Ace in the Hole: Old Movie or a Mirror?

 

Ace in the Hole (1951)

Directed by Billy Wilder

Paramount, 111 minutes, Not-rated (but Hollywood Code in place)

★★★

 

 

 Ace in the Hole is on the National Film Registry, though it shows up in some platforms as The Big Carnival. That would “carnival” as in messy sensationalist hype, not lame rides and bad food. The brief title change­ had to with script writer Victor Desny’s lawsuit against director Billy Wilder who likely used insider information to sandbag Desny’s planned Floyd Collins project.

 

The name Floyd Collins might not ring many bells now, but his sad tale was one of the most ballyhooed stories of the 1920s. Collins was trapped in a Kentucky mine and died there while yellow journalists hyped his story to the skies. Ace in the Hole is a thinly veiled Collins tale set in New Mexico. That's where the free-wheeling, high-living Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas) lands after being fired from a series of jobs in the newspaper business. In essence, Tatum is an egomaniac who believes he’s better than anyone else, but he is unreliable and too much trouble to keep on staff. He drifts to Albuquerque, where he settles for a paltry $60 a week job and he probably is better than anyone else on the paper, though he commits the unpardonable sin of telling them so. After a year on the job, he is still being handed grunt jobs such as covering a rattlesnake roundup.

 

 He is on his way to the venomous wigglers with photographer Herbie Cooke (Robert Arthur) when fortune seemingly smiles upon him when Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) is trapped in a mine. Tatum rushes to the scene and finds that Leo is suffering from pneumonia. He clears enough rubble to get within talking distance from Leo, gains his confidence, and is able to bring in some supplies to buy more time. On the surface, Tatum is hailed a s hero. In truth, he’s an S.O.B. who finds himself in relatively good company. Leo's wife Lorraine (Jan Sterling) is a floozy with big dreams of her own that don't include a hick like Leo. She wants to leave him and head for a big city, but that doesn't mesh with Tatum 's plans. He wants her to play the role of grief-stricken spouse and collude with him to delay rescue efforts to keep the story alive so he can milk it for financial gain and sell his talents to either a Chicago or New York publisher. He is even willing to woo Lorraine. You could call this shark versus shark. Given that this is a film noir production, you probably recognize Lorraine a classic femme fatale and won’t need to call Las Vegas for betting odds.

 

The rating system wasn’t in place in 1951, but the infamous Hollywood Code was. Originally the script called for law enforcement officials to be in on the fix of delaying Leo’s rescue. Under the Code however, censors insisted that police should always be on the side of good, so the script was changed. In my estimation, this weakened the film and reduced it to several cynics playing with a working man's life. The Floyd Collins story involved the systemic collusion between disreputable journalism and the public’s yearning for lurid news.

Kirk Douglas was very good in the role of Chuck Tatum, as was Robert Arthur as a photographer whose loyalties were uncertain. Jan Sterling is a largely forgotten actress, but she won an Academy Award in 1954 for her role in a film The High and the Mighty. I suspect though, that modern audiences will find her performance a bit like something from the old racy magazine True Confessions. Not to mention that the floozy role is decidedly problematic today.

 

Nonetheless, Ace in the Hole is another of those old movies that seem strangely familiar when we strip away 70-yar-old backdrops, costumes, and mannerisms and imagine it in modern garb. There are many recent stories that are tabloid-style in content. Perhaps you recall the hype of baby Jessica McClure, who fell down a Texas well, or the 24/7 coverage of the 2006 Sago Mine disaster. Do you remember how people were glued to social media, newspapers, and televisions during the 2018 incident in which a group of scouts was trapped in a cave in Thailand? As I always remind people, look beneath the surface. When we do, t’is often the sad case that we gaze into a mirror.

 

Rob Weir

The Dsecendants: Okay but Overrated

 

The Descendants (2011)

Directed by Alexander Payne

Fox Searchlight, 115 minutes, R (for prolific F-bombs)

★★★

 

 

I keep an eye out for lists of critically regarded films that I’ve not seen. Sometimes I find gems, other times duds best left to molder. Mostly, I find a lot of dead ordinary efforts. The Descendants falls into the third category notwithstanding its five Oscar nominations in 2011, including Best Picture, Best Director (Alexander Payne) and Best Actor. It was bypassed for those, but won for Best Adapted Screenplay and that was a stretch.

 

Overall, The Descendants feels like a weepy destined to be edited for the Hallmark Channel. An opening sequence of a woman recklessly water skiing sets the table; Elizabeth King is about to suffer an accident that will leave her in a coma. Her husband Matthew (George Clooney) hopes that she will awaken, but it doesn't look good and he faces the possibility of becoming a single dad to two daughters, 17-year-old Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) and nine-year-old Scottie (Amara Miller). How will a workaholic lawyer in Honolulu who has been only tangentially involved in his daughters’ lives cope?  Alex, in fact, has to be retrieved from a private school where among other things, her drug habit was addressed, though she remains an angry, disrespectful, foul-mouthed enigma. For inexplicable reasons, she wants the seemingly clueless happy-go-lucky Sid (Nick Krause) present at traumatic family events.

 

Matt has a lot on his plate, including serving as the sole trustee for 25,000 acres of undeveloped land on Kauai that his cousins, including good-time Hugh (Beau Bridges) are urging him to sell before the trust dissolves in seven years. (They stand to make a veritable fortune from such a sale.) Matt has other things on his mind, but it’s what escaped his mind that comes back to haunt him. In an angry outburst Alex reveals that her mother had been having an affair, something confirmed by the Kings' best friends Kai and Mark. Now Matt is both angry and scared, as doctors inform him that Elizabeth will not come out of her coma and under her living will, they are obliged to pull the plug.

 

The Kings leave the Big Island for what is ostensibly an escape to Kauai, but it's really a search for Elizabeth’s lover. It leads to Brian Speer (Matthew Lillard), but Matt’s revenge fantasy cools when he discovers that Brian is married to the very sweet Julie (Judy Greer) and has two children. Brian insists that he did not love Elizabeth and begs him not to destroy his family. He's a sleazebag, but Matt simply informs him of Elizabeth’s impending death and lets that sink in. But Matt is not about to forget that  Brian is a realtor who would make scads of money if the trust lands go to a particular developer. Cue a tearful deathbed scene and observe how Matt resolves the trust.

 

There is a back story involving how a white family came into the possession of so much land on an island that was once the domain of native Hawaiians. The King surname connects to actual historical events, namely the 19th century relationship between missionaries and sugar barons, though the movie’s King family link is purely a script contrivance.

 

The Descendants has been labeled a tragicomedy or a dramedy, hybrid terms which often indicate a movie is neither fish nor fowl. That is indeed true in this case. The Descendants is often touching, but in predictable ways and it’s hard to determine why Clooney's performance was lauded. He’s actually flat in the film, which is appropriate for earlier sequences, but Clooney seldom sounds a different note. In my view, critics were too enamored of his mystique to see that there wasn't much depth to his performance. Woodley was rail-thin in presence and a brat for much of the movie. It doesn't speak well when you are out acted by a nine-year-old. Nor is there any particular reason why Sid is in the script at all other than providing goofy comic relief and later leading Matt to see that snap judgments are not always reality. Not sure that comes as a great revelation to anyone.

 

We are left with a movie that might make some reach for the tissue box, and is perfectly fine as a diversion. It’s worth watching if nothing better presents itself, but don't buy into the hype; it is indeed very ordinary.

 

Rob Weir

Babel is a Brilliant Novel

Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution

By R. (Rebecca) F. Kuang

Harper Voyager, 2023, 549 pages.

★★★★★

 

 

What a fantastic book! And I mean this on several levels. R. F. Kuang is a fantastic writer and scholar. Babel is set at Oxford and there are some gratuitous pokes at Cambridge, but she has degrees from both places and is working on an East Asian language PhD at Yale. Yes, she's that kind of smart and a gifted novelist to boot. Babel is fantastic in that it's a mix of magical realism, imagination, and English society, a veritable alt.history of the 1830s. In such a novel, Kuang departs from what actually happened–parts of the novel feel like a darker adult version of Harry Potter­–but she's also fantastically confident. After noting some of the liberties she has taken, the last line of the forward is one of the best disclaimers ever: “If you find any other inconsistencies, feel free to remind yourself this is a work of fiction.”

 

The Radcliffe Camera of the Bodleian Library the likely model 

 

In the 1830s, robust England is in a throes of a silver industrial revolution. Britannia rules the waves, the global economy, and commands much of the world's wealth because it harnessed the secret of Ag. As you might know, silver has the highest potential for conductivity of any metal. That’s where Oxford comes into play, along with alchemy and abracadabra-like magic. University College–Britain's oldest–contains a domed eight-floor building whose top level is filled with silver bars that run or support everything from trains, carts, machines, sewage systems, bridges, building foundations, clocks, communications, and factories. Think parts of the 21st century transported to the 19th. For the bars to work, though, they must be activated by finding the correct pairings of words and engraving them onto the bars. They must be philologically compatible to work and mistakes can be volatile and dangerous. Hence, this task is left to translators who go to the roots of words, which requires extensive knowledge of ancient and foreign languages. Oxford, not coincidentally, has grown wealthy from its silver work.

 

The novel centers on the education of four students: Robin Swift, a Cantonese lad plucked from China as a boy and raised by Oxford don Robert Lovell; Ramiz “Rami” Mirza, an Indian Muslim; Victoire Desgraves, a black woman of Haitian heritage; and Letitia “Letty” Price,  a wealthy admiral's daughter who was only allowed to enter Oxford because her brother died. To some degree Robin can pass for white, but not Rami or Victoire and the latter, along with Letty, are women. Let’s just say that ethnocentrism,  racism, and sexism were not banished by silver bars! Each was trained from childhood for a stated destiny–success at Oxford–and a hidden one: service to British imperialism. As Kuang writes, most Babel students, “had nowhere in this country to go. They had been chosen for privileges they never could have imagined, funded by powerful and wealthy men whose motives they did not fully understand and they were acutely aware these could be lost at any moment.”

 

Read “trapped in a gilded cage” in that. Babel follows the four from their early giddy days of bonding as only outcasts can do, through their academic rigors and their awakenings. Their stories take place against a backdrop of what is about to happen: Queen Victoria's coronation, the suppression of worker movements, and the Opium Wars with a silver twist. The plot involves incantations, underground rebellions, personal revelations (especially for Robin), and veritable “which side are you on?” choices. All of those details are richly described and resolved in ways too delicious to reveal.

 

One of the more hackneyed ways to end a review is to say, “I'm sorry that this book had to end.” I mean it, though. This novel is intelligent, engaging, well plotted, thrilling, heartbreaking, and beautifully written. It is also a lesson in the interconnections between megalomania, social class, virulent nationalism, war, slavery, and racism. As its rather lengthy title suggests, it also probes several very old human conundrums, including the alluded logic behind the Biblical Babel and philosophical musings over what (if anything) justifies the use of violence. I would have gleefully read another 549 pages.

 

Rob Weir

Edward Hopper & Cape Ann in Gloucester

 

Edward Hopper & Cape Ann: Coming Home

Cape Ann Museum

Gloucester, MA

Through October 16, 2023

 

Edward Hopper is certainly one of the most iconic American painters of the 20^th century. Even if the titles don’t ring immediate bells, Hopper works such as Nighthawks (1940), Chop Suey (1929), Automat (1929), and Early Sunday Morning (1930) are instantly recognizable. Hopper is recognized, with considerable merit, as the preeminent artist of ennui, anomie, and disconnection. He is famed for populating his canvases (if at all) with people who look at anything except each other or you the viewer. His career soared during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when many saw him a quintessential painter of the period’s gloom.

 

Hopper (1882-1967) considered himself a realist painter, a term that has little to do with being photographic or careful depictions of his surroundings. Realism is more a kind of truthfulness, an honest evocation of place, mood, or emotions (or lack thereof). “Eddie” Hopper was born into a strict Baptist family, grew into a rather gangly body, and never entirely cast off his family’s austere Dutch Protestantism. He studied with luminaries such as Robert Henri and William Merritt Chase, but like many budding artists, he struggled for a time. His first trip to Cape Ann–the North Shore in Massachusetts parlance–came in 1912, a veritable search for inspiration. Henri had told him to, “Forget about art and paint what interests you.” That was good advice, but he sold nothing at all until 1913 and his first breakthrough took another ten years. 

 

Josephine Nivison Hopper

 

In 1924, he married Josephine Nivison, also an artist. She proved an adroit booster, manager, and organizer of his career. The two stayed together though their marriage was often stormy and rumors of physical violence swirled. Her career never really took off but before anyone raises gender hackles, the few canvases displayed at the Cape Ann Museum suggest that she was a second-rate talent. When they revisited Cape Ann during the 1920s, his work was noticeably more dynamic than hers.

 

With an artist of such a profile as Hopper’s, it would be pretentious to say I disliked the show at the Cape Ann Museum (CAM). There is much I liked quite a lot, actually, but I was also underwhelmed. Like many artists, Hopper dabbled in various media, such as drawings, etchings, and lithographs. The CAM show is heavy on watercolors and most of them simply lack the poignancy and emotive power of his oils. This is particularly noticeable in its abundance of stand-alone houses. They are fine as documentation of fading styles for the well-heeled, but his oils often took a longer look and included people, dogs, fishermen, and landscape details that invite viewers to write our own narratives. Stripped of them, a grand house of bourgeois dwelling is precisely that and little more. 

 

 

 

 

In many respects, his views of railyards, empty streets, and down-market homes are much more intriguing. In this respect, he followed Henri’s admonition. Henri was a leading light of the Ashcan school of painting, which found more potency and vigor in work, struggle, and grit than in “pretty” things. Hopper as well, which is why his best known works impress more than they please. They are, insofar as Cape Ann is concerned, more “Gloucester,” a fishing town, than the lace, awnings, and graceful porches of elites.

 

Note Hopper's use of verticals and triangles

 

 

 Heres’ an admittedly idiosyncratic critique from a person who literally has trouble drawing a straight line with a ruler. To my eye Edward Hopper simply wasn’t as skilled at watercolors as he was with oils.

 None of this is to say that you should avoid the CAM show. It might be advisable, though, to tamp down your expectations. Another small detail you should know. Since nearly all the works are on loan, no photography of any sort is allowed in the exhibit. I’m sure this is in accordance with stipulations from the various lenders, but I wish the art world would simply stop the striptease. The no-photos horse left the barn a long time ago and you could go to where these paintings reside and photograph most of them in situ. Why not allow patrons small remembrances of their visit? 

 

My favorite. Note how Hopper folded eaves and rooftops into the boat sails!

 

Note: The Hopper images in this piece are taken from internet sources. They are low quality copies of copies, I don’t redistribute them, and I make exactly zero dollars from anything on this blog!     

Music Recommendations for September: Laia Llach, Florencia & The Feeling, Bonnie and Taylor Sims, Amulet, Sandy Bailey

 

 

 

You might glance at the name Laia Llach and think “Welsh.” Nope. She’s a Catalan folk and pop singer with a degree in environmental studies, the latter a value she weaves into her 8-song Sol d’hivern (“Winter Sun”). Others deal with memories and self-affirmation, but she’s also interested in music as a healing tool. Consider it accomplished. The title track alone does so. It is so warm and inviting that no hot cocoa analogies need apply. “Serà La Pluja" (“It Will Rain”) is uncomplicated and gorgeous, with Llach’s sunny demeanor exuding the promise that all will be well. She’s like a delicate bird wafting above troubles. “Campanelles” (“Bells”) doesn’t clang; it a gentle call to play, explore, and revel in nature. The closest she gets to dark is “Dos Sogons” (“Two Seconds”), which is short and a little moody, but the emotional honesty of the song dispels doubts. When she lays down a song such as “Llum” (“Light”), it’s a promise, not a hope. Llach exudes clam and genuineness. In a world of challenges and fear, I adore her to pieces.  

 

 

 

Florencia Rusiñol has a degree in music therapy. Birthday, the debut album from Florenica and The Feeling is both good for what ails you and a cause for celebration. Rusiñol is Canadian-born and of Argentinian extraction. She and her five-piece band now live in Johnson City, Tennessee and, though they call themselves a funk pop fusion band, the emphasis is on fusion. You’ll hear echoes of Latino, cool jazz, and a few other influences as well. The title track features one of the album’s themes: recovering from a bad breakup. But what you’re likely to notice first is the song’s quirky little vocal runs, one that’s somewhere between a stutter step and staccato. She’s more explicit about her yearning in “Meant to Be,” with its memorable line: I can’t erase your shadow from my bed. “Que Será” has a torchy feel melded to a retro pop ballad and “What Can I Do?” is a jazzy take on pop power. 

 

 

 

The new self-titled album by Bonnie and Taylor Sims is loaded with songs for, in their words, “a shifting world marked by the juxtaposition of beauty and pain, hope and destruction.” I’m not sure that’s a new global shift, but you get the picture. Bonnie used to head a lineup called Bonnie & The Clydes and there’s a decided outlaw country streak in this record. Listen to Bonnie lull you into a nice calm place before airing it out on “Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.” Because Taylor plays acoustic guitar the “duo” is often labeled a “country folk” act. But as you see, that’s not always the case when Bonnie plugs in and percussion and electric bass ring out. They do get quiet on “Liza”– just guitar and mandolin–but again, Bonnie’s voice rings out strong and bold. Taylor also has an inviting voice, as you can here in swingy little roadhouse “Side by Side.” They’re based in Colorado these days, but when they sing “Texas Again,” they’re not tourists; they hail from there, the song’s bluegrass feel notwithstanding. 

 

 

 

 

I could do without the pointless electronic noise of “Introduction,” but Amulet settles into more appropriate arrangements on Petit Viking. Amulet is the stage name of singer Antoni Mulet who is from Mallorca, a favored resort in Spain’s Balearic islands chain. Spanish and Catalan are spoken there, but islanders prefer their own dialect. Forgive the linguistics lesson, but it’s my way of saying I have to take Mulet’s word that the songs are based on the hero’s journey and focus on various struggles. The music gets pigeonholed as “indie folk,” but when guitar and banjo share space with brass, explorative keys, and the strident fishorn matters get more complex. But songs like “Estrella” do have a folk feel and what’s a recording these days without a love song like “Amor?” Checkout “Surt, Petit,” which gets my vote for a reason to keep things simple.  Note: There used to be a punk band called Amulet. This performer has no connections to it.

 

 

Let’s round out the reviews with some homegrown Western Massachusetts grit. I first recall Sandra (“Sandy”) Bailey tackling a Mavis Staples song and thought, “Well that takes moxie.” I was wrong. It takes a strong, powerful voice and she has one. Bailey is where Norah Jones meets Susan Tedeschi, Bonnie Raitt, and Patsy Cline and they get together to slay some tunes so get out of the way. Bailey has edge. Check out the album cover, an ironic mash up of a country queen dress and non-Nashville footwear. “I Ain’t Your Honey,” evokes classic Motown with a splash of country pop and a smack of don’t mess with me. How about some ukulele-driven blues on “Already Down.” Her album Daughter of Abraham is full of soul, country blues, gospel-influenced, and Americana offerings. The title track is about a runaway enslaved man walking to freedom. It is done with appropriate dignity and determination: He almost forgot about the holes in his shoes/When his stomach started growling. It’s a different kind of pain, but “Bottles of Emptiness” says it all. I’ve long admired singers who forget about the glitz and just air out the songs. That’s Bailey in a nutshell.

 

The Rabbit Hutch: A National Book Award Winner

 

THE RABBIT HUTCH (2022)

By Tess Gunty

Alfred A. Knopf, 339 pages.

★★★★★ (National Book Award winner)

 

 

When Pete Buttigieg ran for president, he touted his success as mayor of South Bend, Indiana. It's a good thing The Rabbit Hutch wasn't published until 2022 or we might never have heard of Mayor Pete. Tess Gunty modeled dire Vaca Vale on South Bend.*

 

Vaca Vale is such a grim postindustrial city that it can't even be said that dreams die hard there; it's more as if residents are so hollowed out that they are on autopilot and resigned to their fates. Even the local Catholic Church is described as “gothic on a budget.” Our protagonist Blandine Watkins isn't exactly the sort that Buttigieg was selling either.

 

The namesake “rabbit hutch” is shorthand for the La Lapinière Affordable Housing complex. The latter is a fancy name for a down-market building that's mostly inhabited by social services clients, resource-challenged residents, and those on the margins of mental health. It's also a backdoor reference to the city’s past glories. Vaca Vale once produced Zorn automobiles, but the company went out of business in 1963 and took the  city down with it. (Once, South Bend was home to Studebaker, which ceased production in 1967.)

 

So many revitalization plans have come and gone that few can work up much enthusiasm for Maxwell Pinky’s promise that his project will bring new jobs and tax revenue. In fact, his big announcement is sabotaged in unusual ways. Plus, the city is literally plagued by rabbits that are metaphors for locals: “They look tough, like they knew how to break your legs,” but they are fragile, timid prey.

 

This also describes Blandine to a tee. Her birth name was Tiffany but sexual abuse, dashed hopes, and nervous collapse bred a desire to be dead. She has become a devotee of Hildegard von Bingen, a Christian slave martyred in the 2^nd century. Blandine “loves the mystics because they, unlike her, never stopped searching for portals. They treated prayer as their getaway car, cathedral as a rabbit hole, suffering as a Wonderland... The mystics gave up on the Beyond and they refused to leave the Green World.”

 

Good luck finding a Green World at the rabbit hutch. Gunty’s novel is propelled by interlocking biographies that collide with that of Blandine. She shares a flat with three 19-year-olds–Todd, Malik, and Jack–and they're as damaged as she, but in different ways. Others who drift in and out of the complex or are permanently caged there include: an obituary checker who flags inappropriate comments, a new mother suffering from postpartum depression, a woman whose son is in jail, an elderly couple whose devotion to each other is tested by bad luck, a New Age devotee, an artist faced with the choice of paying her rent or fixing her car to get the money to pay said rent, and a man who likes to strip naked, smear broken glow sticks onto his body, and surprise strangers at night–often by breaking into their homes. Gunty also works a TV sitcom actress into all of this.

 

Detailed backstories flesh out how each character came to their present circumstances. It's a toss-up which is weirder, their journeys or the twisted history of Vaca Vale. Blandine’s travails are at the heart of the book, but the various asides paint lurid backdrops. At times there are so many loose threads awaiting connective knots that we, as readers, get tangled in the mess. In a way, that's the point. Blandine is disturbed by “absence” as she walks across her town. “[T]here is junk everywhere she looks,” but it collectively creates an atmosphere of “nothing.” Her own thoughts are similar. She fancies herself a Marxist and has her postmodern rhetoric down, but when she considers the broken relationship that turned her into Blandine as having gone from a state of primitive communism to feudalism and a final capitalist collapse, she's essentially confessing that she has been a rabbit, not a fox.

 

As you can see, this is a multi-layered novel. What is not and is any sort of endorsement of Buttigieg’s South Bend. In essence, Vaca Vale is filled lots of dead rabbits and mammalian survivors who don't thrive.

 

Rob Weir

 

*Full disclosure: I was in South Bend and found it as depressing as Vaca Vale, but that was more than 20 years ago. Maybe it has gotten better. I hope so!

 

 

 

 

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