The Nix

Faye has no intention of staying in London. Rather she moves through Heathrow and immediately boards a flight to Norway. She is heading to Hammerfest, her father’s hometown. She wants to know why he left Norway so abruptly. When she arrives, she is initially put off. The town is hardly as picturesque as her father made it sound in his stories. The entire journey now seems stupid: “Just a few more stupid choices in a life full of them” (673).

Her ruminations are interrupted, however, by the appearance of a beautiful white horse. Faye feels drawn to it. She sees a young woman walking toward her. The two chat—her name is Lillian. Faye confesses the reason for her trip, that she is looking for the Andresen farmhouse. In a stunning revelation, the woman says that she is Frank’s daughter, although she knows him as Fridtjof Andreson. Lillian leads Faye to a nearby farmhouse. Lillian tells Faye that Frank was a fisherman known for his strange power to sense troves of fish in the ocean. Frank fell in love with a waitress named Marthe. In the spring of 1940, even as rumors spread about the approach of Nazi troops, Marthe told Frank that she was pregnant. The two married and the child, Freya, was born. Later they had Lillian. Three years later, during the chaos of the Nazi retreat, Frank simply disappeared, abandoned his young family, emigrating to America. The family now despises him (his name has actually been erased from the family Bible). Faye is shaken by the story, seeing parallels now between her father’s story and hers. She is resolved now to return to America and to Samuel.

She sends a long email to Samuel telling him she is coming home. In addition, she admits that Samuel’s editor, Guy Periwinkle, was in fact her lover from the 1960s, Sebastian. Samuel realizes that Guy/Sebastian had been in control of their reunion. Faye had found out through the Internet that Samuel was a writer, or at least a promising writer. She contacted Sebastian and pointed out that he owed her. It was Sebastian who then had extended to Samuel the ridiculously generous contract on the slim evidence a single published short story. Guy/Sebastian had in fact orchestrated the reunion from the moment Faye threw the rocks at Governor Packer. Samuel is uncertain how to feel as he wanders the streets of New York. He wonders why life cannot be as easy as the narratives in those Choose Your Own Adventure books he loved as a child. He meets with Bethany and asks for her help—she agrees, and the two begin a new phase of their long relationship, one uncomplicated by his old obsessions but based rather on mutual care and respect, in short, a friendship.

Approached by the Packer campaign (again at the direction of Guy Periwinkle) to serve as its crime czar in return for making the case against Faye disappear, Judge Charlie Brown agrees. Faye is off the hook. Meanwhile, the tell-all book about Faye appears under Samuel’s name (although it had been ghostwritten by the Packer campaign). Samuel knows what he must do, and he leaves for Iowa. He understands that gathering materials for the book has gifted him with the empathy, understanding, and forgiveness to begin his own novel about his mother’s childhood—his writer’s block at last disappearing. He now realizes the error in Pwnage’s template about people being puzzles or traps, obstacles or enemies: “[I]f you really look under the hood of someone’s life, you will find something familiar” (728).

His mother meanwhile has also returned to Iowa to nurse her dying father. She sits by her father’s bed, and they share stories of Norway. She knows that every now and then the fog of his dementia clears and he knows his daughter has come home. As the novel ends, Faye, certain now her debts are paid, is determined to build a strong and lasting relationship with her son: “It makes her hope that someday soon they’ll be two people encountering each other sincerely, without the disfigurement of their history, and minus all her immutable mistakes” (731).