This was a long one! And so difficult to rate. There were parts where I was ready to give up and DNF. Then there were parts I couldn't put the book down. Being torn between 2 and 4 stars I settled for a 3.
Wellness is a story of a couple from the early 90ies to present. Their evolving relationship, their past, and everyday life concepts they come across.
I had a love hate relationship with Nathan Hill's writing, as well. Very descriptive, long winded sentences, which made me either soak up all the information presented, or skim over, sometimes, page long paragraphs.
Overall the story was decent, and quite a bit of informative sections on interesting subjects. I actually learned a few things.
Thank you, Netgalley, publisher, and author for the ARC.

I went in as a full supporter after loving The Nix but Wellness just fell flat for me. Already verbose I felt it circled back on storylines that were already made clear, which felt painful in a near 700 page book. Additionally, a book written by a white man about an about a bit picky mother and aloof husband just didn’t sit right in 2023.

I’m not going to finish this book. I’m only a few pages in and this is too verbose for me. I can’t imagine 624 pages of this. I wish I liked it better.

Thank you to Netgalley and the Publisher for this Advanced Readers Copy of Wellness by Nathan Hill a weird but wonderful book.

Thanks to Netgalley and Knopf for the ebook. This is an epic examination of one couple who meet in the art scene in Chicago in the 90’s and we jump around in time to focus on their married life and careers, the birth of their son and the endless wait for the construction of their Forever Home. A book that’s not afraid to show our two at their highs and lows, and also takes the time to dig into both of their childhoods in a way that shows they could have only become the people they are right now.

Many thanks to NetGalley for this ARC! Fans of "The Nix" will relish this. The story of Jack and Elizabeth will leave a mark. This was long (>600 pages) for a fiction but I don't know what I would have left out if I was the editor. Sit back and enjoy some of the best writing I've read recently. Nathan Hill is so gifted. This is a "big" novel. Big, important ideas. A Challenging novel. Dig in. Highly recommended for fiction fans.

I struggled to finish this one and wound up stopping at almost half. It goes off on so many satirical tangents about “wellness” topics that I think are funny and clever and quirky but I lose the plot. I liked the characters, I liked their love story. I wanted to see how their lives together played out but it’s was just so much extraneous information to sift through. The pacing was just off for me. I think this will be exactly why some people will love it. I really loved The Nix. I will continue to try books by this author who is no doubt talented, this book was just not a good match for me. I feel like some people will really love this but for me it just didn’t work. Thank you to NetGalley for the early access in exchange for an honest review.

Not a great book for me -- some pretty interesting social commentary and phraseology that made me think. I liked the beginning and the contrast between the subjective realities each of them inhabited -- it's always interesting to be reminded that what you think you observe going on for another person may not have anything at all to do with what is really going on for them -- but after that it seemed to go into a satirical and cynical look at how mature out of their idealistic youth. I prefer to like characters and be able to empathize with their journey but here I found myself first identifying with them and then backing up and sneering at them instead. Also, lots of muddy, run on sentences -- I'm more of a pithy commentary person myself. I will not be posting this review on goodreads or my blog due to my negative feelings about it. I give it 3 stars because there were thought provoking bits which I appreciated.

I couldn’t get through this book and as such I am not providing a rating on Goodreads. It’s a bit of a social commentary and at times humorous. It shares knowledge and is thought provoking. Some chapters were more interesting than others but in the end I chose to put it down rather than to finish it.

Thank you you to NetGalley for providing this early release in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Wellness is one of those stories that will rip out everything you ever thought you knew about love and the daily dynamic and slowly teaches you how to empathize with people who have been through trauma and struggle throughout their adulthoods to cope with their past in the most humanly way possible. Jack and Elizabeth have been together for close to 16 years and in those two decades their love takes a white to black approach in which you get the details in between through different chapters alternating between the both of them.

From their difficult childhoods to the present - trying to find out their new identities and coming to terms with no longer living like they did as children, but learning how to be the parents they truly deserved, it was a beautiful testament to how parents, in general, always question themselves and try to break the chains and overcompensate sometimes. Sometimes you “just need to let it go”, trust yourself that you are doing the best you can and that everything will work itself out in the end.

This is the first book I’ve read by Nathan Hill and I cannot wait to read The Nix! I loved the writing style and the longer sentences, I could feel the anxiety in the character’s POV but every word had a purpose. The only thing I would have changed about the writing was the way he wrote for all the character’s dialogue: they all sounded really similar, it was hard to tell them apart because they spoke for so long sometimes, so they started sounding like the narration side of the book. Other than that, I was mesmerized and wanted the book to last as long as possible!

Thank you to NetGalley, Knopf and Nathan Hill for the ARC, the opinions expressed are my own.

I've never read The Nix, but had heard so much hype and was intrigued by his latest offering that I decided to give it a go. The blurb was really enticing: the '90s, midwest scene, married life challenges, etc. I made it halfway through, but not without struggle. The first 10% flew by and I loved learning about Elizabeth and Jack. The character development was impressive at first, and then tedious. This book has the makings to be great, but it feels to me like it needs to be edited down. I'm curious to know how it all plays out, but I can't continue on, losing interest, at this glacial pace.

Beautiful prose, excellent use of place and deployment of backstory for each of the main characters... but the pace is glacial, and I can't make it past 7%. I'm absolutely certain I'll revisit this book in the future, likely even buying a physical copy so I can take all the time I need with it, because the scant amount I've read is really lovely.

Hill's sprawling new novel is consistently engaging and wildly humorous. It's an intimate look at one couple's relationship, and eventual parenthood, and the power of placebo. Hill's characters feel authentic and the author's wit and storytelling prowess is always on display. A great read.

This could be the Great American Novel. Would that it were possible to award more than Five Stars to "Wellness."

Is there an algorithm for how to describe this book? Besides keeping me riveted for almost 500 pages I came away with so much information that my brain aches. But that is far from all. It's an absolutely beautiful love story which also includes everything you need to know about being alive in the first quarter of the 21st century.

You want psychology? Do you wonder about the Placebo Effect? How about Facebook and other social media? Polyamory? Yup. And so much more. Rather than recount the tale of Jack and Elizabeth, both tortured souls due to their parents' behavior, let me sing the praises of Nathan Hill, who with scholarship blended with humor, will cause you to collar people around you to read aloud passages of pure and absolute genius. I learned more about art and photography here than I did in countless museum visits and Art courses. Same about the

Do not let all this frighten you away from reading one of the most heartfelt and emotionally memorable novels of the century. Thanks and blessings to Knopf and NetGalley..

I was a big fan of The Nix so this second novel of Nathan Hill’s comes with sky high expectations - and boy did it deliver. The book follows Jack and Elizabeth, their meeting each other, 20 years past that when attempting to build their “forever home” and flashbacks into their troubled pasts. Beautifully written tackling topics of romance, art, social media, placebo science, and marriage with poignancy and wit that made me chuckle to myself at times and I counted no less than a dozen times where I looked up from the book and thought wow, that was well done.

As much as I enjoyed The Nix, the premise of this book appeals to me more. As a fellow mid 30s middle class citizen, similar to the protagonists, the various characters involved in the book feel like people I’ve encountered all the time. The boomer father spending his retirement on facebook, the suburbanite moms, the real estate developer bro- all these side characters that are written with such sharpness and wit without reducing them to cliches. The character development sticks out as one of the strong points as the characters are so well written.

This is the best book of 2023. It cements Nathan Hill as one of the best active writers. I urge you all to preorder the book and get your hands on a copy asap. It’s a wonderful book that will stick with me for a good while.

Thank you to the author, netgalley, and Knopf for the advance digital review copy in exchange for an honest review.

The Nix was one of my favorite books of all time but it had been so long since its publication that I was starting to wonder if it was a one-hit wonder, the author like one of those literary sensations that burn briefly and then fizzle out like you always see in movies and books about once-brilliant writers. So when I saw the author had a new book out, I immediately requested it. I had to wait till I was in the right mood for a complicated literary chonker of a book.

And his sophomore effort does not disappoint. This book is just as brilliant in a very different way. It’s a master class in character development; no one is as good at character as Nathan Hill. This effort was well worth the wait.

It’s the story of the marriage of Jack and Elizabeth, the symmetry of the secrets about the darkest sides of yourself that you spare your partner to maintain the illusion of love, of a life together, and each of their callings in life. Jack takes photographs of nothing, without a camera, splotches on wasted photographic paper produced in a darkroom, which he claims are meta abstractions but are really depicting his darkest secret.

Elizabeth, meanwhile, the skeptic and scientist paired with the moody artist and hopeless romantic, runs a company called Wellness, that studies placebo effects and later markets them as treatments, and yet miraculously avoids a criminal investigation of fraud. She’s the prodigal daughter of abusive old money parents, whose families earned their wealth the old fashioned way, by hitching their fortunes to theft, deceit, the Klu Klux Klan and Nazis.

As their marriage unravels, Elizabeth and Jack confront deeper truths about themselves, their upbringings, their core beliefs, all couched in salient truths about algorithms, culture wars, fathers and sons, fathers and daughters, gentrification, a tongue in cheek critique of wokeism but also its opposing force, gender roles, the nature of belief and the stories we tell ourselves to shore up that belief.

In the hands of a lesser author this would have been too much ground to cover in one novel, but in the hands of Nathan Hill, every sentence was perfect, salient and true.

This was a brilliant book and well worth the wait. Beautiful sentences, beautiful, complex, flawed characters, gorgeous storytelling. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance review copy. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

I understand why some people don't like or appreciate this. It's long, wordy, maybe a little pretentious, and it can be hard to read. I loved it for those reasons. I think this is brilliant. The author has an astute eye for the human condition, and I think his presentation of this relationship was stunning.

You have a new fan.

I received a complimentary copy of the book from the publisher and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Two young college students, Jack and Elizabeth, watch each other through windows of their rooms in adjacent buildings overlooking an alley. They fall in love with each other, a romance fated by the buildings they inhabit, call the architecture Chicago brick, renovated warehouses and brownstones. Their romance follows the steps of courtship, marriage, a child, and other living spaces. The living spaces, the rooms in which they live, the dream condo in the stages of renovation and change, an ongoing project, much like their marriage, Facebook as a living space, the yuppie family neighborhood, have as much character as the characters. Years later, as the romance wears off, the stresses of married life have Elizabeth and Jack looking for ways to bring the magic back before the marriage falls apart. Everyone has answers. Amazing as it may seem all answers are right as Jack and Elizabeth push toward separate truths from their respective pasts, their deepest hurts secrets they never share with each other. Nothing was really true in childhood when parents told their children false versions of the truth, some stories passed on through generations. Readers of John Irving’s Until I Find You, will appreciate what Hill has done with the past shared between parents and children.

In this story scenes from a marriage alternate with scenes from the distant and near pasts. The love story is straightforward, the distant past unfolds on the pages like confessions once told a psychoanalyst. Lacking a therapist, personal family histories with their tragedies and ruthlessness remain unspoken but not forgotten, as the couple work with placebos, abstract photography, pop gurus, super-moms, smart phones with apps that plan and regulate their lives, a realtor with a building with condos designed to perfectly meet the separate needs of husband and wife, including the unforetold probability of divorce so the two can continue sharing the same living space.

To be expected, with the foibles of our capitalistic culture at any given moment, there’s much bloviating and commiseration by the author of the mental state of his characters. Some of the writing seems like filler, but entertaining, often informative, and some of the writing makes for good stand-up comedy. Hill even provides a partial bibliography of scientific and parenting documents of his research. Not to forget the prompts by the author, a constant reminding that there are many stories, as he deftly suggests story lines of families provided for the reader to reach conclusions like how a slender historical line from enslavement to exploitation is manifested in white privilege.

Hill hopes, as do I, the reader will read through all this to his staggering emotional ending. This is literature after Infinite Jest, not to say there aren’t traces Joyce’s Ulysses and Nabokov’s Lolita, and the rest of the old literature deeply rooted or embedded like the pasts of Jack and Elizabeth in this story, but this story is vintage romance in a modern day setting and that doesn’t grow old.

Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for an advanced copy.

Thank you Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage and Anchor for the privilege of reading this book. Wellness takes a deep dive into marriage, the highs and lows of relationships and what it takes to dig deep and stay together or let it all go. Jack and Elizabeth find each other in college, she's science driven and he's an artist. I found Elizabeth's way of looking at relationships with the placebo effect fascinating but I'm glad she realizes that's not life and your relationships with friends, your children and your spouse are too complicated when feelings, thoughts and emotions are involved. I was glad for the deeper dive into Jack & Elizabeth's upbringing because it did shed light into their path to each other and what could ultimately drive them apart. I liked the author, Nathan Hill's, wit and depth and will definitely look for his other books.

I never read The Nix but so many people raved about it that when I saw Nathan Hill had a second novel, about marriage and disillusionment and a couple that meets in Chicago, I was intrigued enough to give it a try. Unfortunately his writing style is just not for me. There is nothing wrong here, the author's voice is just not a good fit for my reader preferences and I was not able to connect to the characters or finish the book.