The Top Five of 2017: And the Winner Is...

I was into the big burgers this year. My #3, The Castle Cross… by Kia Corthron came in at around 800 pages. #2 The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne was 580, and #1, The Nix by Nathan Hill, is 620 pages. Do I get cosmic points for my high calorie reading diet?

So it looks like this is a poster you could buy and hang on your wall if you like bookish representations of big burgers. There's art for everyone, I guess. (on Pinterest, from Lexiconograph)

The Nix is a debut novel, and with that, this book isn’t perfect. It could be much leaner, certainly. But man, this novel hit me at a time that I needed it. That’s one thing that I’ve noticed about making a list of books that I “like.” Books can fill a need – a need to escape, a need to understand, a need to laugh. “Liking” can mean something different at different moments. This past year, I needed to place the feelings I had about our society into some sort of framework. And the best way that I can sum up my feelings about our ongoing series of awful political things is utter confusion about how I could have misunderstood people so profoundly. I clung, despite my increasing age, despite lots of historical evidence to the contrary, to the idea that people have been aspiring to a larger “common good,” even if they disagreed about the finer points of what that idea means. My idealism sat right there. I thought that when push came to shove, most people would be on the side of justice.

And how crazy was that? Of course people actively promote injustice, all the time and in all ways, political and personal. The best moments of #3 Kia Corthron’s The Castle Cross... involve the relationships between black children and white children. And spoiler alert! Even with their friends, those white characters fell back into their power. At the end of the day, those relationships were unequal.

The Nix is a book about failed idealism.  The book jacket paints the story as one of a son trying to understand the mother who abandoned him after she resurfaces in a political scandal. That relationship, the one between parent and child, is so often one where idealism gets its first shake. But The Nix is more than just a family drama. At every turn, the characters have to deal with their disappointment with what they think the world is like compared to what it is really like. Higher education isn’t all about deep inquiry and building ideas. People who say they are going to protect you can be liars. The real world can be way more disappointing than the virtual one. Leaders of social movements for justice can be motivated by completely different principles. And YOU can disappoint yourself, through inaction or misstep or misplaced faith. 

So far, I bet you’re thinking that this book is a giant downer. But believe it or not, this story is funny (there’s a student/professor section in particular that made me feel like I did when I read Richard Russo’s Straight Man for the first time). I read The Nix in the summer, while sitting in the sun. It was my beach book – a beach book for troubled times.

Here’s a New York Times story about Nathan Hill, in which he discusses his World of Warcraft gaming addiction and mentions that the editing process cut 400 pages from this novel. It turns out this IS the lean version.