I've just finished part one of this book, which was mostly spent establishing the character of the son whose mother has been arrested for throwing gravel at a particularly obnoxious State Governer and with setting the tone for the novel.
It's the tone that I find both most engaging and most difficult to deal with.
This is a book that doesn't have a narrative thrust so much as a slow roll down a gradually steepening slope which instinct tells me is going to accelerate gradually but inexorably until it hits something, probably with a loud bang.
It's a book of scenes that are primarily focused on the interior monologue of the main character in a scene. None of these scenes is tackled quickly. They go on and on and as they go on things get worse and worse and you want ti to stop but you know that it won't and you read on anyway.
The scenes could be sketches in a standup comedy: their acutely observed and focus on behaviour that makes you cringe because it's as familiar as it is embarrassing. Except that where a stand-up comedian would be fast, using his or her wit to impale their subject in a flash of verbal steel, "The Nix" is slow and relentless, flaying the subject inch by bleeding, painful inch.
There's the scene where a character. in the process of falling into sleep after a disappointing day, rehearses all the reasons why, day after day, he fails to change his life, sort out his house, start his new diet, break free of his obsessive behaviour and be the person he wants to be. It's a mixture of hope, regret, self-reproach and self-deception that I'm sure most of us have experienced and it's there in all its unforgettable technicolour glory.
There's another scene, that goes on and on, in which our hero tells a student that he's failing her for plagiarism and finds himself on the receiving end of false argument after false argument about why he can't do this until his rage overtakes him and he says something that he shouldn't. This slow but predictable loss of control in the face of faux-outrage is als very familiar to me.
So, I know it's meant, probably, on some level, to be funny. The problem is that it is too true to be funny. Tragic. Masochistic. Nightmarish. Any of these words can be made to fit but not funny.
I feel as I do when I see those huge Ultra High Definition TV screens showing programs in the showrooms of electronics stores: overwhelmed and disoriented. The image I'm looking at is SO detailed and SO clear that it feels like a distortion. I NEVER see the real world with that level of clarity, so the television's accuracy is disquieting.
I'm going to continue with "The NIx" because I'm fascinated by the ability to sustain this hellish but familiar view of life and because I want to be there when the rate of roll of the plot reaches it highest velocity.
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