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The New York Times best-selling author of The Nix is back with a poignant and witty novel about marriage, the often baffling pursuit of health and happiness, and the stories that bind us together. From the gritty '90s Chicago art scene to a suburbia of detox diets and home-renovation hysteria, Wellness reimagines the love story with a healthy dose of insight, irony, and heart.
When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the '90s, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in Chicago's thriving underground art scene with an appreciative kindred spirit. Fast-forward twenty years to married life, and alongside the challenges of parenting, they encounter cults disguised as mindfulness support groups, polyamorous would-be suitors, Facebook wars, and something called Love Potion Number Nine.
For the first time, Jack and Elizabeth struggle to recognize each other, and the no-longer-youthful dreamers are forced to face their demons, from unfulfilled career ambitions to painful childhood memories of their own dysfunctional families. In the process, Jack and Elizabeth must undertake separate, personal excavations, or risk losing the best thing in their lives: each other.
Excerpt
Wellness
He lives alone on the fourth floor of an old brick building with no view of the sky. When he looks out his window, all he can see is her window—across the alley, an arm's length away, where she lives alone on the fourth floor of her own old building. They don't know each other's names. They have never spoken. It is winter in Chicago.
Barely any light enters the narrow alley between them, and barely any rain either, or snow or sleet or fog or that crackling wet January stuff the locals call "wintry mix." The alley is dark and still and without weather. It seems to have no atmosphere at all, a hollow stitched into the city for the singular purpose of separating things from things, like outer space.
She first appeared to him on Christmas Eve. He'd gone to bed early that night feeling horribly sorry for himself—the only soul in his whole raucous building with nowhere else to be—when a light snapped on across the alley, and a small warm glow replaced his window's usual yawning dark. He sat up, walked to the window, peeked out. There she was, a flurry of movement, arranging, unpacking, pulling small vibrant dresses from large matching suitcases. Her window was so close to him, and she was so close to him—their apartments separated by the distance of a single ambitious jump—that he scooted back a few feet to more fully submerge himself in his darkness. He sat there on his heels and stared for a short while, until the staring felt improper and indecent and he contritely returned to bed. But he has, in the weeks since, come back to the theater of this window, and more often than he'd like to admit. He sometimes sits here, hidden, and, for a few minutes at a time, he watches.
To say that he finds her beautiful is too simple. Of course he finds her beautiful objectively, classically, obviously beautiful. Even just the way she walks—with a kind of buoyancy, a cheerful jaunty bounce—has him thoroughly charmed. She glides across the floor of her apartment in thick socks, occasionally doing an impromptu twirl, the skirt of her dress billowing briefly around her. In this drab and filthy place, she prefers dresses—bright flowered sundresses incongruous amid the grit of this neighborhood, the cold of this winter. She tucks her legs under them as she sits in her plush velvet armchair, a few candles glowing nearby, her face impassive and cool, holding a book in one hand, the other hand idly tracing the lip of a wineglass. He watches her touch that glass and wonders how a little fingertip can inspire such a large torment.
Her apartment is decorated with postcards from places he assumes she's been—Paris, Venice, Barcelona, Rome—and framed posters of art he assumes she's seen in person: the statue of David, the Pietà, The Last Supper, Guernica. Her tastes are manifold and intimidating; meanwhile, he's never even seen an ocean.
She reads inordinately, at all hours, flicking on her yellow bedside lamp at two o'clock in the morning to page through large and unwieldy textbooks—biology, neurology, psychology, microeconomics—or various stage plays, or collections of poetry, or thick histories of wars and empires, or scientific journals with inscrutable names and bland gray bindings. She listens to music he assumes is classical for the way her head sways to it. He strains to identify book jackets and album covers, then rushes to the public library the next day to read all the authors that rouse and unsleep her, and listen to all the symphonies she seems to have on repeat: the Haffner, the Eroica, the New World, the Unfinished, the Fantastique. He imagines that if they ever actually speak, he will drop some morsel of Symphonie Fantastique knowledge and she will be impressed with him and fall in love.
If they ever actually speak.
She's exactly the kind of person—cultured, worldly—that he came to this frighteningly big city to find. The obvious flaw in the ...
Excerpted from WELLNESS by Nathan Hill. Copyright © 2023 by Nathan Hill. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!
Suggested Reading
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Circle by Dave Eggers
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff
The Nix by Nathan Hill
Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano
The Overstory by Richard Powers
Hope by Andrew Ridker
Normal People by Sally Rooney
Lake Success by Gary Shteyngart
Commitment by Mona Simpson
My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Knopf. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.
Nathan Hill's second novel, Wellness, follows Jack and Elizabeth, an ambivalent and disillusioned married couple in their late thirties. The two met in Chicago in 1993; they were eighteen years old and lived in pre-gentrified Wicker Park, where Jack took photographs of the neighborhood's indie rock scene and Elizabeth, a freshman in college, was voraciously studying "the whole human condition." Now, in 2014, they're surprised by where their paths have led them: Jack is an adjunct photography professor, Elizabeth runs a grifter behavioral psychology company, and they're preparing for a move to the suburbs. Somewhere along the line, bit by bit, they sold out.
The novel's title refers to the name of Elizabeth's company, but it's also a promise of critique, a sendup of reality in 2014, especially compared to the optimistic counterculture and nascent internet of the '90s. Hill starts out strong in this vein, setting up a slightly exaggerated and askew world: Jack and Elizabeth's son has to be put to bed with the words "Don't forget to subscribe"; Jack, to be healthier, has gone on something called "the System," in which an orange wristband tells him not only how to exercise and eat but also when to have sex and how to improve his marriage; and his university has started calculating an "impact algorithm," which pays professors based on their online presence. These are not laugh-out-loud jokes, but you could call them skewering—of the business of higher ed, of our optimization culture and dependence on smartphones, and so on.
But Hill's heart isn't in satire. He's more interested in setting up personalities and exploring family dynamics. The marriage at the core of the book is a recognizable type, and Jack and Elizabeth know it. "I'm just worried that somewhere along the way I turned into this person I never intended to be, this person that Elizabeth never expected to be married to, this, like, boring vanilla toxic untalented gentrifier," Jack tells a friend. When Elizabeth doesn't want to have sex with Jack, she feels guilty: "She hated being that person: the dowdy, exhausted wife who says no. What a cliché."
These characters never fully transcend their archetypical quality, but Hill does a good job of fleshing them out. Elizabeth's ambivalence about marriage and parenthood, her vague desperation to bring back the spark of youth, seemed to me well-rendered, even if Hill's roaming third-person narration keeps us at arm's length. A few characterizations made me laugh in recognition, as in the description of Elizabeth's stubborn independent streak:
It was one of her pet peeves, that thing that happens to couples when they stop saying "I" in favor of "We," as if they'd developed a shared couple-brain… Jack would sometimes say "What do we want for dinner tonight?" and she'd stare and him and say "I know what I want for dinner. What do you want for dinner?"
As a portrait of a modern marriage, it's not the most complex or unique, but it's compelling. And one reason it is so compelling—so breezy and digestible—is that it's filled with pseudo-scientific theories, anywhere on the spectrum from crackpot to plausible, about why society is the way it is, and why the human brain and body work the way they do. Elizabeth uses evolutionary psychology to explain her mid-life unhappiness: historically, the fragile young and old had to be content enough to stay put and not take risks, she reasons, while the middle-aged people needed to feel antsy enough to go off into the dangerous world and get stuff done. Kate and Kyle, Silicon Valley transplants in an open marriage, do some surface-level psychoanalysis on Jack and Elizabeth's relationship, then use similar evo psych logic to explain their scorn for monogamy: for most of human history, the average relationship only lasted eight years, so humans are hardwired to feel attached for that long and no longer. Kyle adds that the human penis is shaped like a plunger, a form that evolved to suck out other men's sperm, evidence that women have always slept around and therefore monogamy is unnatural.
These explanations read like the chapters of Freakonomics or someone talking about love languages—the kind of fun, facile logic that seems plausible in the moment but is ultimately too simple to encompass the complexity of human behavior. Hill wants to poke at it, to show us that it can be both absurd and compelling, that it can make good fiction. And of course he includes the more sinister, antisocial theories that have gained footholds online. An old friend of Jack's has become a Joe Rogan prototype, drinking raw hydrogen water and railing against the "trash-garbage that comes out of the tap." A new friend of Elizabeth's, an unhappy suburbanite, believes that "one's energy sent vibrations out into space-time that produced either positive or negative changes in one's own reality."
Hill's own theory, evidenced also by his debut novel, The Nix, is that we can understand our present selves by understanding our pasts. That's why he gives us ample episodic flashbacks that shed new light on what we've already read, showing Elizabeth and Jack's lives to be more painful, or fraudulent, or complicated than we'd previously realized, and in so doing, creating a kind of unified theory of their lives. We get long scenes of Jack's upbringing on the Kansas prairie and Elizabeth's rich-kid one in suburban New England, plus a history of Elizabeth's con men ancestors and a chilling set piece about Facebook algorithms. Some parts are more interesting than others (is there anything worse than picking up a novel about the complexities of adult life and having to read about AP classes and SAT scores?), but one could thumb through this book and find any number of standalone episodes to reread.
It's conventional wisdom that one's childhood affects their adult relationships and parenting style, and so all of these scenes are, in theory, worthwhile. And yet when taken all together, the result ends up seeming almost as facile as the theories Hill lampoons. Wellness' structure is too neat, too symmetrical; there is too straight and solid of a line between past and present. Real life doesn't work like that; and even if it did, it'd be boring to write about. The many good parts of Hill's novel understand this, that anyone who feeds you easy answers is probably selling something, or at least underestimating you. The interested reader should read Wellness like they would a daily horoscope or pop psychology—as food for thought, for entertainment, for flashes of recognition, but without the expectation of great truths.
Reviewed by Chloe Pfeiffer
Rated of 5
by Gloria M
So Good!!
I am totally beyond satisfied that "Wellness" by Nathan Hill was the first book I read for 2024! (Like many readers I always try to choose an epic one to begin the year!) It totally deserves its selection as an NPR best book of the year and an Oprah's Book Club pick, though it was already on my radar since I loved Hill's first book "The Nix" and I fervently hope he is already furiously writing his next great book!
"Wellness" tells the tale of Elizabeth and Jack who meet when they are college students. Fast forward and now they routinely tell their story of living in apartment buildings directly across from one another and how they watched each other furtively until they finally met accidentally in a dive bar and Jack simply said "Come with" and thus their relationship began. But now, they are older, and life is filled with the mundane, and they have a child, and issues with the construction and designing of their dream home, and serious problems with their careers. Throw in suburban drama and social media trolling helmed by Brandie (of course she spells her name with an ie!) a mean girl mom who hides behind her positive thinking mantra while sabotaging anyone who doesn't fit in with her narrative and an interesting couple with an open marriage who fixate on Elizabeth and Jack.
Hill has taken the traditional love story into the modern era with great style. We watch Elizabeth and Jack face the hard truths about their lives. We learn they both have dysfunctional families that they fled, but have they repeated the mistakes of their own parents? Elizabeth has never told Jack the complete story of how her father wanted her to fail at everything and in turn Jack has never told Elizabeth why he feels responsible for the death of his beloved older sister when he was only nine years old.
As Hill writes, " ...people created a story that explained themselves to themselves, and then they believed their made-up story was the actual objective truth." Can this couple unearth their inner selves and then reveal them to one another? Or is it as Jack fears, "His wife and son were becoming other people, new people, people who found Jack more and more unnecessary."
Hill's writing style will appeal to fans of the literary genre and those who prefer a family tale that is relevant to today's society and all its enormous overwhelming flood of information and striving to be the best at everything one does. The reader is engrossed and captured within this saga on the very first page and it will linger in their thoughts for a long, long, long time. It deserves to be on the top of your TBR list!!
In Nathan Hill's novel Wellness, protagonist Jack is from the Kansas prairie, where his father was an expert at managing prairie fires. Prairie fires may look terrifying and unwieldy, but in fact they are often purposeful and controlled, and play a critical role in maintaining healthy ecosystems. In much of North America, prairies were historically sustained through regular, intentional fires by Native people.
There are a few different but related reasons that fire is so effective for maintaining prairie land. Crucially, fire stops the spread of trees and other woody vegetation by burning saplings before they mature enough to disperse seeds. If those saplings get too big, they steal sunlight and water from the prairie plants underneath—which is the stuff animals actually want to graze on—and that grassland can easily turn into forest. Because so much of the grassland plant biomass is underground, it remains safe from the fire. A rangeland ecologist puts it this way: "It's actually pretty simple: When there's fire, grass wins. Without fire, trees win."
Burning the prairie does more than just rid the land of the encroaching forest—it also triggers vigorous regrowth, which then attracts animals for grazing. The newly-grown grass that comes up after a fire is more nutritious than older grass, so wildlife flock to it.
Relatedly, prairie fires promote biodiversity. The American Prairie Foundation describes a healthy prairie as being like a patchwork quilt—some patches have been burned more recently than others; some patches are more heavily grazed than others. Each patch is an ideal habitat for some species at some point in their lifecycle, so the prairie as a whole allows for the habitation of many different species. The Spring Creek Prairie Audubon Center notes that this is particularly noticeable in birds—"Henslow's Sparrows, for example, require a thick thatch layer that accumulates in areas that haven't burned for several years. Killdeer, on the other hand, prefer recently burned areas." And most species have needs somewhere in between.
Finally, prescribed burns can prevent wildfires, or at least reduce the intensity of them. If there aren't planned fires, leaf litter can build up over time and provide plenty of fuel for a wildfire to fly through, making it much harder to control.
Native people, obviously the original dwellers on prairie land, once used fire for all these reasons and more, including driving and attracting game. Intentional burning has been an ingenious and necessary, if potentially dangerous, development in North America, but was outlawed by the United States government for over a century. In recent decades, it is increasingly being used again as government organizations have begun to recognize its value, though Indigenous people say that further change is necessary to bring back traditional burning practices and their ecological benefits.
Controlled burn at the Froland Waterfowl Production Area in Minnesota Photo by Alex Galt/USFWS
Filed under Nature and the Environment
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