This is a rich, multi-layered story about family curses and failure, and how to make amends for a life full of mistakes. It’s been 23 years since Faye walked out on Samuel and his father, but her lawyer still hopes Samuel will be willing to write a character reference to be used in her defense, prompting their awkward reunion. Meanwhile Faye is awaiting trial for throwing rocks at Governor Packer, a conservative presidential hopeful from Wyoming.

Now Laura Pottsdam, a student he caught plagiarizing a Hamlet essay, is on a mission to take Samuel down. Once the Next Big Thing, feted by Granta for a brilliant short story, he has never delivered his contracted novel and spends more time in the World of Elfscape online game than he does engaging in real life. Samuel is an assistant English professor at a small suburban Chicago college. In 2011 Samuel Anderson and his estranged mother, Faye, find themselves in strange situations. Here’s one: “How easily a simple façade can become your life, can become the truth of your life.” He mixes up the paragraph arrangement in a particularly effective way, such that long thoughts are punctuated by a killer one-liner given a paragraph of its own. From the first few pages onwards, I was impressed by Hill’s carefully honed sentences. If you’ve loved The World According to Garp, City on Fire, The Goldfinch, and/or Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, you should pick this one up right away. Six hundred and twenty pages of small print: was it going to be worth it? Luckily, the answer was a resounding yes. I was wary of Nathan Hill’s debut novel, The Nix, as I always am of big ol’ books.

The nix novel