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."

Wellness

 

Wellness by Nathan Hill

Fiction

Narrated by Ari Fliakos

2023

Finished on May 20, 2025

Rating: 3/5 (OK)

Publisher's Blurb:

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Nix, a witty and poignant new novel about marriage, middle age, tech-obsessed health culture and the bonds that keep people together.

When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the '90s, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in Chicago's thriving underground art scene with an appreciative kindred spirit. Fast forward twenty years to married life, and alongside the challenges of parenting, they encounter cults disguised as mindfulness support groups, polyamorous would-be suitors, Facebook wars and something called Love Potion Number Nine. For the first time, Jack and Elizabeth struggle to recognize one another, and the no-longer-youthful dreamers are forced to face their demons, from unfulfilled career ambitions to painful childhood memories of their own dysfunctional families. In the process, Jack and Elizabeth must undertake separate, personal excavations, or risk losing the best thing in their lives: each other.

Moving from the gritty '90s Chicago art scene to a suburbia of detox diets and home renovation hysteria, Wellness mines the absurdities of modern technology and modern love to reveal profound, startling truths about intimacy and connection. In the follow-up to Hill's electric debut, Wellness reimagines the love story with a healthy dose of insight, irony, and heart.

I seem to be in a rut of disappointing reads. It took me over three weeks to finish listening to Wellness, which is just shy of 19 hours in length. I loved the opening chapters, enthralled by Ari Fliakos' superb narration of Nathan Hill's gorgeous prose. But the momentum began to fade somewhere around the halfway mark. The segments about Jack's father and his ignorance of Facebook's algorithms pulled me back into the story, but it wasn't long before Jack and Elizabeth's navel-gazing had my mind wandering. But I can stick with a mediocre book if the audio narrator is one that I enjoy. Had I not been listening to the audio, I would have tossed the 600+ novel across the room. Having said that, I have a print edition of The Nix, Hill's debut novel, which I was planning to read later this summer. Now I wonder if I should bother.

I received a complimentary copy from Libro.fm. All thoughts and opinions are my own.