Nathan Hill and His Vision of Modern Reality

He Chose His Own Adventure

Nathan Hill was born on December 27, 1975, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His childhood was connected with the American Midwest. Hill’s paternal grandparents were farmers who grew corn and soybeans and raised cattle. His maternal ancestors emigrated from Norway several generations ago, first settling in Minnesota and then in eastern Iowa near the Mississippi River. The connection with Norway has long been lost: the only thing Hill knows is the mention of the town of Hammerfest, where his great-great-grandfather came from, according to his great-grandmother. Hill said he used this piece of knowledge as a way to «complete» the family history where there were no more facts. This is what he eventually did in his debut novel «The Nøkk».

The family was constantly moving: Hill’s father was building a career in the Kmart retail chain, and each promotion almost always meant a new city. Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas — the geography of his childhood consisted of temporary homes and schools that didn’t have time to become familiar. Later, Hill recalled that there weren’t many books in the house, but his parents encouraged his увлечение with the «Choose Your Own Adventure» series, which was read to shreds.

His first attempts at writing were connected with this reading. In one interview, Hill described in detail how, as a child, he wrote his own «Choose Your Own Adventure» story called «The Castle with No Way Out». He illustrated it himself, received a school award for it, and his teacher read the text aloud to the whole class. Later, Hill found this notebook in boxes with his childhood things at his parents’ place. He said the plot was primitive, the choices were formal, and the characters often died, but the feeling of inventing a world on his own was an important experience for him. By the way, Hill later reflected this episode of his life in «The Nøkk» as well.

Nathan Hill. Screenshot from Radio France

After school, Nathan entered the University of Iowa. Initially, he planned to study biomedical engineering, but quite quickly realized that he was interested in something else: the opportunity to write and read texts as part of university courses. He changed his major to English and journalism, worked as a reporter for the university newspaper The Daily Iowan, and graduated in 1999. At that time, he studied under the writer Sarah Levin, who later remembered him as a focused student who paid close attention to the «mechanics of the sentence» and the structure of the text at the micro level.

After graduation, Hill worked as a journalist at The Gazette in Cedar Rapids for some time. He later associated this period with the development of research skills and the ability to work with facts, which later came in handy in his fiction. Two years later, Nathan entered the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. During his studies, he published stories in literary journals such as The Iowa Review, Agni, and The Gettysburg Review. It was then, he said, that he first encountered serious disappointment: his collection of stories was rejected by 38 literary agents. Later, Hill formulated it this way: he wrote trying to make an impression, but the result was «completely unexpressive text».

Unwelcoming New York and Gaming Addiction

In the early 2000s, Hill moved to New York, like many graduates of writing programs. He lived in Queens, shared a house with eleven roommates, and continued to write stories, hoping to get into prestigious magazines and find an agent. In the summer of 2004, a month after moving, during the transition from temporary housing in Queens to a permanent apartment, his car was broken into and robbed. Books, clothes, and a computer storing all the texts Nathan had written were stolen. «The computer with everything I wrote during my graduate studies — three years of work and all the backup disks — just disappeared. Everything was gone», Nathan said. Hill later called this episode the moment when his literary career «almost ended before it even began».

It was after this theft, amid a feeling of professional dead end, that the online game World of Warcraft appeared in his life. According to Hill, the idea was suggested by a friend who wanted to distract him and keep in touch at the same time. «A friend said, ‘Let’s play World of Warcraft together.’ I had never heard of it, but I started playing», Hill recalled.

Gradually, the game took a significant place in his daily life. Nathan said that World of Warcraft became a space where he succeeded. «I saw that the game worked as a zone where I could be successful while the rest of my life was falling apart», the writer said. He listed the reasons: stolen things, lack of publications, doubts about his writing future, low-paying job at a non-profit organization, and financial instability in New York. «Everything was pretty lousy, but at least I could be very good at this game», Hill said.

Over time, the hobby grew into a regular and intensive practice. Nathan began spending 20 to 40 hours a week in the game, participating in raids, clearing dungeons, and fighting game opponents. He admitted that he started playing «because he needed a break from reality when the rest of his life was in chaos» and that he reached a point where he refused to meet with friends, explaining it with in-game obligations: «I told my friends I couldn’t come because I had a raid», the writer recalled.

A few years later, his attitude towards the game changed. Hill began to notice that World of Warcraft was taking up a lot of his time. He said: «I realized I was spending much more time playing a video game than writing. It was taking me away from real life». The decision was abrupt: Nathan quit the game immediately and has hardly returned to online gaming since then. However, later Hill emphasized the duality of this experience. He noted that the game helped him get through a difficult period but at the same time interfered with his work on texts. Hill used the game as a way to avoid writing out of fear of failure: he spent time on something «where he knew he couldn’t fail». The realization of this became the reason for his final abandonment of World of Warcraft.

And then Nathan took an even more radical step: he decided to leave New York and start anew — this time in Florida. Nathan said that the texts he wrote in New York didn’t satisfy him: he was focused on editors, magazine parties, and career signals rather than the work itself. He admitted that he was writing «for the wrong reasons» and wasn’t striving to say something significant. Hill perceived leaving the literary center as a necessary distance from other people’s expectations and constant comparisons with other authors.

His personal experience of studying and writing was accompanied by external influences. In college, Hill discovered the postmodern American writer Donald Barthelme — an author who showed him that humor was possible in serious literature. Later, during his graduate studies, the most important discovery was Virginia Woolf and her way of conveying the inner life of characters. Hill himself repeatedly formulated his task as an attempt to combine Barthelme’s «playfulness and absurdity» with Woolf’s «deep internal focus», emphasizing that literature is the only tool that allows you to get so close to someone else’s consciousness.

In one of the interviews, Nathan recalled the advice he received during creative writing classes: the teacher told him that he could write, but everyone had little time, so it made sense to engage in what was really important. Hill noted that he returns to these words every time he sits down to write.

«Everyone has a body»

«The Nokk» (2016) is Nathan Hill's debut novel, which took the writer about 10 years to complete. He started writing the text in 2004 and finished it only by the mid-2010s. Hill himself emphasized that he had not originally planned to write a large novel; he had no clear plan either in terms of form or volume. «It happened almost by accident. The novel started as a short story; I thought I was writing a short story,» the writer said in an interview.

The starting point was the scene of an anti-war march during the Republican National Convention in 2004 in New York. Hill recalled seeing a column of people carrying empty coffins covered with American flags — a symbol of those killed in Iraq. «The first phrase I wrote was: «Everyone has a body,» Nathan said. This line determined the working title of the novel for many years — «A Body for Each of Us», which remained until the manuscript was sent to publishers.

In the early stages, Hill did not understand where the text was going: «I didn’t know what I was doing. For a long time I had a different ending, and even longer I had no ending at all.» At that time, Nathan had just graduated from a master's program and, by his own admission, was writing with a view to a career. He called the early version of the novel a «widget» — a tool that was supposed to help him get publications, the attention of editors and an academic job. «And it’s no wonder that the texts I wrote then were very bad,» Hill stated.

Gradually, the short story began to grow. Nathan said that he first wrote about a man participating in the 2004 protests, then decided to add a parallel with the events of 1968 in Chicago, which were constantly talked about in the news. «But I didn’t know anything at all about what happened in Chicago in 1968, so I started to figure it out, and it seemed incredibly interesting to me,» the writer explained. In the process, a line about the mother appeared, and it, according to Hill, became central: «I suddenly realized that I was much more interested in the mother and started to follow her.»

Over time, the text turned into a ramified novel in which different time layers and themes were intertwined. The book gradually transformed from a family drama about an alienated mother and son into a large-scale narrative about politics, the university environment, online games, Norwegian mythology, social networks, the Occupy Wall Street protests and the counterculture of the 1960s. Hill himself said that new lines emerged slowly, through «very small decisions», and the book, in his words, «seemed to take them inside itself.»

The work progressed unevenly. At some point, Hill stopped sending texts to agents and editors and stopped showing the manuscript to colleagues. In an interview, Nathan said that he had to «press the mute button» and abandon external voices, even if they had been useful before. «There comes a moment when you need to do something idiosyncratic that belongs only to you,» the writer noted. For a long time, his wife remained the only reader, to whom he regularly read out new fragments.

The writing process was accompanied by extensive research. According to Hill, he first wrote, then went for a long time to collect materials, returned to the text again and again lost direction. A critic from The New York Times quoted his definition of this stage as «three years of writing, six years of research and wandering.» At some point, the manuscript grew to 1002 pages. «It was a very sloppy, disorganized and inefficient way to write a novel,» Hill admitted.

After completing the first draft, a long stage of cuts followed. Hill said that he removed about four hundred pages: side lines that led nowhere disappeared, as well as fragments that he himself called «throat clearing» — texts needed only to get to what was really important. The first major editing took about a year, then he worked on the novel with an agent and an editor for another year.

The title «The Nokk» appeared at the very end. Hill said that the decision was made literally a day before sending the manuscript to publishers. Nathan explained that «A Body for Each of Us» no longer corresponded to what the novel had turned into. The new title referred to Scandinavian folklore: a nokk is a water spirit— оборотень who can appear in the form of a white horse and lure children. Hill said that this figure turned out to be in tune with the destinies of the characters and the general logic of the book.

«A heavy political novel»

The plot of the novel revolves around Samuel Andersen-Anderson, a failed writer and literature teacher in the suburbs of Chicago. He had long given up trying to write a book and spent most of his time in the online game «World of Elves», where he feels successful. His life changes when he learns that his mother, who disappeared from the family when he was eleven, has been arrested for attacking a politician. Television reports bring back her past — participation in radical movements of the 1960s, arrests, life in Chicago. Samuel tries to reconstruct his mother’s history and understand the reasons for her disappearance, involving acquaintances from the gaming world.

The novel unfolds non-linearly, jumping between 1968 and 2011, between the Midwest, New York, Chicago and Norway. Protests of 1968, the Republican Convention of 2004 and the Occupy Wall Street movement appear in it in turn. Hill said that he did not set himself the task of writing a «heavy political novel.» «My first impulse was to write a very frontal political book, and then I realized that it was just crude,» he said. According to him, over time, it became more important for him «to show people a good time» rather than to prove theses.

After the release of «The Nokk», the novel was published in more than two dozen countries. Publication rights were sold on a competitive basis, and Hill temporarily left teaching and went on an international book tour. However, in numerous interviews, he emphasized that the main result of this ten-year work for him was not the success of the book, but a change in his attitude to writing. «I stopped seeing the novel as something that should advance my career,» Nathan said, adding that he had learned to see writing as a process that makes sense in itself.

The novel «The Nokk», from its release in 2016, was perceived as a work that simultaneously deals with personal history and the modern American context. Critics noted in the book «social satire aimed at the academic environment, politics, the publishing market and social networks.» Reviewers pointed to «echoes of Pynchon» in the way Hill builds this system of targets. At the same time, the author himself repeatedly emphasized that he was not guided by the desire to write a political novel, but by interest in how people experience the clash with historical and ideological processes on a personal level.

According to him, the main work on the novel fell on 2008–2013 — the period when the United States constantly talked about unprecedented political polarization. It was at this moment, as Hill emphasized, that the myth of the nokk — a water spirit from Scandinavian folklore — turned out to be key for him. According to legend, the nokk can appear in the form of a horse or in the image of a loved one who will inevitably cause pain. «The idea that what you love most can one day hurt you the most seemed very accurate to me,» Nathan said. He explained that this principle works equally well for different characters in the novel: for Samuel, who is undermined by his mother’s disappearance; for the violinist Bethany, whose body is literally deformed by the instrument; for a workaholic deceived by the company; for a gamer betrayed by the game; for a student whose life is determined by devices that give her meaning.

This logic also applies to the economic background of the novel. Hill linked it to the experience of the Great Recession, emphasizing that the crisis became possible precisely because many things were considered «so safe that they supposedly carried no risk»: mortgage-backed securities, pension savings, stable employment. In this sense, he said, the story of a mother and son in «The Nokk» turns out to be just a private case of a larger failure happening «across the country.»

At the same time, Hill deliberately avoided direct political assessments. He recalled that when he started writing the novel in 2004, he was in a state of extreme political aggression and anger after the re-election of George W. Bush. «I lived in a kind of bubble,» he said, «we all agreed with each other and were echo chambers.» Working on the book became for Nathan an attempt to go beyond this bubble and see a variety of points of view, including those with which he does not agree. That is why he abandoned the initial impulse to «didactically explain who is right and who is wrong» and instead focused on the feelings of people «facing politics and history on a human, emotional level.»

This attitude influenced the way protests are presented in the novel. The book features two generations of anti-war protests — Chicago in 1968 and New York in 2004. Hill noted that while researching the protests of the 1960s, he discovered the same degree of mediatization that he had previously considered a sign of modernity. He cited the example of nominating a pig for president at protests in Chicago in the 20th century for the sake of press attention and admitted: «I realized that I was wrong on many points and began to retreat step by step until the book became more about the characters than about politics.» He called this shift fundamentally important for the novel.

In one of the interviews, Hill said that he sought to give the reader a diverse experience, especially given the volume of the book. «If I ask the reader to read a 600-page novel and the whole book is сплошная тоска, that’s just bad manners,» he explained, adding that he deliberately looked for humor, especially in the chapters devoted to 2011 and modern America, which he called «in many ways absolutely absurd.» This humor, according to the author, was not an end in itself, but stemmed from his own view of reality.

The theme of information overload and the effect of «instant judgments» occupies a separate place in the novel. Hill linked this to his own experience as a journalist, when he constantly faced the impossibility of fitting a complex story into a limited format. He emphasized that behind any thirty-second video there is material for hundreds of pages, and this discrepancy interested him: «As soon as you open the hood of someone’s life, you find much more there,» the writer said. In the book, this results in criticism of the culture of instant likes and dislikes, against which the novel builds an argument.

A separate layer of «The Nokk» is related to the academic environment and the character of Laura Potsdam. Hill said that this character is a «composite image» from his teaching experience. He described students who cheat, do not read assignments, are constantly distracted by their phones and ask utilitarian questions like «how will reading Hamlet be useful to me in real life.» At the same time, Nathan noted that over time he began to treat Laura more sympathetically, realizing that her generation grew up in conditions of recession and constant anxiety about the future: «Today’s students are desperately afraid of not finding a job and not moving out from their parents.» This understanding, he said, changed the very logic of the character.

No less important for the novel is the line of video games and the character of Pavner. Hill explained that a ten-page chapter consisting of one sentence was born from the desire to convey the feeling of elusive time and anxiety. «I wanted to textually reproduce his claustrophobia and anxiety,» he said, describing the moment when the game becomes the only source of meaning in the hero’s life.

The figure of Faye, Samuel’s mother, initially conceived as repulsive, was, according to Hill, «very fascinating to work with» because «it contained many contradictions.» Faye is a person living two lives at once — real and imaginary, inhabited by options for an unfulfilled future. Nathan said that this gap between lived and imagined life is to some extent inherent in almost all people, but in Faye’s case it takes extreme forms.

Critics greeted the novel as a large-scale and at the same time well-balanced statement. Barnes & Noble included «The Nokk» in the list of the best new novels of summer 2016, Booklist called it «an engaging and strikingly timely story,» and John Irving said it was an «ambitious novel without pretentiousness,» combining the tragic and the comic in a «Dickensian range.»

Publisher: «Fantom Press»
Translated from English by Yulia Poleshchuk
Number of pages: 688
Year: 2025
Age rating: 18+