Wellness

by Nathan Hill, Justina Bandol (Traducator)

O perspectivă modernă asupra iubirii și căsniciei

Jack și Elizabeth se cunosc de dinainte să se fi întâlnit vreodată. Clădirile în care locuiesc în Chicago sunt despărțite de o alee întunecată, iar ei își petrec adesea serile observând în secret ce face celălalt. Așa începe povestea lor neobișnuit de obișnuită despre un el și o ea care se îndrăgostesc și se căsătoresc. Autorul însă merge dincolo de „și au trăit fericiți până la adânci bătrâneți” urmărind cu înțelegere, ironie și umor evoluția lor după 20 de ani de căsnicie.

În locul celor doi tineri visători, descoperim două personaje înstrăinate care își caută sensul într-o lume tot mai complicată, unde conversațiile se transformă în războaie pe Facebook, grupurile de suport ascund secte periculoase, iar cunoscuții le propun relații poliamoroase.

Acum, Jack și Elizabeth trebuie să-și confrunte demonii, ambițiile profesionale neîmplinite și traumele din copilărie, sau riscă să piardă cel mai important lucru din viețile lor: relația care îi leagă.

Genres: Fiction, Audiobook, Book Club, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Romance, Historical Fiction

640 pages, Paperback

First published September 26, 2023

About the author

Nathan Hill's short fiction has appeared in many literary journals, including The Iowa Review, AGNI, The Gettysburg Review, and Fiction, where he was awarded the annual Fiction Prize. A native Iowan, he lives with his wife in Naples, Florida.

Connect on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/nathanreads

Connect on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/nathanhillauthor

Official Website: http://www.nathanhill.net

Reviews

[Jordan (Jordy’s Book Club) · Rating 5 out of 5]

QUICK TAKE: it's an instant classic. I couldn't put it down, and I loved every second of it. That's all.

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m gobsmacked, and have remained so from page one to the last word. An epic, sweeping, transformative, colossal (adverbs and adjectives are just not enough!) door-stopper of a book, a windswept and fiery, burning satire of a 1990s marriage between a modern couple in Chicago, Jack and Elizabeth. There’s a preoccupation with eternal love, health and well-being, the potent obsession with fitness and strength. How past years’ discarded identities generate the self of today, afraid or unafraid of tomorrow.

Jack is a photographer, but his pictures arise from the chemicals and fixatives in the darkroom, not from the camera. Elizabeth is a scientist who peddles placebos to rejuvenate passion. WELLNESS spans twenty years forward, but reaches back, to their childhoods, shifting back and forth in time. Or should I say Time, since Time is essential here, it subverts the narrative and liquidates expectations. It’s about everything, sort of like Infinite Jest is about everything, and it’s a parabola, like Gravity's Rainbow is a parabola, but it’s neither the former or latter. The prose is gracefully placed on the page, despite the legion of info (critics would say info-dumping) that the text provides. Hill straddles the line between saying and pontificating, which may cause some readers to recoil.

Hill has created his own radical, non-starry-eyed romance, a 90s mosaic of Gen X ideology, as Jack and Elizabeth assemble and inhabit their identities via several and ongoing selves throughout the years, to someday evolve or diminish into what they are now. The stakes, at first, seem fairly mellow. I mean, the worst that I thought could happen is a break-up. Hooooold on, about those stakes. Hill drove them hard through my heart. It’s heavy, at times I felt my throat closing up. This isn’t a book I could read non-stop, I had to take breaks to release the tension, otherwise I would explode!

It's also about perception and paradox, connections and loneliness, greed and loss, manipulation and madness. The narrative winds through a buffet of subjects, and love is the polestar, and the threat. Love at first sight is endorsed and dismantled, but never abandoned. There’s so much breadth, from artists to investors, groupthink to prairie fires, children to ancestors, “forever homes,” the World Wide Web, health, sickness, and cures, social media, absence--and the faith in metaphysics, that our souls can travel at night.

Paradox: “…that was a pre-globalized world, a pre-9/11 world, a pre-housing bubble world…when they all sort of understood implicitly that however much they resented and resisted the mass economy, they would also have little trouble eventually finding a job and livelihood within it.”

Thematically rich in artful contradictions, as a new friend earnestly says to Elizabeth: “He practices the art of nothingness, while you practice the science of nothingness. You’re both obsessed with it: nothingness, emptiness, blankness, absence. Don’t you find that really meaningful?”

And this touched my heart, a poignant guidance from the scientist that mentored Elizabeth:

“Believe what you believe…but believe gently. Believe compassionately. Believe with curiosity. Believe with humility. And don’t trust the arrogance of certainty.”

This book is so deep, vast, mind-bending, and provocative, I just can’t do it justice. It’s written for all of us, all the Time, wherever you are, visible and manifest.

[Rita · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a burrito that should have been a taco.

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wellness is Nathan Hill’s sophomore effort, after the well written, often funny The Nix. This time, Hill has focused his attention on modern married life, that stage when the bloom is long off the rose. Jack and Elizabeth have been married for twenty years, after meeting as college students in Chicago. “All they wanted back then was to eliminate the space between them. And now, here they were twenty years later, putting it back.”
The book covers a lot of different topics. A lot! Internet research, health trackers and fitness programs, divorce, open marriage, conspiracy theories, art, cults. In fact, in the Bibliography, Hill writes “One of the great joys of writing a book is that it gives me permission to explore the various odd things that grab my attention, to dive deeply into those subjects that puzzle, amuse or amaze me. This book has many such deep dives.” He’s not kidding.
It’s a very cynical book. It makes fun of all the new age BS out there. It took me back to my working days when Hill made fun of the woowoo corporate speak. I can remember being told to “bond and interface”. Hill loves to play with and make fun of language. Elizabeth majored in psychology and her job included clinical studies. So, there are lots of psychological topics and studies thrown in. There’s also a whole chapter on the history of Elizabeth’s family and how they made their money, which I found enlightening (but I’m a history nerd) and humorous but definitely did nothing to advance the story about Elizabeth and Jack.
At heart, the story is about belief, faith and hope. It’s the stories we tell ourselves that form our beliefs and impact how we act. Whether the story is based on fact makes no difference. It’s the whole idea behind the placebo effect that Elizabeth studies over and over. “The key is to keep persisting inside your fantasy until the fantasy becomes a fact.”
The book could definitely have been condensed. At times it rambled and it was not consistently interesting or evenly paced. I’m not sure I needed all those pages describing the algorithms that Google and Facebook use (although it was an education). But it works much more than it falters. And it reads surprisingly fast for a 600+ page book.
This book cries out to be a book club selection. It will make you think, ask questions, look inward and outward. And laugh. It will definitely make you laugh. I have a feeling that it’s a book that is going to evoke a lot of strong emotions, one way or the other.
My thanks to Netgalley and Knopf for an advance copy of this book.

[Melanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

The sigh heard around the world.

You know the saying. The one brandished like a sword in every creative writing class under the sun. Show. Don’t tell. Give us sensory details, descriptions, actions, propulsive events, trains of thought. Do not summarize, explain, expose, justify. And please, do not lecture.

(Most importantly, do not give us a detailed bibliography at the end of a work of fiction. That is just the nail in the coffin of any work of art.)

There were two books living inside “Wellness”.
One was dead on arrival for me and the other one tried for 624 pages to salvage its own stubborn little beating heart. Like a premature baby breathing in a glass bubble.

The first book tried to tell me everything, E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G, about how our minds work, how we love, how we attach, how we grow apart, how we parent, how we see, how we don’t see, how we take care of ourselves, how we socialize, how we believe what we believe, etc. Characters became vehicles for the retelling of said bibliography. Why does this passage feel so familiar? Ah yes, it’s because Esther Perel is the one who explained all this. In a TED talk.

The second book though. That one stole my heart. That one didn’t try to tell me anything. That one just was. Or desperately tried to be. And Nathan Hill is genius when he lets his characters simply live their lives, when his writing is descriptive and elegiac and tender and cinematic and raw. Nathan Hill is genius when he creates characters who are so intricately rendered that you are filled with gratitude and life-giving empathy. Evelyn was that character for me. She is the baby heart fluttering at the center of “Wellness”, appearing and disappearing like a ghost, the sum of everything, and of the book, that could have been.

[Sonja Arlow · Rating 3 out of 5]

No one can accuse this author of being a man of few words.

Excessive overthinking, poking fun at health trackers, diets, supplements, sexual experimentation, and Facebook conspiracy theories makes large sections of the book feel unnecessary.

I like segues in a book if it adds colour to the story (ie Elizabeth’s family history and Jack’s sister) but there are swaths of chapters that could have been reduced to 1 or 2 pages and still delivered the intended result.

In-between all of the above you are introduced to Jack and Elizabeth. How they met, fell in love and 20 years later struggle with a midlife crisis about their relationship and themselves.

There is a REALLY good story here if you are prepared to wade through a lot of wafting.

[Buried_in_Fiction · Rating 1 out of 5]

The struggle was real trying to finish this book. It was SO long and I honestly found it to be quite boring. I have a tough time stopping a book once I start because I’m stubborn… and this made me feel like a little kid having to sit down and do homework. I will say that the author himself is talented and that there were some clever ideas within the book… but overall, it just wasn’t for me.

[Marina Fernandez · Rating 2 out of 5]

This author's editor hates him or was terrified of him. This book needed a red pen and the letter X to cut so much of the unnecessary yet incredibly painful to endure portions.

[Canadian Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

What happens behind closed doors…when they are thrown wide open.

This is an exploration into the circadian rhythm of a marriage; of a family. The peaks and the valleys; the past childhood traumas that shaped the characters into who they became.

Hill takes on a journey within this 20 year relationship. Elizabeth, with a PhD in psychology, constantly comparing studies, conducting experiments within her business and her own relationships; constantly on the search for improving every aspect of life. Jack, the artist and pleaser, always fearing rejection. We meet them early on in the exciting days of dating to the consistency and monotony of a long relationship on the verge of a crisis.

Themes of abandonment, anxiety, guilt, the impact social media has on mental health, redemption and acceptance.

This did drag in one area when we are taken into a deep dive on Facebook algorithms. 40 pages -Yawn. The structure also was a little messy for me: was I reading about -child Jack or adult Jack? Only took a few sentences but enough to break the momentum. Perhaps this was Hill’s own social experiment for the reader.

However, despite my criticisms, overall this was a well written story on human psychology. I don’t need an algorithm to indicate whether I will read Hill again. It’s a most definite YES.
4⭐️

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly unlikely I will ever write a book this poignant, surprising, haunting, and emotionally astute. A beautifully written exploration of marriage, how our relationships change as we age, and the ways our inabilities to forgive ourselves diminish us. Also? Great satire of the "wellness" industries. Yes, I loved this novel.

[Candi · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Basically, I’m studying the whole human condition. Coming at it from every possible angle.”

This statement, proclaimed by Elizabeth to Jack upon first meeting during their Chicago college years, made me laugh. Fast forward through a twenty-year relationship and marriage and to the end of the book. I suddenly realized that Nathan Hill had done almost exactly that, studied the whole human condition, in this sweeping novel. He covers a lot of ground in these pages, and I was, for the most part, totally up for the ride. Marriage, parenting, city versus suburban versus rural life, capitalism, consumerism, the World Wide Web, Facebook and social media, psychology, placebos, monogamy, art and photography, and childhood traumas. These are among the themes Hill manages to tackle with great skill and humor. He backs everything up with a ton of research which he references at the end of the book.

The heart of the novel, however, is this marriage between Jack and Elizabeth and whether it’s something sustainable.

“It seemed that happiness spiked around age twenty, spiked again around age sixty, but bottomed out in between, which was where Jack and Elizabeth now found themselves, at the bottom of that curve, in midlife, a period that was notable not for its well-publicized “crisis” (actually a pretty rare phenomenon – only 10 percent of people reported having one) but for its slow ebb into a quiet and often befuddling restlessness and dissatisfaction.”

It's interesting to read this from the point of view of how a relationship unfolds just as the World Wide Web was unleashed and became an everyday part of our lives. When Jack and Elizabeth first met, the web was in its infant years. Jack really didn’t know a thing about it. Over the next twenty years, along with the development of various social media platforms, it seeps into every aspect of our daily living. We have become surrounded by stories. Our own stories and those stories that are told to us. We are inundated with advice and options. Elizabeth runs a company called Wellness, a place that specializes in “placebo” treatments. I admire the way Hill ties this into his idea of how we are shaped by those stories told by ourselves and others.

“Elizabeth wondered if her and Jack’s story wasn’t in fact just another highly embellished placebo, just a fiction they both believed because of how good and special it made them feel. And maybe all love was like that, a placebo, and maybe every marriage ceremony was part of that placebo’s elaborate ornamentation, its therapeutic context.”

One thing I should mention is the structure of the novel. Hill takes us fluidly back and forth in time between Jack and Elizabeth’s current situation, their early years, and each individual childhood. We even visited three generations of Elizabeth’s family, the self-made, wealthy Augustines. I’m not sure we needed the depth of those Augustine sections, but I was pleasantly surprised by how much I truly enjoyed those detours! Hill goes on that rare list of authors who can seamlessly make those transitions in such a way that it greatly enhances the characterization of his protagonists. Besides Jack and Elizabeth, there are some nicely developed supporting characters as well. Honestly, Nathan Hill excels at this part and when he gets into the nitty gritty of his people, that’s when I was most engaged. I could have read an entire novel about Jack’s childhood alone! Gosh, I really did love what Hill did with him. Just read this one sentence, that says it all:

“Loneliness, it seems, holds him like a buttonhole.”

There’s a whole lot more I could say about this novel, but I’ve invested a lot of time already reading this hefty work. I also spent some meaningful time discussing this with my two savvy buddy readers and gained even more insight there. I’m very glad I read this. I will, however, admit to getting worn out for a couple of reasons. First, the extra digressions – particularly the section describing the algorithms of Facebook, a platform I tend to avoid when possible. Second, every now and then I felt the deep diving into the marriage and parenting of this couple was a bit too much for me. I’m a champion of succinct writing when it comes to topics like this and feel like points can be made just as effectively with a little less. Sometimes “less” has a deeper impact on this reader. But that’s a matter of personal taste. I certainly wouldn’t steer anyone away from this, if they aren’t hesitant to read something with such depth and breadth. Hill is one smart cookie and his prose is top notch!

For more keen observations, check out what my fellow readers had to say: Antoinette’s review and Lisa’s review

I’ll finish with this little piece I’m going to walk away with as a personal reminder:

“Maybe it was like Dr. Sanborne said: certainty was just a story the mind created to defend itself against the pain of living. Which meant, almost by definition, that certainty was a way to avoid living. You could choose to be certain, or you could choose to be alive.”

[Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

I felt underwhelmed by this book. At its core is a story about a couple who’s dissatisfied by their marriage. Somehow, Nathan Hill stretches this basic premise across 600 pages, when I think everything insightful about these two characters could’ve been communicated within 200 pages. I found some of the conflicts within their marriage and some of the flashbacks into their pasts interesting, though a lot of times the prose felt dry or the characterization came across as too try-hard.

Hill also includes a lot of commentary about the wellness industry which came across as a bit random to me. I felt like these portions of the book could have been better distilled into a few paragraphs of straightforward critique instead of being interspersed throughout the book. Finally, throughout Wellness he incorporates basic psychological principles in a name-dropping kind of way (e.g., here’s this psychological premise, here’s how this character uses it) which also felt distracting and oddly jammed into these characters’ lives (maybe I was particularly unimpressed because I am a Psychology professor, lol.) Onto the next!

[Laura · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am baffled at all the reviews saying this is the “Next Great American Novel.” This book was insufferable and unpleasant to read. It was about an unhappy marriage, and unhappy childhoods. But there were so many unnecessary and long tangents about random topics. Pages and pages were spent describing a toddler’s tantrum, Facebook algorithms, and the placebo effect all in excruciating detail. It added nothing to the story. And I could see the ending from a mile away.

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Nix is one of my favorite novels, and after all these years we finally have another novel by Nathan Hill. I requested on Netgalley as soon as it became available. And… it exceeded my wildest expectations. I didn’t think Hill could follow up his debut; honestly, over the last few years I’d kinda assumed he would pull a Harper Lee and simply never publish again.

Yet, here we are.

Wellness is as prescient and biting in 2023 as The Nix was in 2016. The novels are similar in all the important ways: genius, absorbing writing and unique character development and gorgeous, gorgeous passages—seriously, my e-Galley is all marked up with highlights!—but the plots and subject matter are wildly different. Because of my absolute love for/interest in the Vietnam era I think I still prefer The Nix, but it’s awfully damn close. Because this novel of modern marriage and placebos and art and love and social media algorithms and SO MUCH MORE is firmly in my top 10, if Nix is in my top 5. This book’s 600+ pages flew; I haven’t had that sort of journey with a book in many months. Whew.

Due out in September! Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC.

[Gabi Edwards · Rating 5 out of 5]

holy shit.

[Anne Wolfe · Rating 5 out of 5]

This could be the Great American Novel. Would that it were possible to award more than Five Stars to "Wellness."

Is there an algorithm for how to describe this book? Besides keeping me riveted for almost 500 pages I came away with so much information that my brain aches. But that is far from all. It's an absolutely beautiful love story which also includes everything you need to know about being alive in the first quarter of the 21st century.

You want psychology? Do you wonder about the Placebo Effect? How about Facebook and other social media? Polyamory? Yup. And so much more. Rather than recount the tale of Jack and Elizabeth, both tortured souls due to their parents' behavior, let me sing the praises of Nathan Hill, who with scholarship blended with humor, will cause you to collar people around you to read aloud passages of pure and absolute genius. I learned more about art and photography here than I did in countless museum visits and Art courses. Same about the internet, Bots and wellness fads.

Do not let all this frighten you away from reading one of the most heartfelt and emotionally memorable novels of the century. Thanks and blessings to Knopf and NetGalley who gave me an ARC copy of this book to read in exchange for an honest review.

[Maddie Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

RATING BREAKDOWN
Characters: 5⭐️
Setting: 5⭐️
Plot: 5⭐️
Themes: 6⭐️
Emotional Impact: 4⭐️
Personal Enjoyment: 5⭐️
Total Rounded Average: 5⭐️

This novel was one of the most confronting things I've ever read, wrapped in a package that made me feel nostalgic, devastated, disgusted, and then so amused I couldn't stop laughing. This is so terrifyingly spot-on that it's funny. You can't help but laugh because it's so gross, but so relatable.

Jack and Elizabeth are so well-written. You get to read them from inside their own heads, and then from the point of view of the other, over several years. It's such a brilliant way to show the multitudes we humans contain. I feel as conflicted about them as I do the people in my real life, because they are definitely as complicated. I love the setting, mostly because I was hooked from the jump, as I pictured Chicago in the 1990s. But Hill weaves the setting into the plot as a thematic metaphor constantly, and the setting always contributes to the psychological and emotional state of the characters in the scene, which is brilliant. The plot serves to show how fixated the characters become with upleveling and chasing their respective holy grails. It's brilliantly executed.

But what stands out is how much fun it was to read, and how effectively it made me reflect on culture, the American Dream, marriage, parenthood, and the pursuit of health and happiness. It wrestled with those topics without dismissing them. It could have taken a really pessimistic and cynical perspective, but it didn't. I found its suggestions to be hopeful and sound, dare I say, wise? I think it's a relevant book for the current generations, but it may just hold up as a testament to this era, the pursuits of these decades, and perhaps future generations will read it and understand us a little better. The social commentary is sharp and poignant enough to shed light now and into the future.

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

What I love most about Wellness is the vignette format.

It’s been a long time since I first noticed how swift changes in scenes serve couple stories particularly well—think The Maples Stories—, and Wellness is no exception to the concept. In depicting Jack and Elizabeth’s couple over a few decades, Nathan Hill successfully layers countless episodes that sometimes focus on both partners, and sometimes single one out. The result is as dynamic as it is deep, and amounts to fantastic characterization. This is nimble storytelling at its best for a novel that leans so steadily on psychology.

What I love almost as much is the tone.

Or maybe I love it just as much as the format, in fact. After The Nix, it was anyone’s guess what a second offering might read like, all these years later. Relief first washed over this reader, then mounting joy. Hill’s eloquent irreverence? That sharp eye trained on personal and collective shortcomings in today’s world? That heart, that balancing act between cynicism and good-natured humor? All the boxes are checked. In both The Nix and now Wellness, the author's voice feels like home to me.

And then there's everything else.

There is a myth-buster vibe to the novel, which tackles a vast array of beliefs. Wellness explores the pressure people put on themselves in an effort at self-improvement; less to do with the divine, more with the mundane. As we follow Jack and Elizabeth from their initial meeting in the nineties to their approach to middle age as Gen Xers (and parents), what we are made to reflect on is their quest for meaning while meaning markers evolve over time.

Themes like real estate, peer pressure, consumerism, and parenting ambitions are very present: again, a substantial part of this novel is about people looking for life hacks. But equally important are Jack and Elizabeth’s respective childhood, as significant chunks of this story explore how these two people became who they are today. Elizabeth grew up to be a perfectionist; Jack, an artist; neither is entirely satisfied. So Wellness is also about growing out of your own childhood, which can be the work of a lifetime. Interspersed among current-day interludes, these rearview-mirror chapters felt relatable, heartbreaking, and entertaining at once. A poetic wind blew over them.

On becoming who Jack was meant to be with the help of his visiting elder sister, despite growing up in a house devoid of art or books, with TV shows being of no assistance in providing models:

“Which was another lack that Evelyn sought to remedy. At the conclusion of that first week, she borrowed the Ford to go into town—ostensibly to fetch ingredients for a cake, as it was their mother’s birthday, but she came back also lugging a bag that she secreted to Jack’s room. It was filled with used books: Great Expectations. The Call of the Wild. The Great Gatsby. On the Road. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Books, she said, about people who leave home and go forth into the world and reinvent their very selves.”

Of special interest to me in Wellness was the private language that couples develop, and sometimes families: these favourite idioms that become distinctively ours, despite having been up for grabs by just about anyone all along. Hill has a definite knack for them. That’s all I will say.

While I found the ending saw an elaborate construction fold on itself in the equivalent of a blink, the road to get there leaves me marveling, and giving this book fewer than five stars just wouldn’t feel right.

Must I really wait north of five years for a third novel to come out, now?

[Wick Welker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible fiction that defines the current era.

Ok here’s the short of my review: this is one of the best novels I’ve ever read. This is fiction that is so well written and so relevant to modern life that it defines the current zeitgeist with its story. This is a book most concretely about a marriage between Jack and Elizabeth. It’s told over a kaleidoscope narration of when the couple meets in college and then twenty years later where their marriage has been predictably calcified and now complicated by a child and all the other highly relatable stressors of life. This story has some of the most fleshed out characters I’ve ever read. Nathan Hill takes his time telling the backstory of these two extremely traumatized individuals with wit, humor, drama and also extremely engaging information. Nathan Hill is an absolutely brilliant writer and storyteller and this book will draw you in with the first sentence and keep you there until the last sentence.

I laughed and definitely cried listening to the audiobook (which was also a phenomenal performance.) The very ending of this book left me in literal tears. How the backstory of the two main characters informs their current actions and their relationship with one another is simply one of the best things I’ve ever read.

This book is a perfect picture of life in the 2010s and now. In a generation, when people want to know what life was like for an adult right now, particularly married and with children, they should read this book and they will get a very good glimpse. This book is about the fracturing that has occurred. A fracturing of individuals because of the failure of their parents and communities. The fracturing of society into rural and coastal elites. A fracturing of our attention by the disruption of surveillance capitalism shoe-horned through social media. It’s also about a fracturing of understanding one another and the alienation that is imposed upon us by default of a culture that has become hollowed out and atomized for monetization. This book is about the endless "life hacks" that only mask the deeper issues that people have and obfuscate the solutions which are developing deeper connections with one another with compassion and understanding.

But please believe me: this book is not about cynicism. This book is about so much more than just being cynical of our society. This book is about the hope of pioneering into a new era and with that hope, the compulsion to try and understand where we are and how to move forward together knowing that life is more about coping than trying to obtain certainty.

Nathan Hill is clearly a smart guy and he brought a lot of concepts that you can tell he wants to talk about. He uses this book as his opportunity to riff on lots of social and cultural issues and he does it with style, humor and compassion.

I cannot recommend this book enough. It is so, so real but also a balm for the modern soul.

[Violeta · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was one of the most engaging, relatable and charming novels I’ve read lately.
A modern fairy tale that picks up the thread from the ‘they-lived-happily-ever-after moment’ in a young couple’s life and fills us in on what happens to them twenty years after their vows of eternal love. Hint #1: nothing is eternal.

Nathan Hill not only narrates Jack and Elizabeth’s journey into adulthood, parenthood, and the inevitable low point of the so-called ‘u-shaped happiness curve’ of their forties, but also attempts to paint a portrait of modern-day America. Through his characters’ (mis)andventures he vividly demonstrates how the new mores and norms in the age of the internet are changing the way we learn, work, love and interact. Hint #2: the more things change, the more we try to stick to our convictions.

With a reporter’s thoroughness, a satirist’s irony and a literary writer’s flair, he tries to understand why in this day and age of abundance, scientific progress, medical advancement, intellectual stimulation, domestic comfort, and all kinds of lifestyle options and trends, we keep feeling alternately harassed or aggressive, as vulnerable and confused as our prehistoric ancestors. Love is still the safe haven we search for, but it sure is hard to find nowadays, in a world where everybody’s dividing their energy and attention between reality and their private, digital universes.

In many ways this novel felt like the contemporary, pop version of Franzen’s Freedom. The tone of Hill’s prose is lighter and his characters a little more prosaic, but what he lacks in psychological finesse he makes up with his narrative prowess. All the features of a captivating story are here: dramatic arc, rising action, cliffhangers at the end of each chapter, rich detail, the comforting predictability of a good old fairy tale.

And the realization that...“the best placebo is choice.” However astonishing that sounds, the author made it damn hard to argue against. The final chapter felt overly constructed but it didn’t spoil the 5-star reading experience. Nor did it prevent me from realizing a thing or two about what comprises (or compromises) my own Wellness.

[Bianca · Rating 5 out of 5]

The elephant in the room - this was a very long novel, arguably too long. Honestly, had it not been available as an audiobook, I probably wouldn't have read it, despite having loved Hill's debut, an equally long novel.

Nathan Hill is a clever cookie, with a penchant for digging into what makes people the way they are, and why they behave a certain way.

Jack and Elizabeth are a couple struggling with their relationship after 20 years of being together. Busy jobs, a challenging kid, a mortgage and all the grown-up hullaballoo tend to get in the way, even for couples with good intentions. Jack and Elizabeth are different people, with completely distinct backgrounds, professions and personalities. Elizabeth is a scientist, who is leading Wellness, a company dealing with the placebo effect and other psychological research. Jack is a photography lecturer at a university. He struggles in his profession and with the new business-oriented leadership. His photography is not lifting his spirits either.

Hill takes us back and forth in time, not only looking at Jack and Elizabeth at previous life stages but also giving us a background of their parents and ancestors.

As someone interested in psychology, human behaviour etc., I appreciated the many insights into those fields. There's also a lot of information (some may call it info dumping) on social media, and algorithms, which was interesting even though I was partially aware of its machinations, not that I don't fall into its grip, although I like to delude myself that I know what they're doing but I'm allowing it to happen - Hill would have something things to say about one's power of lying to oneself. :-) There's quite a bit on psychology, the placebo effect in particular - I found that interesting.

A lot is happening in this novel, many questions are raised, and some answers are provided - I found it all fascinating, revelatory, intriguing and informative. The fact that it's all done via accessible writing, it's a feat in itself.

Ari Fliakos was a wonderful narrator.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wellness is a novel about the power of story. Our lives are shaped by both the stories we are told (and believe) and those we create. Are these stories big enough to live in? Can we change them as we change?

Hill's tale centers on Jack and Elizabeth's relationship from their meeting at age 20 through the next two decades. They both yearn for connection and to be understood and accepted. Our protagonists experience traumatic childhoods and never share, let alone process, their pasts. These experiences continue to dictate their stories about themselves and therefore their emotional states and actions. Without opening up about their secrets, they are unable to move forward in life.

Hill alternates between past and present and varies the point of view between Elizabeth and Jack's. He skillfully uses this technique to slowly unveil their pasts and illuminate their actions in the present. Just when I think I am getting a handle on the characters, I learn something new which keeps me engaged and reading. The humor that is interlaced throughout the book also serves this purpose for me. Hill's use of satire and irony makes a lot of points about modern day life.

The characterization is flawless. The secondary characters are drawn as fully as the stars. There is so much here that is relatable. I found myself constantly nodding my head as I recognized aspects of myself and people I know. And the prose, well, it's exceptional.

So what's the shortcoming? Hill has included an 8 page bibliography, which might give you a clue. He did a lot of research which he uses to illustrate his points. Alas, he tells me much more than I really need to know. While I enjoy the digressions, mostly, they go on for long enough that I get pulled out of the story. Hill's journalism background is showing. I'd love to read some essays/articles on these topics which would serve me better than his enthusiastic effort to cram so much material into this novel which then interrupts its flow.

Nathan Hill's latest novel Wellness is well worth taking the time to read.

“Believe what you believe, my dear, but believe gently. Believe compassionately. Believe with curiosity. Believe with humility. And don’t trust the arrogance of certainty."

Thank you to my wonderful reading buddies Antoinette and Candi who contributed their insights to our discussion and made this a consummate reading experience.

Antoinette's review

Candi's review

Publication 2023

[NILTON TEIXEIRA · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wasn’t planning on reading this book so soon, but when I heard that it was picked by Oprah’s Book Club (I missed the September’s announcement), I decided to order a copy from the public library, and, as it was immediately available, I couldn’t resist.
And I was completely pleased.
This was an amazing surprise and a terrific break from reading crime fiction.
The writing and the storytelling are formidable.
I didn’t want to put it down.
It’s not a book of action and there isn’t a specific plot, and it’s not just about marriage, as the synopsis suggests.
The author touches a great number of different topics that are thought provoking.
Everything was skillfully put together and with an excellent dose of humour.
I loved the structure and the characters (including the delusional ones).
It’s simply brilliant.
Some situations felt very familiar to me, specially those times when I was growing up, trying to fit in, while hiding my own self, and the time I decided to leave everyone behind, and to start somewhere else, where no one ever heard of me (and no regrets here).

Please, check the awesome review by Michael Schaub (npr News - September 20, 2023 2:05 PM ET) because it’s so perfect. Excerpts below:

“Wellness is a stunning novel about the stories that we tell about our lives and our loves, and how we sustain relationships throughout time — it's beyond remarkable, both funny and heartbreaking, sometimes on the same page.”

“Wellness is a perfect novel for our age, filled with a deep awareness of the Internet-poisoned, marketing-driven engineered emptiness of modern times, but also a compassionate optimism about our ability to find and maintain love nonetheless. It's a monumental achievement: a masterpiece by an author who has, in the space of two novels, become indispensable.”

Excuse me, as I’m running to get a copy of “The Nix”.

ebook (Kobo): 629 pages (default), 195k words

Hardcover (Knopf): 624 pages

[Kristy · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 Stars

I am the type of person who in the middle of the night goes “I’m curious about the affects green tea has on Alzheimer’s,” and then spends three hours deep diving studies on it. I feel Hill is the same type of person, but he felt the need to show for all that time spent by info dumping that knowledge gained into a book whether or not it needed to be there.

Parts of Wellness I really liked— the scenes that focused on Jack’s and Elizabeth’s relationship and their relationship with their families— but all the non-sequiturs and rabbit holes this goes down made it about 200-300 pages longer than it needs to be and hard to keep caring about the heart of the story.

[Mehrsa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been a delinquent goodreviewer, but I just came here to say that this one was spectacular. There is a scene in it, that I will not spoil, that may be the most beautiful prose I've ever read.

[Debbie · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's been seven years since Nathan Hill's debut novel, "The Nix", and it's now easy to imagine that it has taken all of that time to write this new 624-page book. Written with his typical sardonic wit, the author truly inhabits the lives of his characters as he dissects their marriage and their lives.

In 1993, Jack is a photographic art student who comes to Chicago from a farming family in Kansas. He meets and falls in love with Elizabeth, a science, psychology, economics, and theatre major from a rich family in New England. They come from very different backgrounds, but are both seeking freedom "from their pasts, their families, and their mislaid childhoods".

The narrative navigates through the chapters of Jack and Elizabeth's lives and the evolution of their marriage where, by 2014, they find themselves in a period of mid-life unhappiness. They try to figure out how they fit together economically, educationally, sexually, and socially. The story seems to revolve around an excessive amount of overthinking, while poking fun at home gyms, health trackers, diets, supplements, sexual experimentation, fitness gurus and the internet in general.

We also learn a lot about Elizabeth's ancestors and their wild money-making pyramid schemes with lumber, textiles, and metals through the years. Then, it's Elizabeth's work, within Wellness research and with the use of placebos to treat multiple disorders and dupe customers with real problems, that takes center stage.

Unfortunately, at about halfway through this lengthy telling, it all became a little bit too much for me; too explanatory, too researched, too hypercritical. I began to ask myself if I should just throw in the towel. However, I persevered, but at 70% into the book, when the story went deeply into the analytics and algorithms used to run Facebook, my mind started to wander, and everything began to blur. I started to do what I never do when reading -- I skimmed.

I started reading this book with eager anticipation because I loved Nathan Hill's debut novel, The Nix, and I gave it five stars. In retrospect, I feel that I was probably not the right audience for this newest book and hopefully my review will just be an outlier.

My sincere thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for the digital ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

[Melki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every couple has a story they tell themselves about themselves, a story that hums beneath them as a kind of engine, motoring them through trouble and into the future.

Welcome to Scenes from a Marriage of a couple who may or may not be consciously uncoupling.

Nasty words have been exchanged . . . the kind of words you can't take back:

"You thought if you married a rich girl, it meant you weren't the country bumpkin you're so afraid you really are."

"Okay, and you thought if you married an artist, it meant you weren't the heartless rock you're so afraid you really are."

Hill is careful to present both sides equally, though you may end up preferring one partner over the other. From their awful childhoods - Elizabeth's viciously competitive father, and the heartbreaking image of young Jack playing D&D all by himself, to their problems raising their young son - we get to see it all unravel.

Hill's book is damned near perfect in both the writing and the observations of human behavior.



Many thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for the read.

[Andrew Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nathan Hill’s The Nix was one of my favourite reads of 2016/17. A brilliant mix of tragedy and hilarity, it was a family saga with some political history and the birth and growth of online gaming and social media thrown in for good measure. He hasn’t published a book since, so when I spotted this one, I was quick to grab a copy.

This novel tells the story of Jack and Elizabeth: how they're met, married, and how their union eventually became stale. So in one sense it’s a love story that’s all too familiar, but that’s discounting the author’s ability to get right under the skin of interesting people and his knack of homing in on interesting themes that run along side their story. This sets him apart from other, less inspiring writers. The supporting themes this time around include health scams, polyamory and how social media enables conspiracy theories to get a foothold.

Looking back on my review of his previous book, I commented that ‘some sections do jabber on a bit’. This is evident here, too, particularly when the author launches into a lengthy (if interesting) exploration of how social media algorithms work. But overall it’s an intelligent and well written account of love and living in the modern world. It’s another five-star rating for me. I just hope I don’t have to wait another seven years for his next novel.

[Sally Darr Griffin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am simply obsessed with this book and the way Nathan Hill writes.

You will meet someone and fall in love so effortlessly that it will feel like fate, as though the universe had conspired to align every moment and decision, leading you right to them. And you will think without a doubt that you're meant to be together forever.

But despite the evidence of how perfect everything is, you will ask yourself one day...what the hell is going on? Are we doing this correctly? Are we on the right track? Are we happy? Are we even supposed to be together??? Is it bad sign that I'm asking these questions? Is our story, as Nathan Hill would say, just another highly embellish placebo?

Read this book if you’re in a long-term relationship and have ever worried about how two people can continue to evolve as individuals and still choose each other. Yesterday you were this person, today you’re that person, and tomorrow…who knows? Would every version of yourself and every version of your partner pick each other? Or is true love just a comforting story we tell ourselves to make sense of our choices and calm our fears?

And the only thing she was certain of was this: that between ourselves and the world are a million stories, and if we don't know which among them are true, we might as well try out those that are most humane, most generous, most beautiful, most loving. Was Jack her soulmate? Sure, she thought. Why not?

[Anita Pomerantz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a huge Jonathan Franzen fan, and while the Nix evoked Franzen a little bit for me, this book evoked him a LOT. And that's a good thing.

Wellness use the story of a relationship and a marriage as a framework on which to hang Hill's tremendous intellectual curiosity. Yes, it's a story of two people as their passion for one another waxes and wanes. But I think Hill's real love is non-fiction. He weaves in so many interesting deep dives - - mostly into different aspects of psychology with a touch of business and a bit of university politics. Both leading characters have trauma in their background, and Hill gives plenty of space to slowly reveal their backgrounds and the impact on their relationships and their careers and their child rearing practices.

All in all, I really liked it. It's a bit of a messy ramble of a book, and if you aren't interested in psychology, I don't think the plot line is enough to sustain the reader on its own. I love non-fiction, and to have it embedded in a fictional story made me feel like I really know who Hill is. Or at least made me feel like I'd love to meet him in person. All in all, a fun, well-paced, interesting, literary read . . .perhaps a little self indulgent on the author's part from time to time, but I was there for it.