Wellness Nathan Hill's Newest

WELLNESS (2023)

By Nathan Hill

Alfred A. Knopf, 634 pages.

★★★ 

 

 

Wellness is the second novel from Nathan Hill, whose The Nix justly won much praise. Wellness isn’t quite up that level, but give Hill credit for a second effort whose focus is quite different. Its dual protagonists are Jack Baker and Elizabeth Augustine whose 20 -year plus relationship begins in the 1990s.

 

If you suspect that Wellness is likely to be an ironic title, you’re on the right street, though you may not have the correct address. Each has fled to Chicago to reinvent themselves. They live in facing apartments in a delipidated complex in Wicker Park. Due to unfortunate urban renewal and highway construction, their section of Chicago was gritty, if not as entirely devoid of life as they later recalled. Jack and Elizabeth were mutual (and mostly innocent) voyeurs clandestinely observing each other before they actually met. Jack fled Nebraska, his sister’s death, a perpetually pessimistic mother, and a passive farmer/planned prairie fire starter father; Elizabeth three generations of often ill-begotten wealth and The Gables, an outwardly impressive mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut. Though slight in build, Jack now sports an enormous tattoo, studies photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, hangs out at seedy venues to see now-forgotten “hot” bands, and makes an unexpected splash in the art scene du jour. Elizabeth studies psychology and is mentored by Dr. Otto Sanborn, a guru of placebo studies. Jack and Elizabeth fall in love based on the idea that the other is the rebel they only pretend to be. Ha!

 

The two marry, have a difficult-to-raise son, and move away from Wicker Park until Jack’s friend Benjamin Quince can finish the New Urbanism Shipworks, which will contain their “forever home” condo. They also struggle with the slaps of adult life and the suspicion they aren’t the people they thought they’d be. Jack constantly seeks stability and Elizabeth opens a research lab called Wellness that does blind trials on placebos. On  a personal level, she’s looking for a panacea for whatever upsets her. Her greatest success, though, is in monetizing placebos. To give one example, she helps an airline develop an ad campaign to make people feel good about crowded flights and sell premium seats that used to be called coach. 

 

Wellness takes us into some weird situations. Jack touts photography without a camera; Elizabeth wonders if a woman named Brandie is onto something with her polyamorous lifestyle. Benjamin rockets from one trend to another–hypertext, gag-me diet fads, real estate development–and Jack nods knowingly though he doesn’t have the bandwidth to question whether Ben is a genius or just a moth looking for a flame. You can mix in Minecraft addiction, sexual discontent, guilt, the sophistry of positive psychology, rightwing conspiracy theories, bats in the proverbial belfry, and a whole lot more. At the heart of it all is a burning fear: If Jack and Elizabeth aren’t who they thought they were, are they terribly, terribly wrong for each other?

 

Hill gives us a deep dive into their backgrounds, mostly in flashback chapters. These serve to help us understand Jack and Elizabeth and raise questions of whether self-deception is hardwired into their DNA. In many respects, everyone in the book is selling snake-oil. The chapter titled “The Placebo Marriage” is particularly devastating and revelatory.

 

Wellness is rich in ideas, but sometimes overly so. It’s a long novel that could have been usefully trimmed. There are passages that read more as asides than as necessary to advance the plot. I understand how sections on Facebook seduction parallel those of Minecraft and other trends. I even agree with such observations, but such diversions and another involving the important question of whether algorithms are the new master need more direct connection to character development for full impact. There is another thread–whether we actually live inside a computer simulation–that is suddenly and cavalierly dismissed, so why go there at all? The book also threatens to tire readers, as its protagonists are more annoying than sympathetic.   

 

Hill redeems himself when he’s directly rather than obliquely on target. At heart, Wellness asks the right questions; among them: What is real? What is wellness? Why don’t we detect BS when we’re stepping in it? Can you really leave home? My favorite centers on how to tell the difference between a true rebel and faded tattoos, real ones and those metaphorically etched onto our skins.

 

Rob Weir