Come What May: Nathan Hill and the Art of Embracing Uncertainty
I tend to reread books when I’m going through a period of uncertainty or because I plan to write about them. Both were true this winter when I returned to Nathan Hill’s novels, The Nix (2016) and Wellness (2023). In October, I left the company I’d worked at for seven years to join a startup, which filled me with anxiety. Years ago, I started but couldn’t finish an essay about The Nix, and I wanted to try again. As I wrapped myself up in these gorgeous, sweeping, tender stories, I discovered how much they have to say about that nagging feeling that had brought me back to them in the first place: uncertainty.
To understand how these novels portray and comment upon uncertainty, it is helpful to start with what else they have in common. On the face of it, they’re quite different. The Nix is about Samuel, a college English teacher who finds himself at the center of a national controversy when his estranged mother, Faye, attacks a presidential candidate. The novel is overtly political, time-traveling between the economic collapse of 2008–2009 and the Vietnam War protests of the late 1960s. Wellness, meanwhile, is more internal, more local. It’s the story of Jack and Elizabeth, who fell in love as college students in Chicago and who now, twenty years later, face marital issues as they raise their eight-year-old son, Toby.
Despite these differences, their plots frequently overlap. The male protagonist of each is a guy in his thirties who teaches an undervalued subject in the humanities. He’s in love with exactly one woman for the entire novel, and said woman has perfect posture, an artifact of her regimented childhood. Everyone is running from something: parents leave their kids, children flee their parents, and boys of all ages hide in video games. Capitalism cameos as a man in a suit.
Thematically, Wellness can be thought of as an evolution of its predecessor. At the end of The Nix, Samuel tells his love interest, Bethany, that he’s ready to start over: “I want to burn it all down.” In Wellness, the metaphor of cleansing fire turns literal. Jack’s family lives in the Flint Hills of Kansas, where his dad burns the prairie grass to replenish the soil. Jack and Elizabeth’s so-called forever home goes up in flames when the developer burns it down for the insurance money, giving them the fresh start they need.
Another theme that develops across the novels is the notion that people have multiple true selves. As a college student swept up in the antiwar protests, Faye grapples with her identity:
What Faye won’t understand and may never understand is that there is not one true self hidden by many false ones. Rather, there is one true self hidden by many other true ones. […] For Faye, the larger truth, the thing that holds up every important episode in her life like a beam holding up a house is this: Faye is the one who flees. […] And the more she believes she has only one true self, the more she flees to find it. […] Will she ever understand this? Who knows. Seeing ourselves clearly is the project of a lifetime.
This passage seeds a fuller articulation in Wellness. Elizabeth understands “how many people a single person could, over a lifetime, be. She’d been so many different Elizabeths… And the weird thing was: All of these selves felt true at the time.” Jack, meanwhile, feels trapped between two versions of himself: “the attractive version of himself in the future, and the blundering version of himself from the past.” Despite achieving much of what he wanted — marrying Elizabeth, turning an early successful art career into a teaching job, and starting a family — he comes to regret the cloying, contradictory man he has become. Like Faye, he cannot shake the impossible burden of becoming his one true self.
Together, these themes build toward the importance of embracing uncertainty. We have many true selves, both simultaneously and throughout our lives. Which self, or selves, should we be now? How can we transition among them without betraying our sense of identity? When, if ever, should we burn it all down? And how can we abide such persistent, existential questions?
Critics have praised Hill for his incisive satirization of modern obsessions. Of these obsessions — which include technology, self-improvement, and attention, to name a few — perhaps none is more salient than our obsession with being right. Like the subject of DFW’s famous “This is Water” commencement address, this learned behavior is so omnipresent as to be invisible. Hill’s novels chase it into the foreground. Consider Samuel reading Choose Your Own Adventure books as a kid. He’d leave his thumb as a placeholder in case he picked the “wrong” path — but where’s the adventure in that? As an adult, he wishes life worked that way: he’d love a do-over with Bethany. When someone tells him shocking things about his mother’s past, he wonders which version of her is true. But there’s no right way through a Choose Your Own Adventure book, do-overs don’t exist, and his mom was both people. We cannot always be right.
Yet, in this age of empiricism, we feel like we have to be. The internet made being wrong in public a sin while drowning us in a sea of lies. Samuel’s publisher, the bespoke suit-wearing champion of capitalism, Guy Periwinkle, offers a characteristically cynical view of what this pressure has done to us:
In case you haven’t noticed, the world has pretty much given up on the Enlightenment idea of piecing together the truth based on observed data. Reality is too complicated and scary for that. Instead, it’s way easier to ignore all data that doesn’t fit your preconceptions and believe all data that does. I believe what I believe, and you believe what you believe, and we’ll agree to disagree. It’s liberal tolerance meets dark ages denialism. It’s very hip right now.
Periwinkle’s assessment is more accurate than Samuel, or any of us, would care to admit. One section of Wellness, titled “A Drama in Seven Algorithms,” recounts Jack’s wildly frustrating Facebook “friendship” with his father. In the span of a few years, they devolve from exchanging friendly messages, to vehemently disagreeing on the validity of conspiracy theories, to ceasing communication altogether. Their need to be right outweighs their need to have a relationship with each other.
One of the things that Wellness does almost alarmingly well is characterize how it feels to be wrong. Even the most fervently held beliefs get debunked. As a kid, Jack occasionally finds a dead coyote hanging by its hind legs on his family’s barbed wire fence, apparently caught trying to jump over it. Decades later, after his father’s funeral, his mom tells him the truth. His father would set traps and hang the dead coyotes on the fence to scare away the others, which he’d do early in the morning to spare Jack the cruelty. Jack’s wrongness both crushes and enlarges him. He comes to feel a new tenderness and appreciation for his father. “It was,” he realizes, “a massive failure of empathy, these last few years of bickering, a massive failure of generosity.” He’d stopped talking to his father at precisely the moment his father needed him most — when he was dying of cancer, although Jack didn’t know it at the time — out of a sense of self-righteousness.
An unpleasant thing happened while I was reading the Facebook section: I became a little self-righteous, too. As a software engineer, I tense up whenever a non-technical person utters (and, let’s face it, frequently misuses) the word “algorithm.” Although Hill researches the everliving hell out of things — to write this section, he read hundreds of pages of Facebook patent applications — I nevertheless worried that he’d get something embarrassingly wrong. And, sure enough, he did: he fell for the common myth that Facebook uses the smartphone camera to spy on the user. I knew that this myth had been disproven, so I read with disappointment and self-righteousness — that is, until two pages later, when Hill makes it clear that this belief is not his own but something Jack believed at the time. I was relieved that Hill hadn’t actually stumbled, but I also felt hoodwinked. Like Jack, like Lawrence, like a coyote who ends up on the fence, I’d taken the bait.
Jack and Lawrence’s haphazard online pursuit of truth leads them away from each other and deeper into their respective echo chambers. Certainly, though, better avenues to verifiable truths exist. As a researcher of the placebo effect, Elizabeth seems unlikely to fall for conspiracy theories and half-truths. Even her parenting style — especially her parenting style — is heavily influenced by scientific research. At one point, she administers psychology’s famous marshmallow test on Toby: he can eat one treat now, or two treats in fifteen minutes. The test purportedly measures a child’s understanding of delayed gratification, which is correlated with success later in life. When Toby repeatedly chooses to eat the one treat now, Elizabeth spirals. It’s the latest evidence of her failed parenting, she believes, until she learns that the test was flawed. As it turns out, the real predictor of children’s success in the study was their family’s income level — kids from poorer families didn’t want to risk losing a sure thing. When Elizabeth asks Toby about it, she is shocked to learn that he both knew it was a test and that he tried to pass it by doing exactly the “wrong” thing: treats were typically forbidden, so he thought that eating one would be better than eating two.
Elizabeth reflects that “this kind of thing was happening, it seemed, all the time: things that had once been deep truths were now upended, exposed, discredited, and in such obvious ways.” For her, the end of the novel unfurls in a cascade of wrongness. She was wrong about the marshmallow test and the reason Toby “failed” it, wrong about being perceived by him as a terrible parent, wrong about why she fell in love with Jack, wrong about the existence of soulmates, and, most importantly, wrong about needing to be certain of anything in the first place:
Were they destined for each other? Was he even right for her? She did not know. She wasn’t sure of anything right now. […] But she knew she loved him right now. […] And maybe that was good enough. Maybe you didn’t have to be certain of anything.
What these novels model is believing in something without getting mired in the false security of certainty. They remind us that we will be wrong, and that being wrong is more than OK — it’s an opportunity to learn something and a reminder that we are alive. While these novels strand their protagonists in personal and professional crises, readers are left with the sense that things will turn out well for them because they have made progress in resisting, or at least identifying, the certainties that have held them back.
Ugh, but how unsatisfying, to reduce fourteen hundred pages of glorious prose to something so trite! We don’t read novels for neatly packaged morals — that’s what fables are for. We read novels because they’re messy. We want to swim in a pond in the rain, a Dostoevskian soup.
Let us go, then, where the mess is. Hill’s messiest character is undoubtedly Pwnage. Known only by his online persona, which refers to a meme for “owning” someone in a video game, Pwnage basically exists to demonstrate what would happen to Samuel if he were to let himself go completely. They play a game called World of Elfscape together online; they have never met in real life. Elfscape is a fictionalized version of World of Warcraft, a popular medieval-themed game where you band together with other people to perform quests and vanquish foes. It’s the kind of thing you’d be embarrassed to admit playing as an adult, which Hill knows from experience. When he moved to New York after completing his MFA, his laptop — with three years of writing — got stolen, and in the ensuing years he developed an addiction to World of Warcraft.
Samuel is mortified that he spends forty–plus hours a week playing Elfscape, but at least he mostly keeps his life together. Pwnage, however, plays sixteen hours a day and controls six different avatars simultaneously using a fifteen-button gaming mouse and six-monitor setup. He lost his job, his wife divorced him, he subsists on microwave burritos while eggplants rot in the fridge, and he’s never going to finish that kitchen renovation, nor the detective novel that he thinks will win his ex-wife back. Every night he goes to bed bleary-eyed, promising himself that tomorrow will be different. And while he occasionally summons a burst of discipline — in one scene, he drags himself to the organic grocery store, which ends horribly — he ultimately loses to his addiction. There’s unfortunately no way to do justice to the fourteen-page sentence (!!) in which Pwnage finally succumbs to a pulmonary embolism because, as the sentence concludes, “today was the day he was quitting Elfscape, and since his mind would not let him do it, his body had to do it for him.”
Look: I am not alone in finding Pwnage irresistible. Last year a friend told me that the aforementioned fourteen-page sentence lives in her head, as she put it, rent-free. During a reading of Wellness, someone had the gall, bless them, to ask Hill about Pwnage even though he’s from The Nix. Hill didn’t mind — Pwnage is his favorite character from the novel. We all have our reasons. Mine is that I’ve loved video games since middle school, when my dad brought home a new gaming console called an Xbox and a new first-person shooter game called Halo.
This would be a very different essay indeed were I to adequately unpack my subsequent and lifelong addiction to the Halo franchise. Suffice it to say that I have played all of the games for hundreds of hours each, read many of the novels (yes, novels) and written 40,000 words of my own, and watched countless videos of my favorite Halo e-sports athlete (hi, Frosty). Weirdly, though, in the broader context of video game addiction, I would hardly register as an addict. These days I play five to ten hours a week, and only with close friends. But a spade’s a spade. Sometimes video games cause problems for me and I have to get rid of them; I’ve sold my Xbox three times. I dredge this up because although I’ve never approached Pwnage levels of dysfunction, I absolutely understand how someone could.
And so does Samuel. The name Elfscape is a not-so-subtle nod to why he, like many of us, plays in the first place: to escape. The virtual world offers comforting certainties that the real world often cannot. When he logs on, he gets the feeling of “coming home at the end of a long day to someone who’s glad you’re back.” And yet, escaping into a video game is not only temporary: it’s ineffective. Even during an epic raid, in which his elf guild finally slays their deadliest dragon yet, intrusive thoughts creep in: “Why am I here? […] What is the point? What am I doing? What would Bethany think?” Later, when he finally quits the game, Samuel realizes he played not because it was fun or provided an escape, but because it was easy:
On any given day, it was so much easier to settle in front of his computer than to face his stagnant life, to actually face in a real way the hole inside him that his mother left when she abandoned him, and if you make the easy choice every day, then it becomes a pattern, and your patterns become your life.
What I find compelling about Samuel and Pwnage’s addiction, beyond its obvious relatability, is how it complicates what we tend to believe about certainty and uncertainty. Samuel knows he’s a talented writer and a good teacher burdened with lousy students, knows his mom is a terrible person, knows he’s lost Bethany forever. Pwnage knows why his ex-wife left him, knows what the people at the organic grocery store think of him, knows how to get his life together. The more they lose faith in these false narratives, the more tightly they cling to them, and the further they fall into their addiction. They’re encumbered not by uncertainty but by their unwillingness to confront it.
I recently left my new job at the startup. I hadn’t been sleeping well, hadn’t felt motivated, hadn’t felt like myself. The longer I was there, the more I had the notion that I should leave my decade-long tech career to write full-time, at least temporarily. This was a small voice in the back of my head, speaking with not much conviction. I decided to listen.
Faye’s wisdom at the end of The Nix is that “any real change should make you feel, at first, afraid.” And I am afraid: of embarrassing myself, of draining my savings, of not being good enough, of not having the requisite work ethic, of not finding readers, and, most urgently, of not knowing what to write about. Hill’s novels proved bizarrely instrumental to my decision to leave. They showed me that certainty, not uncertainty, is what we should be leery of. They reminded me how it feels to get bowled over by language, to need to read with a pen. They gave me something to write about.
Compared to the trials of Samuel and Faye, Jack and Elizabeth, leaving a job for a passion feels small. Nothing is getting burned down. But I sense, as Faye does, pain ahead. I’m as uncertain as I’ve ever been. Whatever happens next, it started here.
