Wellness by Nathan Hill explores the ups and downs of married life with kids while also managing to provide a thoughtful, often times hilarious, criticism of the age of technology we are living in. As a reader, I truly fell in love with both Jack and Elizabeth. Jack and Elizabeth are both quirky, eccentric characters with mother wounds that run deep.

Jack's mother blames him for his sister's death (he was only nine when she died) and said some pretty awful things to him that result in a core belief he holds that he is broken and unwanted. It's not until he meets Elizabeth, an aspiring artist who lives life ten toes down, that he feels alive and seen. The two fall in love, get married, and have a son named Toby who is another character I know will live in my head rent free. Hill does a powerful job of showing how our children view us. There are certain aspects revealed in the narrative that the reader can only comprehend through Toby's eyes.

I love that while Jack and Elizabeth are central to the story the author also manages to show important aspects of their upbringing, family life, mistakes and hopes they hold onto as a way to drive home the character's internal battles and triumphs. This story is human, funny, and full of life!

Thank you to the author and publisher for the e-arc copy!

Jack and Elizabeth meet in a romantic fever dream of artistic expression and individuality in Chicago during the 1990s, each of them bursting with the desire to differentiate themselves from their oppressive families and claim a place in the underground art scene. Twenty years and a child later, they struggle to recognize each other, and the forgotten dreams of their youth taunt them. The book examines what wellness means to them throughout the various stages of their lives and relationship. As both a couple and individually, Jack and Elizabeth are forced to realize that they cannot expect their partner to complete them without individually reconciling their prior aspirations against their unfulfilling careers, the struggles of parenthood, and painful memories of their adolescence.

Thank you as always to @netgalley, Nathan Hill, and @aaknopf / @penguinrandomhouse for the ARC. I loved The Nix and was so excited to see another book by Hill, and was even more excited when my request for an advanced copy was approved. I absolutely loved this. The last chapter was probably one of the most perfect things I have ever read. I legit highlighted the whole thing. This book did an excellent job of examining relationships under the influence rapidly changing technology and the social media-era need of demonstrating perfection. There were a lot of great discussions regarding philosophy, photography and art, the placebo effect, ethics in medicine, algorithms, sexual insecurity, and the curse of wealth, among many other themes. I really enjoyed the competing narratives of Jack and Elizabeth. Ambitious but extremely well-executed, Wellness is a sprawling novel with deep themes and an incredible examination of life in the twenty first century. I highly recommend adding this to your TBR! Wellness hits shelves everywhere on September 19.

A quote I loved: “Beyond all the poetry, beyond all the songs, love is this, my dear: it’s 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.”

Abe one more! “Behind curtains, this, he thinks, is what lovers do—they are alchemists and architects; pioneers and fabulists; they make one thing another; they invent the world around them.”

“Wellness,” the sophomore work from “The Nix” author Nathan Hill, has a lot of the charm that made his debut so beloved. With snappy wit and a keen eye for absurdity, Hill targets parenthood, social media, capitalism, science, art, and groups of all political affiliations. Since one of his key themes is storytelling, the plot cycles through vignettes in Jake’s and Elizabeth’s lives. Sometimes, these stories cover similar ground. I think this is part of Hill’s project, looking at ways stories change over time, but readers should not expect an action-packed book. It’s more of an ideas-driven, rather than a plot-driven, novel. For me, the humor kept me engaged throughout. “Wellness” is your intellectual medicine surrounded in a tasty candy coating of comedy.

This is a huge novel that starts with a couple meeting and throughout the story you find out where they come from, why they are the way they are, and what they have gone through. There were many discussions brought up including marriage, parenthood, childhood, placebo, the internet and algorithms, and much more.

I learned a lot about many different topics in this book and/or was offered another perspective. Some of the things went way over my head, but it didn’t deter me from reading. It just made me more interested. I learned more about art and photography in this book than I have anywhere else! All the topics felt very current and relevant.

This book would be a great book club pick and I would love to listen to a podcast or watch a video of others discussing. I would recommend to people who enjoy love stories that aren’t romance and learning in fiction.

I wanted to like this. I found the premise very interesting, but the long paragraph after long paragraph was tiring and boring to read. DNF at 11%.

Some books are hard to read because they are poorly written, have shallow characterization, or use pretentious language. This book is none of those. It is hard to read because you palpably feel the characters' pain. Wellness follows the life of its two main characters, Gen X bohemians who met in art school in Chicago in the nineties and instantly fell in soulmate love. Thirty years later, they are trapped in a boring marriage and dealing with the fallout of their dysfunctional families of origin. Hill writes searing prose that is by turns hilarious and soul-assaulting. He deftly satirizes contemporary wellness culture (the wife of the couple runs a nonprofit that gives people placebos to solve their problems). He analyzes the divisiveness of social media by explaining algorithms succinctly and clearly (I finally get why they're so dangerous!). And he exposes the folly of capitalism, white flight, suburban cultural oppression, and sexual experimentation as a replacement for meaningful connection. I almost put down this book several times because it hurt my soul. I'm still glad I finished it.

Thank you to Knopf and NetGalley for the digital ARC of 'Wellness' by Nathan Hill.

I loved 'The Nix' and raved about it to anyone who would listen when I read it so was excited to hear that Nathan Hill had a new novel coming out.

Although not as outstanding as 'The Nix' I very much enjoyed 'Wellness.' The Nix was multi-generational and multi decade and while this is also in the same ballpark, it's much more contained in terms of the time-frame and the generations involved.

I would say it's an on-the-nose, sometimes very funny critique of the past twenty years or so of modern American (and global life). It takes aim at social media, the wellness-healthcare industrial complex, technology, gentrification (and the realization that the people being gentrified on top of, themselves displaced someone else), capitalism, politics and local activism (left- and right-wing), art, culture. They're all in Nathan Hill's crosshairs. There's a really strong undercurrent of self-loathing (the two main characters are escaping screwed-up childhoods and abusive/non-caring parents) and the role all of the above plays in overcoming or dealing with or papering over the effects of that childhood and self-loathing.

As I said, not as outstanding as The Nix but wonderfully written with characters you want to engage with.

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 recall. 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. Thought slight in build, Jack now sports an enormous tattoo, studies photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, hangs out at seedy venues to see “hot” now-forgotten bands, and makes an unexpected splash in the art scene du jour. Elizabeth studies psychology and mentors with Dr. Otto Sanborn, a guru of placebo studies. They fall in love based on the ideal that the other is the rebel they only pretend to be. Ha!

Jack and Elizabeth 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 reality they aren’t the people they thought they’d be. Jack constantly seeks stability and Elizabeth has an even odder path. She opens a research lab called Wellness that does blind trials on placebos but, on a personal level, she’s really 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 deep background 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 parallels those of Minecraft and other trends. I even agree with such thinking, but such passages and others 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?

Nonetheless, 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 massive faded tattoos, real ones and those metaphorically etched onto our skin.

Rob Weir

I had high hopes for this book when I started, it pull me right in. Unfortunately, it became tedious, long, and not worth the effort to finish.

This book is a wholeeee TOME. 600+ pages, but none of it dragged!

Most people who have read this so far have deemed Hill's first novel 'The Nix' as an all-time favorite book. I have actually not read this book yet, and I have new interest to add it to my list.

This book covers falling in love, marriage, monogamy v non-monogamy, Facebook, 'The Man,' etc.

I believe some people will find this book highly relatable, while others may find it preachy. I found it somewhere in between

Through the eyes of Jack and Elizabeth, we get a real good look at the idea of 'Wellness'. For Jack and Elizabeth, this term is defined differently through the stages of their life. Does that it mean being the aspiring artist/entrepreneur, the perfect mom/dad, the perfect husband/wife? With the added physical and emotional factors of life added into the mix, the term well-being becomes completely subjective.

Nathan Hill is an extremely talented writer but I don’t think his writing style fits with my reading style. Wellness seems to want to be a Great American Novel, and perhaps it is, but the long passages of exposition made the pace just too slow to keep my interest. I was enchanted at first by the love story of Jack and Elizabeth, and then I realized that this was going to be a novel where time jumps around, which is fine, but Hill’s ambition to address so many themes and situations makes the exposition necessary (otherwise the novel would be even longer), and that is the main problem for me.

I read Hill’s previous work-THE NIX-and thought it fabulous. He seemingly disappeared and then 7(?) years later-WELLNESS!!!!! I’m now convinced he spent a good portion of those years writing/ researching WELLNESS. On one level it is the relationship between the two main characters-Jack and Elizabeth. He a photographer, she multi-talented but settles on psychology and psychological testing. Both are “ damaged” as a result of terrible childhoods, and their absolutely terrible upbringing is explored in detail. BUT-it is so much more. Life in rural Kansas, the wellness industry and the effect of placebos, photography, the computer/ search firms-in this case FACEBOOK-and the algorithms they utilize to influence us, a look at polyamorous love relationships and what drives them, how major construction works are perilously funded, how “ cults” can so easily ostracize people and ruin lives-in short-well worth the 600 page tome it is!!! Beautifully written, captivating snd informing-a “ must read” of 2023!!!!!!!

“Wellness” will undoubtedly be deemed the next Great American Novel™ because of its length and exploration of timely topics through a Middle America lens, but whereas some might view that as a compliment, I think it pigeonholes the story – and possibly alienates potential readers.

Sure, Nathan Hill explores the intersection of technology, politics and money on the conscious and subconscious self, but he went for intimacy over scale, using those elements as a framework to dissect what is, in essence, a love story.

It starts in the early 1990s, when modern bohemians (think “Rent”) Jack and Elizabeth have fled to pre-gentrification Wicker Park, Chicago, to escape repressive childhoods. They quickly become each other’s entire world and vow to maintain their anti-establishment ideals.

Twenty years later they would be nearly unrecognizable to their younger selves, having embraced the trappings of capitalism and allowing a chasm to grow between them – the product of unresolved trauma that manifests as a desire to please others over self.

These are the broadest strokes of the story, and the homebase that Hill frequently revisits. Yet between the 600+-pages is a cornucopia of interesting anecdotes and social commentaries that melded into the most interesting and entertaining book I’ve read this year.

Readers of Hill’s debut “The Nix,” know that his storytelling doesn’t follow a straight line. There’s a plot, sure, but how the novel ends is far less interesting than the journey he takes us on. And, this journey will take you everywhere from the Flint Hills of Kansas to the forests of Western Connecticut and a swingers’ club in Chicago.

Jack and Elizabeth are given near equal page-time and through flashbacks and reflection, we learn the depth of their challenges and how desperately they want to resolve them. The story is so immersive that I felt like a voyeur spying on the most personal moments of two strangers.

Whereas the scope of “The Nix” was extensive, balancing decades worth of dual POVs and introducing many characters – both real and fictional – as they experience watershed world events, “Wellness’ is far more contained but no less epic.

In many ways, I think Hill did a better job of not letting ideas or situations overshadow the characters – a minor issue with “The Nix” – but strong character arcs is only one aspect of what made this novel so engrossing.
In the author’s note, Hill said that writing a book gives him “permission” to explore the various “odd things” that grab his attention. In this case that’s the psychology of placebo, social media algorithms, fine art and, of course, long-term relationships.

Each of these topics play an important role in the plot, and I was frequently struck by the depths of Hill’s knowledge, further evidenced by the nearly 20-page bibliography that shows he did extensive research on each topic, too.

We’ve all read novels where it’s clear the author is trying to impress the reader, but Hill is the ultimate Midwesterner, effortlessly showing off while never coming across as pretentious. Thanks, in large part, to the humanistic and humorous approach he takes to each situation.

He knows these whims need to pay off, and with maybe one or two exceptions, he found a way to organically connect them in a meaningful way to Jack or Elizabeth. For instance, readers already know that social media algorithms manipulate data to optimize engagement so rather than give us a primer on the topic (which he does), it’s through the lens of how this manipulation further erodes the relationship between Jack and his father.

My one complaint is that he didn’t quite nail the ending. The last few chapters were a little scattershot and rushed, and honestly, I would’ve preferred about 60-pages trimmed from the middle to tighten the end.
Still, I had unreasonably high hopes for “Wellness” and, thankfully, they were often met and frequently exceeded.

3.5 stars. Wellness is an ambitious novel primarily about the marriage of Jack and Elizabeth, two 40-something Chicagoans (from elsewhere) who met their first year of college and never parted. Aside from the challenges of marital boredom, parental responsibilities, work, etc. we also learn about their childhoods and see some of the factors and events that went into molding Jack and Elizabeth into who they were at 19 and are now.

This novel touches on SO many psychological theories and studies that it has a bibliography at the end. It also discusses Facebook, the pop "wellness" movement, monogamy vs. non-monogamy in relationships, every generation's tendency to see older generations as "the MAN" and disdain their priorities and way of life, the gradual change from radical teens/20somethings to suburban dwellers with corporate jobs, etc.

I thought it was a very good book but I admit that some of the sections dragged on forever, particularly the chapters about the Facebook algorithms. It did serve the storyline, but it was TEDIOUS to my mind.

This is a very interesting book to try and encapsulate in a review. It is about everything and nothing. It is about two married characters and jumps around in time. It delves into their early lives, family histories, and present day lives. I ended the book feeling satisfied but unsure as to why I felt this way. The book is long, likely longer than it needs to be. It feels like several different books put together. There is some cohesiveness, but also parts that feel completely different. It was an interesting read that I recommend, but don't expect it to be like other books you have read or what you may be expecting.

I still cannot decide what to say about this novel. I guess that is the giveaway. It begins with an interesting situation of two people close enough so their windows look into each others apartments. After weeks of surreptitiously watching one another, they meet and mesh. Then we skip ahead fourteen years. Then I lost interest. I guess that sums it up.

DNF 32%. wow this was a hard one. I wanted to read this because of all the reviews of The Nix which Nathan Hill also wrote - plus overall the description of the book. I just could not get into it…I was not tied to any of the topics of what was happening. A lot of the topics seems to be extremely over explained - what made me stop and put it down was the long-wonder chapter about Toby eating. Wow that was very rough to get through.
A lot of reviews claimed they’re happy they finished it but I simply can not and had to put it down.

Nathan Hill's "The Nix" was my favorite novel of 2016. I laughed so hard and I loved every moment I spent with that novel. Even so, I was worried about requesting "Wellness" since it's more than 600 pages and what if I didn't like it?

After a lot of hemming and hawing I requested it any way and slowly started reading it, hoping it wouldn't be too hard to get through.

I spent the next three days of my vacation wanting to do nothing but read this book. I fell in love with the characters. I laughed, I cried, I was touched, I was mad. I loved following every single meandering thread of story Hill took me down and I exclaimed with joy when he brought it all back and tied it with an awesome knot.

This book singlehandedly made my vacation ten times better than it already was. I came home feeling full of joy and could not stop talking about the book to everyone I saw. I am absolutely confident it will be my favorite read of 2023.

Nathan Hill has done the impossible and his sophomore novel is even better than his breakout novel and his story is funny, meaningful, thought provoking, and tender. I loved and cherished every single minute I spent with it.

I cannot recommend it enough.

Now I really hope he hurries up and writes another novel.

with gratitude to netgalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor, Knopf for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review

The Nix by Nathan Hill just might be my favorite book of all time, so suffice to say I have been waiting for his next release with bated breath. Although I don’t think Wellness quite hits the same heights as The Nix, there’s still a lot to like here.

Wellness paints a compelling portrait of a mature marriage, and in particular excels in creating main characters that feel finely drawn and believable. It does this be spending a lot of time defining these individuals, though perhaps a bit too much, as I felt Wellness – particularly in the first half – had some real pacing issues. At multiple points, there seemed to be a real loss of momentum and direction, although this was mostly recovered in the second half and it finished strong. Overall, I think this is a strong sophomore effort for Hill, and although I don’t believe the work quite justifies in exceptional length, I’d still eagerly recommend it to others – especially if they were fans of The Nix, like myself.