Author Interview: Nathan Hill
The author of THE NIX on well-read jerks, the limits to empathy, and Truth with a capital-T
Nathan Hill’s debut novel The Nix was published by Knopf on August 30th, and has garnered rave reviews from the New York Times, Washington Post, and NPR, among other outlets. With early blurbs from John Irving, Benjamin Percy, and Christina Baker Kline, starred reviews from Kirkus and Publisher’s Weekly, and a glowing profile of Hill in the New York Times, The Nix — and its author — is having a pretty phenomenal fall.
The accolades are heartily deserved. The Nix brims with heart and wit in equal measure, these parts combining to create a brilliantly introspective, politically sly, cracklingly funny story of family, friendship, and the choices we make or avoid. Like all great novels, The Nix is about a thousand things — motherhood, mythologies, and video games among them — but its aim is nothing less than life itself, both the span of an individual’s and the larger thing we’re all in together. Hill has tricks for days (a ten-page sentence, for example, and a Choose Your Own Adventure story), but his most impressive trick lies in bringing each of his singular characters to full-blooded, interconnected life. The eleven-year-old warmonger Bishop Fall, the delusional and righteous undergrad Laura Pottsdam, the uni-nomered Pwnage — since finishing The Nix, I’ve missed them all.
Fortunately, I got to revisit them in preparation for speaking with their author about his decade-long journey with this book, the way relationships are like tennis, and more. Nathan Hill reads at Literati on Tuesday, September 13th at 7pm.
Q: There’s a great passage near the book’s end about the story of the blind men and the elephant:
What Faye won’t understand and may never understand is that there is not one true self hidden by many false ones. Rather, there is one true self hidden by many other true ones… which was ultimately the problem with the blind men and the elephant. It wasn’t that they were blind — it’s that they stopped too quickly, and so never knew there was a larger truth to grasp.
Given the heft of The Nix — it clocks in at 620 phenomenal pages — I doubt anyone will accuse you of stopping too quickly! What was the larger truth (or truths, plural) you were trying to grasp in writing this work?
When I first began writing The Nix, I had in mind a really heavy-handed political novel about polarization in America. I was a younger guy then: late-twenties, politically aggressive. Then over the years my thinking changed and evolved and the book took on a new tone; it became a sort of argument against that type of thinking. I began wondering: Given my extraordinarily narrow point of view (white guy who grew up in the Midwest suburbs), what were the odds that I actually knew the capital-T Truth about American politics? Probably zero, I decided. So instead the book became about resisting snap judgments, about taking a step back, about considering other truths. The elephant story emerged as a useful metaphor for that.
Q: The Nix begins with an intriguing premise — the prologue is really exquisite — and then spends all those pages spinning out and away and around and back to it. Did you set out to write a big (and Big) novel, or did it mutate along the way? When did these incredible characters — Laura, Pwnage, Periwinkle — arrive, and did they demand all sorts of space once they did?
Hilariously, I thought the book would only be about 300–400 pages long. Back in 2008, when I finally constructed my first rough outline, I didn’t think I was writing a very long book. I certainly wasn’t intending to, anyway. But then steadily year-by-year the manuscript swelled. This actually caused me a lot of anxiety and distress. But characters had emerged that I wanted to spend more time with, Laura and Pwnage primarily among them. So I just gave myself permission to go where the book wanted to go, and the first draft ended up being 1,002 pages long. Which was ridiculous. I cut it by a couple hundred pages with the help of my agent and one of my writer friends. My editor helped me cut another couple hundred pages. It’s still a long book, of course, but my hope is that it reads quickly, that it doesn’t feel as long as it is.
Q: I heard Kazuo Ishiguro talk once about how he felt like he improved greatly as a writer when he began focusing less on the development, tension, wants, needs, etc. of characters as individuals and more on the development, tension, wants, needs, etc. of the relationships between those characters. There are a lot of shifting partnerships in The Nix, and I love the way your characters think about those partnerships. A young Samuel, for example, takes pride in his crush’s talent, “as if being in love with Bethany meant something important about him. As if he were rewarded for her accomplishments.” A young Faye, on the other hand, braces herself for her soon-to-be husband’s failures; she’s “angry that she feels responsible for him, accountable for his weaknesses as if they were her own.” I’m wondering if you agree with Ishiguro’s distinction, and how your characters’ conflicting ideas about relationships might have affected (or not!) your writing of them.
That’s a great quote. I think the way I imagine my characters’ relationships is that they’re sort of like equally matched tennis players. (I play a lot of competitive tennis, so it’s an easy simile for me to make.) In any given point in tennis, you may find yourself under pressure and on the defensive, but you can switch to offense so quickly, with just one properly angled shot. I like to think of my characters’ relationships this way: they’re facing off, wanting something from each other, sometimes on offense, sometimes on defense, sometimes switching from one to the other in an instant.
Q: Speaking of partnerships: can we talk about how you’re going to be in conversation with John Irving at an event next month? Are you freaking out? (I’d be freaking out.)
That guy has been so amazing! And we met only by chance. My wife and I just happened to take a vacation to Oslo, Norway, this past January, and John Irving just happened to be in Oslo that same week promoting the translation of his newest novel, and he and I just happened to have the same Norwegian publisher. So we met and had dinner and had a really great time. Afterwards, he asked to see an advance copy of The Nix, and ever since then he’s been a wonderful and incredibly generous advocate for the book. In other words, I got really, really lucky.
Q: In a scene set in 1968, Sebastian tells Faye about some Buddhist monks who’ve “solved the problem of human empathy.” (“I didn’t know that was a problem needing to be solved,” says Faye.) He distinguishes between the general understanding of empathy as relating to someone and “real empathy”:
“Real empathy is the actual corporeal feeling of someone else’s emotions, so that it’s experienced not only in the brain but also in the body, the body vibrating like a tuning fork to the sadness and suffering of another, as in, for example, you cry at the funerals of people you never even knew…”
Of course, I think that fiction is one of the best methods we have for attempting this kind of empathy — but I’m also wary of the way empathy has become such a buzzword in recent discourse, a catch-all solution, a vague stand-in. So I was delighted when Sebastian — full of shit as he is! — goes on to point out that feeling another person’s pain is not enough, that one must do something to alleviate that pain. Can I ask you how you think writing and reading relate to this conversation?
It’s true that reading fiction will work your empathy muscles. There’s all sorts of good nuerobiological research on that subject. And yet reading fiction is not guaranteed to turn you into, like, a good person. (Evidenced by the people I’ve met who are incredibly well-read and yet total jerks.) I guess what I was trying to get at in that section (which, as you point out, is refracted by Sebastian’s egotistical desire to seem smart to a girl he’s interested in) is that there are limits to empathy. Because if we really felt in a 100% way exactly what it feels like to be another person, it would be sort of shattering, wouldn’t it? How could we continue to hold on to our own personal truths when we suddenly had access to someone else’s? It’s like a twist on the old time-travel paradox: two truths can’t occupy the same space. We tend to erect walls around our most important beliefs about ourselves, and sometimes those become impenetrable.
Q: The Nix was a book ten years in the making: you lived with this book and these people for a decade. What’s it like now that they’ve moved out of your head and into the world? Does your writing mind feel vacated, cleansed, lonely, or are they still there, marveling (smugly, in Laura’s case; incredulously, in Samuel’s) at the warm reception they’re getting?
I was really happy to live with the book for so long. Even if the novel had never been published, it was worth writing, just for what it taught me. But now that it’s out in the world, I’m happy to let it go. During the writing of it, I found that I looked at the world filtered through the lens of the novel: anything I encountered, I’d think, “Can I use that in The Nix?” I haven’t thought that way in many months now. Now, I’m looking at the world through the lens of the next book.
Q: Yes! Can you tell us anything about it?
I’m only about 50 pages into some exploratory material, but I’m really eager to dive in. I think it will have something to do with marriage, authenticity, gentrification, hipness, and the ’90s. That’s all I can really say right now.
