Nathan Hill, THE NIX

In the end, I liked this novel very much. But for the first two hundred pages or so, I felt like I was reading something between a satire and a realist novel; the characters--particularly the gamer who is overweight and divorced and lives on espresso and frozen burritos, and the entitled college student who plagiarizes her essay but then blames the professor and trumps up charges of feeling "unsafe" in his class to avoid responsibility--these feel so overblown that they verge on caricatures. But somewhere around the middle of the book, the tone changes a bit, and as some backstories emerge, other more rounded characters take over. This is one of those big-hearted, wide-ranging books, both in terms of time and place; and I would certainly try another by Hill.