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Wellness : a novel
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2023
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Fiction/Biography Profile
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Fiction
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Library Journal Review
Following the award-winning The Nix, Hill offers a smart, expansively written portrait of a marriage that also captures the social landscape of the last two decades. With windows facing across a narrow Chicago alley, students Jack and Elizabeth meet and fall deliciously in love in a move that feels fated. He's a waifish, searching photographer from the rural Midlands who feels as out of place in Chicago as he did on the prairie. She's from a wealthy, distinguished New England family and is eager to escape their glare, eventually working at a lab that studies placebos as inherently effective because people believe the stories created around them. Twenty years on, Jack and Elizabeth's marriage suffers from distance and disappointment as the author examines the stories we tell ourselves, the persuasiveness of believing, the burdens of family and class, the meaning of art, the dangers of social media, the very possibility of truth, how we change over time, and what we seek in others, in a narrative so heady readers may be tempted to take notes. VERDICT Jack's friend Ben says of his master's thesis, "Ostensibly it's about Wicker Park. But really? It's about life." Hill's book is ostensibly about one couple's relationship. But really? It's about life. Highly recommended.--Barbara Hoffert
Publishers Weekly Review
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. (Sept.)
Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK * AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR * The New York Times best-selling author of The Nix is back with a poignant and witty novel about a modern marriage and the bonds that keep people together. Mining the absurdities of contemporary society, Wellness reimagines the love story with a healthy dose of insight, irony, and heart.

"A stunning novel about the stories that we tell about our lives and our loves, and how we sustain relationships throughout time--it's beyond remarkable, both funny and heartbreaking, sometimes on the same page." --NPR


When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the gritty '90s Chicago art scene, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in the thriving underground scene with an appreciative kindred spirit. Fast-forward twenty years to suburban married life, and alongside the challenges of parenting, they encounter the often-baffling pursuits of health and happiness from polyamorous would-be suitors to home-renovation hysteria.

For the first time, Jack and Elizabeth struggle to recognize each other, and the no-longer-youthful dreamers are forced to face their demons, from unfulfilled career ambitions to 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.
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