46 pages • 1 hour read
The Nix
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Part 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2 Summary: “Ghosts of the Old Country”
It is summer, 1988. Young Samuel, an only child, is overly sensitive (“stupidly fragile,” [87] his mother thinks). He cries for long periods of time for no reason. He has few friends and spends most his time in his room pouring over his favorite adventure books, a series in which readers make decisions about how the story will unfold. His father, Henry, is seldom at home. He is an executive for an agro-industrial company that specializes in developing cutting-edge frozen meals.
Homelife is often tense. Whenever his parents edge toward arguments, Samuel seeks refuge in the nearby woods. There he meets another boy, Bishop Fall, a tough kid reputed to be a bully. Samuel is intimidated (the boy’s eyes seem “impenetrable and dead” [93]). Oddly, the two hit it off, Bishop promising to toughen Samuel up. Bishop is known primarily for being kicked out of a local prestigious Catholic academy. Bishop invites Samuel to visit the swanky home where the Fall family lives. There, Samuel first meets Bishop’s twin sister Bethany, who is practicing her violin. Samuel is immediately smitten: “He didn’t know this then, but this would become the template for beauty for the rest of his life” (103).
When the schoolyear begins, Samuel’s mother shares with the boy a folk story from her native Norway about a magical ghost named the Nix who would change into the shape of huge white horse and would fly lonely children on its back all the way to the craggy coastline where the horse would summarily drop the terrified children one by one onto the rocks below: “The things you love the most,” she cautions her young son, “will one day hurt you the worst” (115).
Samuel and Bishop continue their friendship. Samuel goes to the Hill house largely to listen to Bethany play the violin; indeed, he and his mother attend Bethany’s recital after which the Bethany and Samuel share an awkward kiss. Meanwhile, the two boys play video games and stage elaborate war games in the woods until Bishop shares with Samuel his plot to kill one of his neighbors, the headmaster at his former school. He gives Samuel no reason but shares his plan: dump deer poison into the headmaster’s hot tub and let the poison seep into his skin.
The morning his mother disappears, Bishop also disappears. When Samuel sees police cars ringed around the headmaster’s home, he understands what has happened. He runs to the woods where he meets Bishop who admits what he has done. Bishop reassures Samuel that it is good that his mother left: “Because you get to be a man now” (187). In an awkward moment, Bishop offers to have sex with Samuel—Bethany is his twin, after all: “You can pretend I’m her” (190) he tells a startled Samuel. The two couple, Samuel tapping into the “nervous twitching warmth” (190) of his first sexual experience.
Part 2 Analysis
Much of the narrative power in Part 2 is achieved through the vehicle of foreshadowing. The importance of the events in Part 2 only becomes clear to the reader much later in the narrative. For instance, we are initially put off by Faye’s treatment of her son. She seems a distant and hands-off mother, unable or unwilling to comfort a delicate son who seems born maladjusted, an introspective and lonely child born somehow already broken. The story she shares of the Nix seems inappropriate. What starts out as an enchanting fairy tale quickly spirals into a horrific story sure to haunt any impressionable child. It is only of course much later that we realize the emotional turmoil raging in Faye and how her story of the menacing Norwegian ghost is her subtle and indirect strategy to prepare her son for the departure only she knows about. Love, she cautions Samuel, hurts. It will take Samuel decades of painful emotional evolution to understand the love his mother was struggling to express.
Part 2 also introduces the charismatic Bishop, Samuel’s only friend. As with Faye, we are initially given to stereotype the boy—he is a bully, a prankster, a subversive, a thorn in the side of teachers and principals. When he is dispatched to the principal’s office for a paddling, he takes the feared punishment with heroic nonchalance. He returns to the classroom in triumph, never allowing the principal the upper hand. His elaborate war games in the woods mask a threatening and distinctly unsettling child-sociopath. His conniving vendetta against the schoolmaster who had driven from the local prep academy seems to us (and to Samuel) as brilliant as it is disturbing. The reality is that Bishop kills a man and in the process ropes Samuel in as accessory. As with Faye, we (and Samuel) learn only decades later the backstory of the headmaster and his molesting of Bishop.
Finally, we are given the object of Samuel’s obsession, the beautiful and gentle Bethany. Here we are given (as with Faye and Bishop) a two-dimensional cutout. Bethany is Samuel’s ideal, his first crush. His pilgrimage to the mall to secure a gift for Bethany recalls James Joyce’s classic coming-of-age story, “Araby.” In both cases, the girl in question is never allowed to become anything but a shadowy ideal, classically beautiful, anything but a flesh and blood girl. Like Samuel, we accept Bethany as an object of adoration, the sweet and harmless muse. Only later will we realize how much emotional and psychological damage girls in American culture endure because we objectify them and deny them the full measure of their humanity.
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