Wellness
Nathan Hill’s new novel, Wellness (2023), peels the onion of modern, middle-aged life. It nails so many truisms about contemporary life in terms of fitness, AI, health trends, Facebook Wars, married life, love, polyamory, mindfulness groups, parenting in the digital age, careers in academia, and urban gentrification, to name a few. Many of the contemporary elements are laugh-out-loud funny, others are bleak and depressing. Woven into the pre-pandemic age of twenty-teens Chicago (roughly contemporary) storyline are a number of backstory, character-driven vignettes. These reach back in time to highlight the traumas and generational family dysfunction with which the main characters live, whether they are conscious of that fact or not. Many read almost as stand-alone pieces, but together they create the patchwork of Hill’s characters’ lives. Wellness is witty and poignant, delightful and difficult. It is a novel I highly recommend, particularly to those of us who recall the grungy anti-capitalism of the 1990s in the very early days of the digital age.
The novel opens with backstory. Readers meet two young people in the gritty, avant-garde scene of Chicago’s collegiate arts underground a la 1992. Elizabeth and Jack live in apartments separated by a small alley. Their windows face one another. Both are young and alone. Both are searching. University brought both to Chicago. Jack is an art student from Kansas and Elizabeth has left her family’s wealth and pretension back East to study everything, eventually settling on behavioral psychology. Through the frame of their lit windows at night, they find each other and in time they close the distance of that narrow alley. In other words, Wellness opens with a love story. But Hill does not leave it there. The primary narrative is contemporary as Jack and Elizabeth face the challenges and existential crises of modern middle age.
There are so many layers to this novel, so many themes one might highlight. One particularly fascinating theme that Hill weaves throughout is the power of placebo to heal, and in turn the ethics of its application. When science proves that human belief in a cure, within certain ramifications, is often self-fulfilling, how might that power be applied to wellness? To complicate the question, of course, when a person knows their cure is placebo, it no longer works. As the bibliography at the end of Wellness demonstrates, considerable research went into this (and other) subjects in the novel and it shows.
Wellness holds up a mirror to the hustle, longing, and disappointments of modern life. It is a novel that incites readers to reconsider everyday experience and perhaps rethink trends in health and love and life. It is also a novel that, in the end, leans toward the hopeful so as to avoid stark dystopian tones. In other words, Nathan Hill’s Wellness is a must-read.
Hill, Nathan. Wellness. Knopf: 2023
A Few Great Passages:
“It is a odd feeling, to sense one’s aliveness, for perhaps the very first time, to understand that life up until this point was not being lived, exactly; it was being endured.”
“She finally comprehended parenthood’s strange paradox: that it was deeply annihilating while at the same time also somehow deeply comforting. It was both soul-devouring and soul-filling.”
“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.”
“‘So if nothing is real, if certainty is just an illusion, what do we do? Believe in nothing?’ ‘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. I mean, my goodness, Elizabeth, if you want the gods to really laugh at you, then by all means call it your forever home.’”
