The Nix

 

The Nix by Nathan Hill

Fiction

2016

Narrated by Ari Fliakos

Finished on December 2, 2025

Rating: 2/5 (Meh)

Publisher's Blurb:

It’s 2011, and Samuel Andresen-Anderson hasn’t seen his mother, Faye, in decades—not since she abandoned the family when he was a boy. Now she’s reappeared, having committed an absurd crime that electrifies the nightly news and inflames a politically divided country. The media paints Faye as a radical hippie with a sordid past, but as far as Samuel knows, his mother was an ordinary girl who married her high-school sweetheart. Which version of his mother is true? Two facts are certain: she’s facing some serious charges, and she needs Samuel’s help.

To save her, Samuel will have to embark on his own journey, uncovering long-buried secrets about the woman he thought he knew, secrets that stretch across generations and have their origin all the way back in Norway, home of the mysterious Nix. As he does so, Samuel will confront not only Faye’s losses but also his own lost love, and will relearn everything he thought he knew about his mother, and himself.

One Goodreads' reviewer said she read The Nix in one sitting. 732 pages! 

The audiobook is 21 hours and 42 minutes.

It took me 9 weeks to finish!

I let days go by without listening.

8 of my friends gave it either 4 or 5 stars.

The World of Warcraft-like gaming chapters drove me crazy.

One sentence (in a gaming chapter) was 14 pages in length. Listening to it made me want to scream, "Take a breath!"

Why didn't I quit?

Well, audiobooks have a way of taking hold of me unless the reader is just awful, and Ari Fliakos is not awful. As a matter of fact, his narration is probably the only reason why I continued listening.

And, there was one funny (albeit sad) line, so I was hoping for more like this:

Samuel thought how his father married to his mother was like a spoon married to a garbage disposal.

I listened to Wellness (aso read by Ari Fliakos) this past May. The book was ok, but I didn't really care for it. Since I had a copy of The Nix on my shelf, I decided to try a read/listen approach.

Suffice it to say, I don't plan to read anything else by Nathan Hill.

As a good friend recently wrote, "not every book is for every person."