46 pages • 1 hour read
The Nix
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Symbols & Motifs
Motherhood
At the center of Hill’s novel is Faye’s struggle for, with, and against motherhood as she searches for her identity. In the late 1960s in the American heartland, Faye is expected to marry, have children, and find reward in running a house. Hill examines the critical decades in America when that template of ideal motherhood was openly questioned, defied, and redefined.
From her earliest experiences, Faye is restless. A century ago in the literature of domestic realism, Faye would be an easy character to condemn because she refuses to follow conventional wisdom about the identity of women in matters of family, love, marriage, and motherhood. By those terms, she is selfish: She defies her father to pursue her education; she twists the affections of a boy who loves her; she unapologetically experiments with her sexuality; she explores unconventional avenues of spiritual awareness; she finds no reward in attending to meals and loads of laundry; she abandons her only child only to live less than a half-hour away from him as he grows up attempting to understand the trauma of that abandonment; and she takes controversial and public stands on hot button issues of politics and civil rights.
When Faye returns to her son’s life, however, she offers the adult Samuel what she could not offer him when he was a child: her fullest self and her sincere interest in his well-being. When Faye returns to her roots in Norway, she understands that the need to explore the dimensions of the self had compelled her own father, and that the difficult and painful decisions made to explore the self (much as her mentor Allen Ginsberg cautioned her in college) always come with a price. Every self, especially one fully explored, is haunted by the pull of regret and lingering doubts over those abandoned in the process.
This insight at last prepares Faye, now well into her sixties, to be a mother: She could not give of herself until she understood what that self was. Faye understands her identity and is prepared to assume the role of daughter and mother, able now to refute the assumption that had for so long haunted her: “Because her great and constant fear all these years was that if anyone ever came to know all of her […] they would not find enough there to love” (731).
The Quest for Peace
The Nix depicts an America in chaos, pitched into conflict. No motif better reveals Hill’s paralleling of individual and culture than the quest for peace. In college, Faye struggles to tap into the spiritual peace that her mentor Allen Ginsberg describes; she struggles to understand how to “live in your breath” and how to chant your way into the “white pristine light of total awareness.” The vision of Zen Buddhism suggests how each principal character struggles to tap into serenity.
When every effort to define a relationship ends in betrayal or loss, Hill’s characters succumb to the disquiet of anger, self-doubt, depression, and loneliness. Like Faye who dutifully recites “om” but who nevertheless cannot find peace, Hill’s characters for most of the novel cannot let go of their negative emotions (clinging to them sometimes for years) and cannot find their way to genuine peace. Only in the last pages do Samuel and Faye understand the need to abandon their emotional baggage to embrace a world wider than anger, depression, guilt, and distrust.
If Samuel’s realization of peace marks the novel’s thematic climax, Hill uses as a backdrop to that narrative the chronicle of 50 years of American culture that is so divided and intent on distrust and hostility that the ending of the novel can seem ironic. Samuel restores his voice as an artist, and he earns his way back to a mother, but America lurches uncertainly through an ugly presidential election in which front-runner Governor Packer capitalizes on the divisions over gender, income, race, religion, and sexual identity. Bishop Fall dies in America’s prolonged campaign of occupation in Iraq, that is, more than a decade after 9/11, both bloody and futile; Bethany, Bishop’s twin sister, protests against the wealthy while engaged to one of Wall Street’s wealthiest financiers; and Alice fights a lonely campaign against reckless land developers to preserve the fragile ecosystems of Lake Michigan. Hill recreates the tempestuous 1960s when America witnessed the chaotic street birth of civil rights and the struggle to end an unpopular war. In his assessment of contemporary America, then, Hill suggests that we are a country dreaming of peace while at war with ourselves.
The Nix
A vivid memory that defines Faye centers on an afternoon barbeque in Iowa when neighbors discovered that Frank, Faye’s surly and distant father, had quietly built a bomb shelter (it was at the height of the Cold War) in the basement of the family’s home. Even as his neighbors share his barbeque, he assures them he has no intention of sharing the shelter should the time arrive.
Faye is puzzled by her father’s misanthropy. To explain, in a rare moment of tenderness, Frank shares with Faye a story from his childhood growing up in bleak coastal Norway, a gloomy wilderness world full of superstitions and spirits. His farm home was haunted, he admits matter-of-factly, by a nisse, or a nix, a quasi-benign ghost that had stayed in the basement and watched over the house. The young Faye is terrified and asks whether their home was haunted; her father says only, “Sometimes they’ll follow you your whole life” (282). That night Faye cannot sleep, worried there was a monster in the basement.
Faye is found the next morning, shivering and shaking in the basement. She cannot talk or see—and she has no memory how she got there or what happened. The doctors at the hospital conjecture she had some sort of panic attack, but Faye knew her father’s ghost had followed him to America and had attacked her: “Every life has a moment like this, a trauma that breaks you into brand new pieces. This was hers” (285).
The nix symbolizes the heavy burden of the past and the pull of the status quo. It suggests the sense of being cursed when any person decides to break free of the familiar, to leave home and family. On the eve of her departure for Chicago, Faye is again visited by the nix and wonders whether she should stay. As a haunting spirit, the nix suggests how difficult confronting that past and those decisions can be. Thus, the nix becomes a strategy for staying, for resisting the call of the world, to surrender to the familiar and never grow from it. Only later will Faye realize the terrible guilt her father carried with him for abandoning his own family back in Norway after the war—a guilt, or nix, that Faye has wrestled with 20 years since she abandoned Samuel. In prison after throwing rocks at Governor Packer, Faye will again be visited by the nix who will damn her for being a renegade mother. The closing exorcism of the nix from the Andreson-Anderson clan is achieved through honesty, awareness, and embracing rather than surrendering to family and home.
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