Anderson, early 30s, blocked writer, failing academic, thwarted lover, online RPG addict...Sam is a mess, we have to say, and moreover something of a cliché. The not-so-young-anymore male writer who has come a cropper is a familiar figure. Chip Lambert in The Corrections, "Dave Wallace" in The Pale King, "Joshua Cohen" in The Book of Numbers, to say nothing of the older versions in Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys, Richard Russo's Straight Man, Julie Schumacher's Dear Committee Members.... It all goes back to Stephen at the beginning of Ulysses, I suppose, unless it goes back to Lucien de Rubempré in Lost Illusions.

Sam is the son of the rock-heaver, it turns out, who abandoned the family when Sam was quite young, much to his anguish. Sam's publisher, who is about to drop him (and require him to pay back his long-gone advance), offers him a chance to get back in the game by writing a savage tell-all memoir about his radical harpy of a mother. Sam decides to go along with it.

This project, much to the novel's benefit, gets us out of sad-male-writer world. Pursuant to the tell-all memoir, Sam recalls his childhood, richly and memorably evoked by Hill, and then digs into some research work about his mother--at which point the novel really opens out as Hill reconstructs the life of the mother, Faye. Faye was a small-town Iowa girl who as a freshman at Chicago Circle wound up at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, a historical vortex Hill does a nice job of recreating.

Hill has a Dickensian deftness in caricatural minor characters--Sam's publisher, Guy Periwinkle, for instance, or Sam's full-blown-nightmare of an entitled/aggrieved undergraduate, Laura ("I pay your salary and you can't treat me like this!"). He even brushes genius in creating some of the not-so-minor characters--Sam's RPG buddy Pwnage, for instance (Hill's narration of addiction to online gaming rivals comparable passages in Infinite Jest), Faye's college friend Alice, and especially Sam's boyhood companion Bishop Fall, unique and unforgettable.

One thinks of Dickens in again when a series of not very likely coincidences resolve the plot in the closing pages, but by that point I was ready to forgive a great deal.

A "nix," by the way, is a kind of bad sprite or curse hanging around in the wake of a past mistake or dropped responsibility, and atonement for such lapses eventually surfaces as a theme--very convincingly, I think.