The Nix

Nathan HillFiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

Part 9

Part 10

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Part 9Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 9 Summary: “Revolution”

Here we are abruptly dropped into the tumultuous day that rocked the streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the nomination secure, frets in his hotel room over the smell of nearby slaughterhouses and the tincture of tear gas wafting up from the streets below; Allen Ginsberg sits cross-legged in the grass of Grant Park trying to stay calm while all around him agitated students begin to “scream and revolutionize” (607); CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite waxes philosophically over how little television cameras can actually show: “the danger of television is that people begin seeing the entire world through that single drop of water” (635). Meanwhile, Officer Charlie Brown, off duty and now badge-less, prowls the chaos looking for Alice but taking wild and random swings at protestors with his nightstick, cracking heads, “pretending to be Ernie Banks” (624).

As Faye sits for hours in county lockup for a bogus prostitution charge, she is visited by what she can only describe as a nix, a gnomish-looking troll that she assumes must be some dream who cruelly taunts her and the life choices she has made. Faye is unexpectedly sprung by Sebastian, whom she notes has a key for the jail cell. The two exit through an unsecured back door. In the streets is confusion—angry students armed with two by fours and rocks march through suffocating clouds of tear gas; anti-riot police in full regalia stand menacingly; helicopters buzz overhead; television cameras are everywhere.

In the chaos the two meet up with Alice. As heavy orange clouds of tear gas start rolling in, Sebastian understands it is time for them to run. It is as they are running, handkerchiefs across their faces, that Officer Brown spots them, or more specifically he spots Faye and charges after her. Faye, momentarily separated from Sebastian and Alice, is pinned by the crowds to the front windows of the Haymarket Bar. Just as Officer Brown catches up to her, the weight of the pressing crowd caves in the window. Faye wiggles free, but Officer Brown is caught, his back pierced by a large shard of glass. He cannot move. He feels only a penetrating, spreading cold. In an epiphanic moment, he repents his affair with Alice and his rage against Faye and understands that he deserves his paralysis.

Sebastian and Faye take refuge in a church off Michigan Avenue. There Sebastian explains his role in helping the police foment student unrest. Months earlier he had been given a choice: get sent to Vietnam or help spy on student organizations. Sebastian isn’t even his real name. Even as Faye processes this, no less than Ginsberg himself comes into the church and quietly, in a whisper, marries the two. In a deal she brokered with the nix, Faye understands that her time in Chicago is over; she will return to Iowa and dutifully marry Henry. However, on her last night in Chicago, she wants to be wild, reckless, sensual, and free: She and “Sebastian” make love in the darkened, empty church.

Part 9 Analysis

This Part, in which Hill recreates the student riots that disrupted the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, is the novel’s example of a kind of historical fiction, sometimes called docu-fiction or “faction” (a fusion of fact and fiction), first pioneered in the early-20th century by American Modernists, most notably John Dos Passos, and practiced more recently by Postmodernists such as Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, and most famously William Kennedy. In this part, Hill juxtaposes the novel’s most supranatural event: Faye’s encounter with the nix while in her jail cell and her decision to give in to the spirit’s taunts and return to Iowa. Thus, the section mingles fact and fiction, history and imagination, the real and the fabulous. It is a section defined by crossing boundaries and defying limits.

In this penultimate section, Hill as novelist sets his fictional characters, their encounters, and their life-changing decisions against and among real historic personages and against a real historic backdrop—the plot itself follows the real events and the actual locations near the Chicago convention center and follows the timeline of the actual riots. Alice and Charlie Brown and Sebastian and Faye allow us to move through the streets, smell the tear gas, hear the panicked screams, sweat in the late summer humidity, and feel the ugly press of the crowd.

Hill explores the psychologies and motivations of historic personages: Ginsberg, Cronkite, and Humphrey. They become more than two-dimensional historic figures. Historic events become fictionalized and become trigger points in Hill’s novel: The front bay windows of the Haymarket Bar along Michigan Avenue were collapsed by the street mobs during the height of the riots—but an off-duty cop named Charlie Brown was not paralyzed for life by a shard of the window. In fusing the historic and fictional, Hill creates a section of the novel that exemplifies the theme his characters, most notably Samuel and Faye, come to embrace in the novel’s closing chapter: the ability to see from another’s vantage point and to violate the boundaries that separate us. Hill now must test whether his fictional characters can experience that same leap out of the confines of the self: It is time for Samuel and Faye to deleverage, a banking term that indicates that a financially stressed company (or an individual, for that matter) has begun to work out of massive debts.