My suspicions about this title were first aroused by the press release, which included a blurb from The World According to Garp author, John Irving, who wrote, “Nathan Hill is the maestro of being terrific.” I figured he must’ve really hated it. A few pages in I started to think he might be jealous.
Hill is a master storyteller, weaving plots together effortlessly, bouncing between past and present, while all the while poking fun at the publishing industry and academia, two subjects in sore need of a good take down. The main story involves a college professor who was abandoned by his mother at an early age. Finding her means reconciling demons from his past. And while it’s a thoroughly enjoyable ride, there are a few too many neat ends for my taste. Professor Samuel Andersen’s publishing deal is about to expire when his mother attacks a presidential candidate. Since he hasn’t been able to finish his own book, his publisher gives him the option to write a sordid story about his mother, whom he hasn’t seen for a couple of decades. At last he has an outlet for his hatred of his mother. Up to this point in the story I was pretty hooked, especially when events rolled back to Andersen’s childhood and we got to meet another roster of interesting characters. When the story turned back to the professor on campus, things got problematic.
One of his students decides to build a case against him rather than deal with the consequences of her plagiarism. This was where a troubling theme emerged, namely, that females are shallow and self-serving. Unless they are a love object, in which case they are Perfect.
I suspected there would be some kind of softening on this stance over the course of the remaining 400 pages, but if it wasn’t assigned I might've put the book down at this stage. We already have enough Richard Fords and Chad Harbachs and Jonathan Franzens. I didn’t need to read on for this title to confirm that the gynobibliophobia of Francine Prose’s 1998 Harper’s Magazine article, “Scent of a Woman’s Ink,” is alive and well. Not even Donna Tartt would write an eight-page chapter comprised of a single paragraph.
Yes, I went there. Not (I tell myself) because the literary canon reveres the long tome, and female writers — already massively underrepresented in publishing — rarely push out a debut doorstop title such as this. But because the book, thanks to Hill’s relentless depictions of deplorable women, got my wheels spinning on gender.
But despite its 620 pages, nothing lasts overly long. Within these pages, there’s a whole video gaming scene that provides a tidy contrast for the Socratic dialogues that our college student is forced to think about, as well as overlays of the 1968 and 2008 political conventions. And if that’s not enough, another section is written (sort of) in a Choose Your Own Adventure style. (In this adventure, however, there is only one choice.)
The brightest spot is his Puck, in the form of one Guy Periwinkle. Periwinkle is the agent apparently, and also Andersen’s. This character gives Hill all sorts of opportunity to drop in zingers like this description of a Disney display as, “narcotized puppets doing the same wrote tasks over and over in what I'm sure Disney totally did not intend to be an accurate and precise vision of Third World labor."
Periwinkle makes pronouncements that begin, “it's no secret that…” and then take clever turns such as, “the Great American pastime is no longer baseball. Now it's sanctimony. "
But when he starts kneading a pop singer for material, it feels more than a little self-referential. The star “can’t be accused of selling out because that was her goal all along.” Aren’t all books that invoke Shakespeare and Plato angling for an award? It’s the literary equivalent of the beautiful actor donning a fake nose for Christmas-time releases.
By the end he has indeed covered every base — and I haven’t even gotten to the Norse metaphor in the title, itself a statement about truth and memory. Hill refers to an old Buddhist tale that depicts three blind men, sent to feel parts of an elephant. Each returns with an accurate report of their section, but no one can describe an elephant. By the third and final invocation of this story near the end, Andersen notes that all versions are, nonetheless, correct. “[T]here is not one true self hidden by many false ones. Rather there is one true self, hidden by many other true ones."
Besides the gender critique, this book suffers from something that will undoubtedly keep it on bestseller lists for some time. In the end, everything ties together. And I mean everything. I won’t spoil it for you, but you might skip the book and go right to the movie (and fake nose) that’s undoubtedly coming.
This article appears in Feb 9-16, 2017.