Wellness
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3.8 • 5 Ratings
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
AN OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK!
'This brilliant novel will leave you thinking about the truth of your own life and the stories we tell ourselves and each other.' - Oprah Winfrey
The New York Times Bestseller.
'A hilarious and moving exploration of a modern marriage that astounds in its breadth and intimacy.' - Brit Benett, author of The Mothers and The Vanishing Half
From Nathan Hill, acclaimed author of The Nix, comes another hugely ambitious novel, about how we change, grow and age. Wellness is a story of marriage, middle age, our tech-obsessed health culture, and the bonds that keep people together, for readers of Jonathan Franzen, Jennifer Egan and Elizabeth Strout.
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 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.
Moving from the gritty 90s Chicago art scene to a suburbia of detox diets and home renovation hysteria, Wellness mines the absurdities of modern technology and modern love to reveal profound, startling truths about intimacy and connection. In this follow-up to Hill's electric debut, Wellness reimagines the love story with healthy doses of insight, irony and heart.
'Nathan Hill is a maestro . . . the best new writer of fiction in America - the best' - John Irving
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hill (The Nix) blends a family chronicle with cultural critique in his expansive and surprisingly tender latest. Jack Baker, a photographer, and Elizabeth Augustine, a self-styled polymath, live across the street from each other as college students in 1990s Chicago, where each spies on the other through their windows. After they meet face-to-face at one of the alt rock shows Jack photographs, they connect over their interest in the local music scene and fall in love. Twenty years later, the couple and their eight-year-old son are planning a move to the suburbs. Jack, who's now an adjunct professor of art history, and Elizabeth, a researcher for a lab contracted by the FDA to study the placebo effect in wellness products, both wonder what's left of their bohemian youth and their long-ago voyeuristic romance. One night, they're invited to a sex club by another couple they meet at a bar, with whom they reminisce about the "abandoned" neighborhood where they first met, prompting a waiter to call out Jack for erasing the community's Puerto Rican population. As the Dickensian chronicle shifts between past and present and probes such issues as gentrification, toxic internet culture, and modern parenting, the realities of the couple's meet cute come into focus, and they learn the truth behind their first impressions. In the end, Jack and Elizabeth's story speaks to the way people craft narratives to give their lives meaning, and it asks whether believing in those narratives ultimately helps or harms. This stunning novel of ideas never loses sight of its humanity.
Customer Reviews
So Long
Sophomore novel by American journalist turned fiction writer much praised for his short fiction, and his long form debut ‘The Nix’ (2016).
Summary
Love story of Jack and Elizabeth from their first meeting in the 1990s to marriage and parenthood 20 years later. Both are involved in the Chicago “art scene”, a tenuous existence at best at times, and must cope with frustrated ambitions. In seeking to do so, they — mainly her — become enmeshed in the cult that is the “wellness industry,” about which the author has plenty to say. He also waxes both lyrically, and not so lyrically, on ‘Facebook’, polyamory, and various other topics.
Writing
I have no complaints about the quality of the prose, just the quantity. The protagonists’ story is worth reading, but would have come in at less than half the page count by itself. Mr H couldn’t shake off his journalistic ways and felt the need to educate his readers as well on topics about which he has obviously done considerable research and feels strongly. This failed to enhance the narrative for one grumpy old white guy at least. ‘The Nix’ was also a door stop that didn’t need to be IMHO.