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.
Prologue-Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
The brief Prologue recalls the heartbreaking moment in late summer, 1988, when Samuel, age 11, growing up in rural Iowa, realizes his mother has left. He struggles to understand why he was not “a child worth sticking around for” (3). Her decision was hardly sudden, the mother spent months quietly packing her things. She moved away “imperceptibly, slowly, bit by bit” (5).
Part 1 Summary: “The Packer Attacker”
Part 1 moves to late summer, 2011. The media is in a frenzy over an attack against a flame-throwing conservative presidential candidate, Wyoming governor Sheldon Packer. An unidentified woman, white-haired and sixty-ish, had been videotaped tossing a handful of rocks at Packer during a Chicago rally while calling him a “pig” (12). The woman was arrested and identified as Faye, a teacher’s aide at a local elementary school. Reporters quickly unearth that she had been a radical in the 1960s, arrested for prostitution during the riots surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
Across town, Samuel, a 30-something literary professor at a small university, wastes another long night in his campus office lost within the shadowy realm of a video game called World of Elfscape. As a character named Dodger, he helps slay dragons and kill orcs. Once hailed as a promising young writer, he had received an enormous advance to complete his first novel—10 years later, he has yet to start it. Samuel now teaches literature to indifferent students. As he plays Elfscape, Samuel considers the waste of his life and what his childhood sweetheart, Bethany, now an accomplished violinist, would think of him.
The next morning, Samuel confronts a spoiled and shallow student, Laura Pottsdam, for baldly plagiarizing a paper on Hamlet. The confrontation is unpleasant. The girl refuses to acknowledge wrongdoing (she coolly compares plagiarism to outsourcing). Samuel threatens to pursue the matter, and Laura takes this as a threat to her finishing college. She redirects the conversation first by accusing Samuel of pressuring her to sleep with him and then by claiming to have a learning disability. Neither is true. Frustrated, Samuel says, “You’re just not very smart” (55). She is incensed and vows to have Samuel fired.
A phone call the next day from a man who identifies himself as the attorney representing Samuel’s mother marks the first time Samuel is aware of the Packer Attacker. He is stunned to find out his long-lost mother has been living about 30 miles from him. The lawyer wants Samuel to write a letter to the judge, a character reference, in support of his mother: “Why should I help her?” (64). When Samuel meets with his editor, Guy Periwinkle, impatient over the long delay in a manuscript, Samuel is given a chance to avoid being sued. Periwinkle is interested in the Packer Attacker and believes a quick-strike book that would demonize the rouge terrorist would find an audience. Reluctantly, Samuel tells him the terrorist is his mother and that he could write the book. Samuel arranges with the lawyer to meet his mother at the lawyer’s office.
Prologue-Part 1 Analysis
Part 1 is dominated by the emerging psychological portrait of Samuel. Samuel comes to us initially in a full-blown existential crisis, a man-child lost in adulthood. In his thirties, this could be a midlife crisis, except that Samuel has never had an actual life: “Why am I here?” (25) he asks himself (we learn later that as a child Samuel wallowed in teary self-pity). He has no friends. He seldom talks with his father. He feels distance and a snarky ironic compassion for his dimwitted students. He lives alone in a life uncomplicated by attachments. His quasi-life is defined and shaped by a nagging sense of failure and a persistent feeling of blame—his anger against his estranged mother is turned inward (what did he do to make leaving him so easy?), his frustration over the novel he cannot bring himself even to start, and his deep regret over the loss of Bethany, the only girl who ever moved him emotionally. The only triumph he enjoys now comes from his nightly heroics in a game world. Inevitably that sense of empowerment and achievement is short-lived: “[I]mmediately after, even if they win the fight, he always feels this crashing disappointment because all the treasure they’ve won is fake treasure” (24).
Hill, however, is interested in placing his fictional characters against a broad cultural, political, and historic backdrop. The trigger event that leads to Faye and Samuel’s reunion is a noisy and boisterous political rally. Part 1, in addition to introducing the psychology of Samuel, expands the range of Hill’s narrative by introducing the presidential candidacy of a far-right Wyoming governor who in his extreme (and incendiary) political platform—his anti-women’s rights, anti-immigrant rights, anti-poor, anti-Washington establishment rhetoric—emboldens a “rabid,” “evangelical” (8) constituency that bears resemblance to the wave of nationalist zealotry and white middle-class anger behind the emergence of the political maverick Donald Trump.
When Faye’s rock-throwing attack is captured on video and becomes a social media sensation, Hill explores the impact of that kind of hasty and shallow journalism (later Hill explores the gravitas and philosophical angst of television news a generation earlier through the vehicle of iconic news anchor Walter Cronkite). The product of such a shallow culture so easily goaded by imagery is inevitably the stubbornly dim Laura Pottsdam, whose casual plagiarism and her unapologetic (and entirely fabricated) defense of her dishonesty, reveals Hill’s indictment of the Millennials. Later, Hill will draw comparisons between Millennials drifting indifferently through college in the 2010s and the militant and committed social activists who were in college during the 1960s.
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