One of your main characters, Samuel, is obsessed with an online game called World of Elfscape. But the more I researched, the more I realized: The people who organized 1968 nominated a pig for president because they thought it would get headlines. In my naïveté, I’d thought the ’60s were authentic. Two thousand and four was a very mediated protest. The media’s bar for contentious conventions has lowered. Writing about the 1968 Chicago riot must have helped you keep this summer’s weird conventions in perspective. Throw in some formal pyrotechnics reminiscent of Don DeLillo and you’ve got sky-high expectations for the 600-plus-page novel. Forty-year-old Nathan Hill’s whirligig of personal and political history, out August 30, spins around an estranged mother and son whose lives intersect with two convention protests: the Chicago Democratic Convention–cum–riot of 1968 and the tamer RNC affair of 2004. Coinciding with the weirdest election in living memory is this fall’s most ambitious first-time literary effort, The Nix.
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