To say there’s a lot going on here would be something of an understatement. Hill packs his book with history, science, landscape, family and above all relationships. The amount of research undertaken is exposed by the notes at the end of the book - prodigious. The result is both an engrossing and at times overwhelmingly theoretical piece of work resting on the relationship between two people whose own hinterlands fill many pages. And those hinterlands are the foundations of the characters’ psychologies in ways so extreme that for all the book’s humor and tenderness, it seems based on fairytale or horror stories. Parents emerge as the villains here, one father and one mother so horrible and obvious in their make-ups that the novel crumbles in their presences.
This flaw weakens the whole book, but setting it to one side, Hill is to be congratulated on that breadth and factual underpinning of his social panorama. There’s so much here. The internet. Capitalism, Postmodernism. I could go on. Ambitious, epic, highly readable but, as mentioned, wonky at its core, this is a beguiling but imperfect work. Bravo for the upside. Pity about the down.

I'm a huge Jonathan Franzen fan, and while the Nix evoked Franzen a little bit for me, this book evoked him a LOT. And that's a good thing.

Wellness use the story of a relationship and a marriage as a framework on which to hang Hill's tremendous intellectual curiosity. Yes, it's a story of two people as their passion for one another waxes and wanes. But I think Hill's real love is non-fiction. He weaves in so many interesting deep dives - - mostly into different aspects of psychology with a touch of business and a bit of university politics. Both leading characters have trauma in their background, and Hill gives plenty of space to slowly reveal their backgrounds and the impact on their relationships and their careers and their child rearing practices.

All in all, I really liked it. It's a bit of a messy ramble of a book, and if you aren't interested in psychology, I don't think the plot line is enough to sustain the reader on its own. I love non-fiction, and to have it embedded in a fictional story made me feel like I really know who Hill is. Or at least made me feel like I'd love to meet him in person. All in all, a fun, well-paced, interesting, literary read . . .perhaps a little self indulgent on the author's part from time to time, but I was there for it.

If there was ever a book depicting how Adverse Childhood Experiences can have a tremendous lifelong effect on your health and wellbeing, Wellness by Nate Hill is it.

Told, distractingly and long-windedly through continuous flashbacks of the Lives of Jack and Elizabeth Bennett, the book presents us with a couple undergoing a midlife marital crisis. The story opens with two lost souls finding their soul mates and winds itself around to a couple who have been together for 20 years, have a child who is likely on the autism spectrum (or he could be perfectly neurotypical and being made to seem odd and out of place by an overly insecure mother), and who are questioning the state of their marriage.
As the story unfolds, via scenes from Jack’s childhood, Elizabeth’s childhood, their teen years, their early days as a couple, Elizabeth’s experiences as a new mother, Jack’s work, Elizabeth’s work, and their present reality as parents, neighbors, and lovers, the story is really about how traumatic experiences in their childhood dictated their emotions and actions, leading to where and who they are now. The problem isn’t their marriage as much as it is the people involved in it.
Wellness makes you think about your own life, your own choices, and what shaped you. At least it will if you can navigate your way to the ending. It took me many tries over a couple of months to make my way through the book. There are a lot of pages, over 500 of them, at least 200 of them are unnecessary to the plot of the story. The book doesn’t’ follow a consistent pattern where we follow Jacka and Elizabeth from meeting to present. Instead, the book feels like a bunch of short stories shuffled like a deck of cards and put together to make the story. One minute you are watching Elizabeth implode because a two-year-old Toby won’t eat the pretty food on his plate, preferring mac and cheese at all meals, then flipping to jack as a child on the prairie with his emotionally challenging mother, then flipping to present day interactions with Elizabeth at a coffee shop, to some random analytical babble on nonsense that doesn’t really belong to the story. It feels all over the place because it is. Just when you get to a good part you are whipped away to something that seem very irrelevant. Some of those irrelevant pieces reveal themselves to have deeper meaning later, others could simply have been left out of the book as neither the story nor the reader became more enriched by it being there.

Would I recommend the story to others? Yes, I already have. I believe there are those who will see themselves and their traumas quite clearly as the story unfolds. I believe that there are those who, even if they don’t see themselves, will question their life and their actions after having read the book. However, I don’t recommend this for people who have problems with patience or focus. It takes quite a bit of fortitude to get through, even if you know the lessons learned might be worth it.

How lucky am I to have received an advance of this book from NetGalley? So lucky! Everyone is in for a treat, an immersive experience, when they read this book when it is published. I am one of the few people who has not read The Nix so must read that next. This book grabbed me from the start as we got to know Jack and Elizabeth as they met as 20-year-olds, and meandered through their childhoods and marriage. I laughed out loud, especially in the internet algorithm section, and so enjoyed reading about Elizabeth's work with placebos. I cried at the end, mostly because it was over. Yes, this was a long book (over 600 pages!) but it never dragged and I loved every bit.

I just went back to read my review for The Nix and I could say many of the same things for Wellness, too. Hill is simply a masterful writer, (e.g. "Immensity plus monotony. That's marriage in a nutshell.") Like The Nix, this is a slower book that takes its time, but if you're into it, you'll find it well worth the ride.

The book peels open like an onion, with gentle call-backs that take you back and forth in time. Nothing is presented at face value. Instead, we keep lazily diving deeper into the present and the past, unraveling the stories of who these people are and why they do the things we do.

Ultimately, this is a story about a mid-life marriage on the rocks. "Parents who acted toward each other less like lovers and more like confounders of an at-home business whose products were children"(Ooof. That's a gut punch of a sentence.

There are no villains in this story. (In this way it reminded me of "Fleishman Is in Trouble.") You explore each person's history and missteps, hopes and dreams. Ultimately there is no easy answers (as is true for any long-term relationship.) You're not sure, even at the end, whether you're rooting for them to stay together or not.

The ideas of wellness is woven throughout the book as a central theme, but is not the subject of the story. Instead, we look at the idea of what it means to be "well." What does happiness and health actually look like? How much of our wellness is based on things we seek outside ourselves (money, prestige, power) versus what we inherently believe or experience innately? How can we forge "well" long term relationships when we (and our concept of wellness, wants, and needs) keep changing over time?

As with the Nix, if you're looking for a fast-paced plot, zippy sentences, and a linear, black and white story where you immediately know who to root for, this may not be the book for you. But, for me it was lovely.

Thank you to the author and NetGalley for granting me the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

Isn’t it great when one of your most anticipated titles for the year delivers, and delivers big?
Folks, for all you #TheNix lovers out there, there’s no worry of a sophomore slump in Nathan Hill’s brilliant, #Wellness
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At its simplest it’s the story of a marriage. A marriage that has spanned time beyond the initial bloom of first romance, past the ten year mark when many marriages have already fallen by the side of the road, and is now at the bottom of the U shaped curve of a relationship when longevity, and kids, and ennui have settled in and partners might find themselves asking, “Is this it?”
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It’s a novel about the choices we make, the expectations we have both for ourselves and our loved ones. It’s about parents and children and how we try to escape out pasts while desperate to not pass on generational trauma. It’s about algorithms and hyperlinks and social media’s effect on us and the ones we love. It’s about art, and science and monogamy and how who we were informs who we’ve become.
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It’s a damn stuffed suitcase of ideas that Hill unpacks with sheer genius, and absolutely one of my favorite books of the year. Thank you to @aaknopf for the advance copy. #Wellness comes out 9/19

I wasn't the biggest fan of the structure of the novel, but Nathan Hill's writing and character development are excellent. Jack and Elizabeth felt so real to me.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the free e-copy.

SO many thanks to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor, Knopf for the opportunity read Wellness by Nathan Hill. Exquisite. If you want a writer who is going to make you think, you want Nathan Hill.

Wellness is Nathan Hill’s sophomore effort, after the well written, often funny The Nix. This time, Hill has focused his attention on modern married life, that stage when the bloom is long off the rose. Jack and Elizabeth have been married for twenty years, after meeting as college students in Chicago. “All they wanted back then was to eliminate the space between them. And now, here they were twenty years later, putting it back.”
The book covers a lot of different topics. A lot! Internet research, health trackers and fitness programs, divorce, open marriage, conspiracy theories, art, cults. In fact, in the Bibliography, Hill writes “One of the great joys of writing a book is that it gives me permission to explore the various odd things that grab my attention, to dive deeply into those subjects that puzzle, amuse or amaze me. This book has many such deep dives.” He’s not kidding.
It’s a very cynical book. It makes fun of all the new age BS out there. It took me back to my working days when Hill made fun of the woowoo corporate speak. I can remember being told to “bond and interface”. Hill loves to play with and make fun of language. Elizabeth majored in psychology and her job included clinical studies. So, there are lots of psychological topics and studies thrown in. There’s also a whole chapter on the history of Elizabeth’s family and how they made their money, which I found enlightening (but I’m a history nerd) and humorous but definitely did nothing to advance the story about Elizabeth and Jack.
At heart, the story is about belief, faith and hope. It’s the stories we tell ourselves that form our beliefs and impact how we act. Whether the story is based on fact makes no difference. It’s the whole idea behind the placebo effect that Elizabeth studies over and over. “The key is to keep persisting inside your fantasy until the fantasy becomes a fact.”
The book could definitely have been condensed. At times it rambled and it was not consistently interesting or evenly paced. I’m not sure I needed all those pages describing the algorithms that Google and Facebook use (although it was an education). But it works much more than it falters. And it reads surprisingly fast for a 600+ page book.
This book cries out to be a book club selection. It will make you think, ask questions, look inward and outward. And laugh. It will definitely make you laugh. I have a feeling that it’s a book that is going to evoke a lot of strong emotions, one way or the other.
My thanks to Netgalley and Knopf for an advance copy of this book.

Nathan Hill is back on September 19th with another sweeping Great American Novel - Wellness. Wellness begins with two people falling deeply in love. They both come to Chicago for the same reason, to become orphans, and find one another at seemingly the perfect time. Two small words, “come with”, open a world of possibilities for them. We then quickly fast forward to them deep into suburban life and all the  health fads, corporate ironies, and parental stresses and comparisons that come with it. The story bounces back and forth in time, showing us their childhoods, and how the pain of them manifests in their adult lives. 
I have not known two characters so deeply in a long long time. Jack and Elizabeth are so fully formed they feel real. Other aspects of this novel are *slightly* speculative. There is something called “The System” which is essentially Apple watch but it tracks literally everything about you. There are cults disguised as so many things in the wellness industry, encapsulating and exaggerating our current realities. Wellness can mean whatever you want it to mean. And Hill explores all those possibilities. 
This novel about a couple, about being well, about art,  about placebos and how they affect us, both enraptured and frustrated me. Hill digresses frequently, and while those digressions will work for many and do add meaning, took me out of this a bit and made me feel it’s length. Nonetheless, I’m so glad I powered through. This book is about so much but going so deeply into one relationship and what makes its occupants tick was a powerful experience and reminded me at times of the power of Fates and Furies. While the Nix is still my favorite Hill, I’m very excited for this to be read and discussed.

Wow. Wow. Wow. This is a book that makes you think. I would describe it as a cross between "Fates and Furies" and "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow." Like the author's previous book, "The Nix," it is chock full of content and goes deep on some arcane stuff that you might or might not be interested in. At its heart, though, it is a book about how our families shape our identities and how we approach relationships and think about love. It is also about art, society, health and wellness trends, and the data/science behind social media. It's deep, compelling and quirky. It is definitely worth reading and talking about. Recommended.

Really enjoyed this new book by Nathan Hill! It's a long book - a little daunting at first but I loved the division of sections that allowed me to read little gems of writing and get into the characters and their lives.
This is the story of Jack and Elizabeth, two of the most interesting and fully developed characters I have read about in a long while. They meet as college students, marry and have a son. We follow them over 20 years of married life to midlife crisis.
The way the author reflects on life in America in the 21st century is nothing short of amazing to me. I have never found a male author so in touch with female feelings especially in relationship to motherhood and marriage.
The careers of both Jack and Elizabeth are fascinating as well as their backstories of growing up.
There is quite a bit of shifting of time and perspectives in the book which I felt was handled quite well and in fact added to the story.
Particularly interesting to me was the section on social media and how it contributed to troubles with personal interactions in the characters - certainly made me think critically.
This is a beautifully written book and one I think worthy of a reread. I think this will be a top book for 2023. It certainly was for me.
Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for the ARC to enjoy and review!

I adored this book. Hill brilliantly commented on modern life with satire and warmth--the satire never felt cold or cruel and the warmth never felt cloying or saccharine. I appreciated the thoughtful examination of optimization culture, the way the internet warps relationships, and, most of all, the stories we tell ourselves to get through this messy life. All of this is done through exquisite, poignant scenes amidst a story that is truly compelling. I wasn't bored once in all 600 pages. This will undoubtedly be on my fall reading guide as well as my best books of the year list. Public reviews to come on @fictionmatters (IG) and fictionmatters.substack.com.

Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students and fall in love, but the falling in love part of this story is brief. We see them twenty years later, trying to buy their forever home in an expensive part of Chicago. They’ve been renters for a long time thanks to occupations that aren’t exactly making them rich. Jack’s photography career, which once seemed promising, has now been reduced to being an adjunct art history teacher with no benefits and no guarantees he’ll even have a job the next semester. Elizabeth’s works with placebos and the power of what you can get people to believe when they take a sugar pill or snort a saline solution.

Buying a condo that is not yet built brings a lot of things to the surface. They have an eight-year-old boy who doesn’t like to socialize but will throw a fit—in public—over seemingly nothing, and this doesn’t make the romantic part of married life any easier.

The story swings from the present to the childhoods that shaped them and thus, how they react to each other as a married couple.

This is a really sweeping, epic novel that covers art, politics, history, Facebook wars, and the lies we tell ourselves. I really enjoyed this. It’s a fairly hefty read and absolutely worth it.

NetGalley provided an advance copy of this novel, which RELEASES SEPTEMBER 19, 2023.

Nathan Hill has performed a miracle with Wellness. He lived up to the exceedingly high expectations I had after The Nix, and made a book about marital discord and the difficulties of raising a child, enjoyable to me childless, happily married, divorce lawyer.

I don’t usually enjoy books about marital discord. They strike too close to home. They don’t let me escape from my day job, they are just a fictionalized version of it. Wellness is none of that. Wellness is an exceptionally well researched novel about the complexities of marriage and raising a child. It’s fiction, but it has a bibliography at the end. It’s not a beach read level of escapism, but it’s not a depressing slog through the difficult parts of a relationship.

As I was reading Wellness the band the Silversun Pickups song “Empty Nest” was getting some minor radio play. It was a fitting song to accompany the book. The song begins with “Did you notice, did you notice our friends are running late? So time to misbehave.” We have anticipation of fun and excitement to break up the monotony of their life. But that later turns into the refrain “Sit in a room right next to you. And now I wanna leave”. This matches well with what happens to the main characters’ relationship in Wellness.

Jack and Elizabeth meet in Chicago in the early nineties. Both are seeking to escape from their dysfunctional families. Jack by studying art, and Elizabeth studying everything. They are described as moving to Chicago to become orphans. Their mutual attraction and love for each other is apparent, and their method of failing for each other, while farfetched and well telegraphed, made me smile when it is finally revealed.

Jack and Elizabeth quickly become a couple, and it’s clear that those first years together in Chicago become the golden years that they often fondly look back on. Jack describes how “for the rest of his life, the songs released this winter will always call him back to these feelings of expansiveness and freedom[.]” They fall in love, and Hill’s beautifully describes love as “an expansion of the self. It’s when the boundaries of the self spread out to include someone else, and what used to be them now becomes you.”

As a happily married childfree person, I enjoyed the portion of the book where Jack and Elizabeth felt betrayed when their friends started having children and losing interest in activities that didn’t involve children. This betrayal felt worse for Jack and Elizabeth as their friends became their new adopted family of like-minded people. But, in a passage that applies to both their relationship to their now child having friends, and their relationship to each other, “they hadn’t considered […] that people don’t stay like-mind forever.” Hill’s exploration of this topic and the idea that what we consider to be our core self, changes. We are different selves depending on the circumstances of our life at the time. Hill notes that “All of these selves felt true at the time.”

We see glimpses of Jack and Elizabeth’s life after they first meet, but then again later in the 2000’s. They are married and have a child. Jack is an adjunct professor going nowhere and Elizabeth works for Wellness, a company that uses placebos to treat all manner of vague and not too serious medical issues. We see that as Jack and Elizabeth have grown, and failed to grow, their relationship has encountered problems. During this time period the refrain from “Empty Nest” seemed to perfectly describe Jack and Elizabeth’s relationship. They are in a sitting in a room next to each other and they both want to leave. Elizabeth is convinced that they are at the bottom of a happiness U shaped curve that peaks at 20, bottoms out around 40, and spikes again around 60. She doesn’t call this a midlife crisis, but rather as a time that is a “slow ebb into a quiet and often befuddling restlessness and dissatisfaction.”

One passage during the bottom of the curve period of the relationship perfectly describes the challenges of marriage. Elizabeth wants Jack “to contribute, but only in the exact and precise and singular way she imagined but never once articulated.” For most of my clients the root cause of their eventual divorce is a communication issue of some kind. They won’t tell me that, they’ll say money issues, or parenting, or infidelity, but those are usually the end result of a failure to communicate on important issues. Elizabeth is unhappy with Jack, but unwilling/unable to communicate that to him. Instead of telling him why she’s unhappy, she instead sets up a meeting with a polyamorous couple at a speakeasy. This goes on to not fix their relationship, but highlight to them both that they have a problem.

Insights into Jack and Elizabeth’s childhood help the reader understand how they turned into a semi dysfunctional couple. Confronting their childhood helps both of them understand what they need to do to move on. Jack realizes that he is best described as someone who doesn’t let anything breathe. Nothing evolved or unfolded naturally without Jack seeking to control or coerce it. He realizes that his need for Elizabeth is so great that he’s suffocating her. His fear of losing her is described as choking “the life right out of their marriage.”

Elizabeth meanwhile realizes everything she does to self-sabotage her life. Her fear of upsetting her father by one-upping him in any way leads her to constantly set herself up for failure. How in choosing Jack, a man who loves her and idealizes her so much, she can continue to feel like she’s the failure because she will never be able to live up to it. She realizes that perhaps the bottom of the U shaped curve of happiness occurs because “maybe that’s just how long it took to discover the specific, tortuous ways you were lying to yourself.”

I rarely mark up books or highlight passages when reading. For Wellness I highlighted over 30 different passages. In reviewing passages for this review, I ended up highlighting even more. Some passages were highlighted because they were funny, some were poignant, one were highlighted because I’d been to the speakeasy in Chicago that he was perfectly describing without naming. Or things that rang true because I’d experienced them in my life, like when he detailed the food served as a work meeting for Jack, the vegan meal is described as “a single diaphanous leaf of wet lettuce.” Or later “She is a lifelong vegan. Word of advice? Never ask how she gets enough iron in that diet. It seems to trigger her and she becomes necessary intense and sort of activist.” When I became a vegan my doctor suggested iron supplements. Amount of iron in one cup of chicken, 1.8 mg, amount of iron in one cup of chickpeas, 4.7 mg. How do you meat eaters get enough iron in your diets? Whoops, became a bit intense and activist there, sorry.

It took me weeks to finish Wellness, not because it isn’t a quick read, but because I didn’t want the experience of reading it to end. I don’t want to have to wait another 6 years for Hill’s next book. Hill finds insight into everyday life over and over in Wellness. With most books, I’m happy for one or two things that ring true and stick with me. For Wellness, I’m lucky to leave it with dozens of passages that brought me joy in some way.

Thank you to Net Galley and the Publisher for the ARC.

You get to know the characters in Wellness inside and out, and experience their lives in layer upon layer, year upon year. There are some truly interesting ideas re the human psyche. And, like The Nix, there are great Chicago settings. Beautifully written, with a fascinating bibliography to boot.

The Nix was one of my favorite books of 2016. I listened to it in on CD (remember those?) and I’ll stop for a special “wow…just wow” for Ari Fliakos, the sole narrator, who created a distinct voice for each of many (many) characters, from self-satisfied high school teacher to Norwegian immigrant. Best. Narrator. Ever.
I went old school with Wellness, thanks to receiving a free copy from NetGalley. It’s a little less epic in scope, but the same way that the *Iliad* is less epic than *The Odyssey.*
Jack Baker and Elizabeth Augustine meet in Chicago as college students. They come from opposite ends of the unhappy childhood spectrum: She, the daughter of old, corrupt money, and he, the son of Nebraska farmers, living out bleak lives on a bleak landscape. (Note: the “bleakness” here is a judgment call from this reviewer, who is herself a “coastal,” if not necessarily “elite,” and prejudiced against the Flyover.) Jack believes he and Elizabeth are soulmates, fated to be together; his belief will be tested in years to come, but Wellness is in large part about the nature of belief itself.
Twenty years on, Jack and Elizabeth are living, in some ways, ordinary middle-class lives, working, raising a son, and looking forward to when they can move into their “forever home,” a condo to be built in a new building.
But Hill’s gift (I’m tempted to say “genius,” but the term gets overused – let’s put that a temporary hold on that one) is zeroing in on what we many of us deal with every day, from helicopter moms to Facebook junkies to juice cleanses, exposing both the hilarity and the humanity.
*Wellness* never reads as satire, though – just really good storytelling.

Two people observe each other from their windows across the alley. So begins an incredibly interesting journey, both forward and looking back, on the lives of Jack and Elizabeth. The results of their childhoods and the effects on adulthoods are explored through art, science, relationships, social media, current issues, and more. I learned so much from this book. Enjoyed every minute, especially the twist at the end, and did not expect it to end. I recommend this to everyone I know. Thank you NetGalley for the ARC.

My first thought after closing this novel on the last of it’s 600 plus pages is to hope that the committees who award the major book prizes will consider this fine one. To write a story this long that is essentially a dissection of two people, their marriage, and what makes it all tick while keeping the reader engaged is masterfully done here. Nathan Hill has interspersed vignettes of his character’s experiences with sections talking about issues that are of interest and part of all our own daily lives like psychology, the ways of social media, and even the many ways to look at art in the world. For some years The Nix has been sitting on one of my bookshelves. I bought it when it was a best seller thinking it looked interesting and then bypassed it as one often does. I must remedy that now after having loved Wellness.

WOW. I don’t typically read big books, but DANG this one was HUGE. Me 624 pages later is reeling with renewed ‘wellness’ – OOOP there I go name-dropping the title, and invigorated to share my thoughts on this ongoing narrative into the inner workings and lives Jack and Elizabeth.

Elizabeth met Jack at a rock show back in the nineties and she was immediately captivated by his composure, intentionally locking eyes with him so they might strike up a connection, and that they did, in fact they got married, had children, and bought a condo, but in between then in now a lot transpired including: irritable interactions, generational trauma, lack of intimacy, issues with children, troubles parenting, struggles at work, and so many other run-ins, which is common for most people alive. I know I struggle with some of those things.

Jack loves the heck out of Elizabeth and Elizabeth is just trying to cope with the ever-evolving weight of being responsible for so much. I found this is the first book I’ve read in while that illustrates the true realities of being alive as an adult with many responsibilities and stressors.

I really enjoyed this on audio and in physical format and have Knopf, Netgalley, PRH Audio, and Nathan Hill to thank for the access. Wellness hits shelves on September 19, 2023, and I can’t wait.