The Nix

“You’re just not very smart.” 

Samuel’s cutting (if honest) assessment of his student caught plagiarizing a paper reflects how far Samuel needs to grow. Samuel lacks any empathy for the struggles and problems of the failing student; honesty is not empathy. 

“‘It’s okay,’ she says. “Don’t be scared.’” 

Faye’s last words before her abrupt departure from young Samuel’s life stay with Samuel, but he misunderstands. He misses entirely Faye’s offer of empowerment, her challenge to her 11-year old son to approach life with courage, confidence, and direction. 

“He didn’t know it then, but this would become his template for beauty for the rest of his life. Any girl he ever met from now on would be compared, in his head, to this girl.” 

In experiencing the first pangs of love, Samuel misreads the experience. His obsession with Bethany stymies his emotional growth. He wants Bethany, but as the example of his mother and Frank will reveal to him, possession is not the same as love.

“The things you love the most will one day hurt you the most.” 

This is a forbidding message for any parent to offer a child, but Faye struggles here to caution her son against giving in to the coaxing power of love, to inoculate Samuel against the tender trap of love and to define the integrity of the self first. 

“Because when all you have is the memory of a thing […] all you can think about is how the thing is gone.” 

Faye attempts to help her son recover his life after their reunion. For Hill’s characters, their history becomes a toxic burden, memories an obsession; the past dominates and directs their present, and regret and blame warp their psychological health. 

“[W]ith Bishop, bonded in that way, pulsing against each other, Samuel, not exactly liking it but not hating it either, thinking the whole time that his mother knew exactly what he was doing and she disapproved.” 

The final scene between Bishop and Samuel is fraught with Freudian implications—Bishop offers himself sexually as a kind of surrogate for Bethany to reward Samuel for helping Bishop kill the schoolmaster who had long abused him. Just hours after his mother abandoned him, Samuel here begins his haunted life. 

“Because, listen, what I do in Elfscape matters. Like, the things I do affect the larger system. They change the world. You cannot say this about real life.” 

Pwnage’s interior struggle between his faux-life within the video game world and the real-time world that so disappoints him parallels Samuel’s own escape into the gaming world. For Samuel, frustrated novelist, socially awkward isolate, and professional fraud in the classroom, Pwnage’s logic is tempting. 

“I find this is also true in life. Any problems you face in a video game or in life is one of four things: an enemy, obstacle, puzzle, or trap. That’s it. Everyone you meet in life is one of those four things.” 

Interred within the game world of Elfscape, Pwnage justifies his social isolation using this simplistic template for understanding people—they are one thing or the other, this or that. The model momentarily engages Samuel who, as he explores his mother’s emotional life, comes to see Pwnage’s lack of humanity. 

“You think you’re better than us? The answer being, in fact, Yes […] Being better than everyone else was the whole point!” 

In Iowa, Faye is taunted by her friends jealous of her achievements in school. Faye’s restlessness, her yearning to engage a world wider than her Iowa childhood, centers on her learning not to apologize for being different, for daring to think unlike everyone else around her. She is better than the world of marriage and children her conservative culture tells her should be her dream. 

“Faye imagines what a Chicago winter would be like, and she imagines it would be better, and warmer, heated by all that traffic and movement and concrete and electricity, by all those hot human bodies.” 

Faye yearns to experience the world not defined by domesticity. Against her family’s dire warnings about life in the big city, Faye dreams of the energy and raw power of the city. Influenced by her reading of Allen Ginsberg, here her thoughts mimic the free rhythm and expansive form of Beat poetry. 

“In other words, you write stories that have nothing to do with your life or really anything you know anything about.” 

If The Nix is the narrative of a frustrated writer who taps at last into his creativity, here is the cause of Samuel’s stymied creativity. In college, he never uses his imagination to engage his own life, never steps into the dark world he knows—he fears such confrontation and refuses such honesty. 

“And so Patch Days were a unique horror because [Pwnage] was cut off from his source of wonder and beauty and surprise and was forced, sometimes for a whole day, to confront his normal everyday analog existence.” 

Pwnage wants to use those Tuesdays when Elfscape is down to address an array of his pressing life issues but finds himself counting the hours before he can return to the alternate reality of the video game. Samuel (and Pwnage for that matter) both come to experience the difficult transition to embrace the everyday. 

“Samuel only knew his mother had lost the struggle, and she sneered at all the symbols of her defeat—their big tan garage door, their patio deck, their bourgeois barbeque grill, their long secluded block brimming with happy, safe, bechildrened white people.” 

Samuel begins to understand the dimensions of his mother’s flight from domesticity during his awkward lunch with his father who evidences little interest in Samuel’s project to reconnect with his mother. He begins to see how certain his father was that Faye should have been content amid the grass-trimmed, tidy track homes of their suburban world. 

“The problem with mustard is that you can’t just chop it down. The seeds can last for years. It will always come back. You have to cut it out completely. You have to cut it out by the roots.” 

Although Alice, Faye’s ex-lover and current environmental advocate, explains her heroic campaign to preserve the Lake Michigan beachfront by controlling the wild mustard weeds, her advice comes to apply to Samuel’s own quest to confront his own past, to get to the root of his blame, his anger, and his regrets.  

“Real empathy is the actual corporeal feeling of someone else’s emotions, so that it’s experienced not only in the brain but also in the body, the body vibrating like a tuning fork to the sadness and suffering of another.” 

Ironically it is Sebastian, the underground journalist for whom Faye develops a hunger, who first introduces the theme of empathy, ironic because, at the time, Sebastian is hardly empathetic. Rather, he coolly works as a mole for the Chicago police department helping stir up student activists by writing entirely invented stories to stoke their outrage and by feeding information to the cops about the protesters. 

“I just want to be made to feel something.” 

In breaking up with her lover, the police officer Charlie Brown, Alice admits her infatuation with Faye. Alice expresses a yearning for love, to widen her understanding of the complex heart, to engage a broader emotional experience of sexuality than sordid sex with a creepy cop into domination and bondage.  

“By deepen your soul, I don’t mean you add to it, like adding a room on a house. The house has always had that room. But this is the first time you’ve gone in it.” 

At the center of the emotional recovery of both Samuel and Faye is this advice given by Ginsberg to his students on the eve of the student riots in Chicago. 

“That’s what I was to you […] I was your Nix. You loved me the most, and I was hurting you. You asked me once why I left you and your father. That’s why.”

Faye confesses to Samuel what he does not want to hear—she left for his own good, that she could never be the mother he needed her to be until she became the woman she wanted to be. 

“That is the Syllable, the universe’s deep bellow, like water, omnipresent, endless, perfect, it’s the touch of God in the loftiest places, the most exalted place, the eminent, the pinnacle, the highest, the eighth.” 

In the end, Samuel and Faye reject Ginsberg’s coaxing conception of saving the self by defining the self, by disconnecting—through chanting, through drugs, through poetry. In the end, they are elaborate dodges as toxic as Pwnage’s video game world. Reach in, Hill argues, but then reach out. 

“I’ll marry Henry and make him happy and forget about college and we’ll be normal, like everyone wants.”

When Faye makes a deal with the nisse she encounters while in lockup during the Chicago riots, she decides to return to a life of commonplace sacrifice closing in routine frustration. This dreary cliché life, far from heroic, is deeply flawed and sets up as inevitable the abandonment of her family some 20 years later. 

“I’m just saying there are some mysteries of the universe that ought to remain mysteries.” 

Here the nisse taunts Faye to accept the logic of boundaries between people, a rejection of empathy. Faye is considering a pilgrimage to her father’s Norwegian home to understand him better—what years later she finally does to complete her spiritual education. 

“But old Cronkite knows the danger of television is that people begin seeing the entire world through a single drop of water.”

The culture defined by television comes to accept a single perspective, a narrow lens of a single camera, as somehow truth enough. Television rejects what The Nix celebrates: the embracing, wide-screen panoramic vision of the novelist. 

“These old stories aren’t important anymore, Faye. Go back to your son.” 

Her own excavation into her past complete, the exorcism of her nisse at last done, Faye, far from home in Norway and talking to a half-sister she never knew she had, prepares to reengage the present, ready now to be the mother her son so desperately needs.