46 pages • 1 hour read
Nathan HillThe Nix
Nathan HillFiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 5 Summary: “A Body for Each of Us”
We return to Summer, 2011. Samuel’s editor, Guy Periwinkle, calls him from Disney World. Guy relishes to the immersive interactive theme park with its relentlessly update message that the world is sunnier than we suspect “How can a world that produces something as amazing as this be such a shitty world?” (335). Periwinkle presses Samuel to get the book into print to capitalize on his mother’s notoriety. He is as well curious about Samuel’s decade-long writer’ block.
Samuel narrates the story of his block as a Choose Your Own Adventure narrative in which the character Samuel chooses one step at a time to become entangled in his infatuation with Bethany. Bethany, a violinist, attends Julliard in New York City while Samuel matriculates at the University of Illinois as a creative writing major. Samuel endures her departure, seeing in this the kind of tragic experience necessary to become a writer: “It gives you a rich inner life fantasizing about all the ways you might not have screwed it up” (344).
However, his apprentice stories avoid directly investigating his obsession. Samuel’s decidedly lurid story that recreates the poisoning of a school headmaster, however, intrigues his professor. It is only in writing the story that Samuel, searching for motivation for his character, realizes that Bishop must have been molested by the headmaster. The revelation stuns him. The professor sends the story to a New York publisher, Guy Periwinkle, and on the strength of it, Samuel is offered a lucrative contract to produce a novel. Some three years later, Samuel, unable to work with any conviction on the manuscript, receives an email from Bethany, now an accomplished violinist in New York, to come see her. The urgency convinces Samuel to go in hopes of reviving their relationship. When he gets to Bethany’s apartment, however, he is greeted by Peter Atkinson, Bethany’s fiancée, a successful banker.
Bethany, however, is part of the Occupy Wall Street movement that daily protests in the streets of the city’s financial district both the immorality of wealth distribution in America and the pointlessness of America’s occupation of Iraq. Samuel agrees to attend the group’s protest march. It is then that Bethany tells Samuel that her brother, who enlisted shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, had been killed in Iraq. She confirms Samuel’s suspicion that Bishop was molested by the headmaster. Even as Bethany shows Samuel her stunning engagement ring, she confesses that the proposal was, at best, “interesting” (378). As they share first one and then another bottle of wine, she confesses how little enthusiasm she has for the wedding and quietly asks Samuel, “Can you help me not marry Peter?” (381).
They kiss, but before anything happens, Bethany retrieves a sealed letter for Samuel her brother sent shortly before he was killed. The letter is short. In it, Bishop first acknowledges that if Samuel is reading this, then he has been killed in action: “This is my dying wish. The only thing I ask of you. For her sake, for my sake, please stay away from my sister” (405). Confused, Samuel departs.
Part 5 Analysis
In sharing the backstory of Samuel’s career-long writer’s block (he has published nothing in more than 10 years, the initial book contract offered after Guy Periwinkle read a single story from one of Samuel’s creative writing classes), Part 5 is defined by how the story of Samuel’s tragi-comic obsession with his childhood crush is shared with us. If The Nix is an exploration of the devastating impact of parent abandonment as well as a broad survey of 50 years of American culture, it is as well a novel about writing a novel.
Part 5 foregrounds storytelling itself. The adolescent crush that Samuel feels for Bethany and his inability, well into adulthood, to forget that impact are both, after all, the clichés of coming-of-age stories. Bethany’s decision to opt into a convenient and stable marriage to a man she does not particularly love is as well the standard premise of thousands of romances. Hill, however, sets Samuel’s story as one of the Choose Your Own Adventure stories from Samuel’s childhood. Hill tells us at the beginning, “This is no ordinary story. In this story, the outcome depends on the decisions you make” (339). Indeed, the section is set in a type font different from the rest of the novel. We cannot forget or ignore that we are being told the story. The story and its drama are secondary and kept at a distance. The lengthy section is not told in past tense; rather it is told in the present tense traditionally associated with fictional characters.
Throughout the section the narrative includes us, directly addresses us as “you.” We cannot simply sympathize (or condemn) Samuel for pining for his childhood crush well into adulthood because the story of that love is presented in chapters that move Samuel the character into a difficult position in which he must make a decision. The format invites us into the decision process by asking essentially at the end of each segment, reader, what would you do? The closing moment in the section brings us to when Samuel reads Bishop’s letter and must decide whether to make love with Bethany or leave. The section ends without telling us what Samuel did: “It’s time. Make a decision. Which door do you choose?” (405). The narrative strategy, however, has pulled us in and made Samuel’s and our decision inevitable.
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