Wellness

Description

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.“A modern take on love, marriage, and society’s obsession on improving almost every aspect of our lives–and the impact technology and social media has on our culture and in our lives. 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

“Gorgeous . . . Wellness has an insistent pull . . . The beauty of Hill’s second novel is that every character is at least a little strange and no one is unworthy of sympathy . . . Few recent novels harbor as much love for humanity as this one does.” –The Washington Post

“Wellness is a perfect novel for our age . . . Hill is an immensely talented writer; he has a gift for prose that’s elegant but unshowy, and his dialogue consistently rings true-to-life . . . 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

“Lovely . . . Hill’s storytelling abilities are impressive . . . his novels vividly capture lonely Midwestern childhoods and real yearning for connection and understanding.” —The New York Times

“I read Hill’s novel with excitement and close to a sense of disbelief that there is still a writer out there who is intrigued by amplitude and by what fiction can do if pushed far enough.” —Daphne Merkin, The Atlantic

“Hill is witty at exposing the ways intelligence and social background don’t necessarily make us more immune to manipulation . . . [Wellness] masterfully withholds information about crucial plot points, suggesting that moments of seeming happenstance almost always involve somebody’s thumb on the scale.” —The Los Angeles Times

“Wellness brilliantly blends ideas about wellness culture, modern parenting, Internet algorithms, gentrification, and most importantly, love.” —People

“A hilarious and moving exploration of a modern marriage that astounds in its breadth and intimacy.” —Brit Bennett, author of The Vanishing Half

“Wellness is such a beautiful, sometimes sad, sometimes satirical but most of all honest book about the many people a person becomes—the way a life, in time, inevitably upends itself. A love story of dislodged chronology, Nathan Hill’s brilliant interrogation of a single relationship spiderwebs out into almost every facet of our contemporary anxieties. Few writers working today have dissected, with such a sharp scalpel, the fundamental paradox of modern American life: this hopelessly broken need to fix what may not need fixing, to reach with utter desperation for a version of better that may not be better at all. Read Wellness with caution: it lays so much of our little self-deceptions bare.” — Omar El Akkad, author of American War

“Nathan Hill has synthesized about a hundred years of that distinctly American delusion called self-improvement, and Wellness is the whip smart and gently comic result. Epic in scope, domestic in scale, it’s a book that defies anyone to read it and willingly pick up a dumbbell or worry about counting steps ever again. Hill has released you, America, and his book will leave you not only fortified but amazed.” —Joshua Ferris, author of Then We Came to the End

“Wellness is one of the funniest, saddest, smartest novels I’ve ever read. In his portrait of one foundering marriage, Nathan Hill has encapsulated the pathologies and possibilities of our troubled era. With his razor-sharp satire and heartbreaking pathos, his stylistic virtuosity and human warmth, Hill has written both a propulsive page-turner and an artistic achievement of the highest order. I didn’t think I could love a book more than The Nix until I read Wellness. It’s a flat-out masterpiece.”—Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“Ambitious, deeply engrossing, whip-smart and ultimately heartbreaking, Nathan Hill’s Wellness is all this and much more.” —Richard Russo, author of the North Bath Trilogy

“Astutely observed, hilariously satirical . . . Hill’s prose is radiant and ravishing throughout this saturated, intricately honeycombed novel of delving cogitation as he evokes the wonders of the prairie and the city, and the ever-perplexing folly, anguish, and beauty of the human condition.” —Booklist (starred review)

“Hill blends a family chronicle with cultural critique in his expansive and surprisingly tender latest . . . This stunning novel of ideas never loses sight of its humanity.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Warmhearted . . . A bittersweet novel of love gained, lost, and regained over the course of decades.” —Kirkus ReviewsNATHAN HILL’S best-selling debut novel, The Nix, was named the number one book of 2016 by Entertainment Weekly and one of the year’s best books by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Slate, and many others. It was the winner of the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction from the Los Angeles Times and was published worldwide in more than two dozen languages. A native Iowan, Hill lives with his wife in Naples, Florida.The questions, discussion topics, and other material that follow are intended to enhance your group’s conversation of Nathan Hill’s Wellness, a love story both contemporary and timeless that explores the ways science, art, religion, and culture shape the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves—and one another—and therefore shape the reality in which we live.

1. Have you ever been under the placebo effect—in a medical or other context? After reading Wellness, can you look back on certain events, decisions, or changes that took place in your life and attribute those changes to belief alone?

2. Dr. Sanborne’s theory of love is one explanation for why Jack and Elizabeth were attracted to each other (including the intimacy questionnaire that Elizabeth uses on their first date). Can you think of any other theories or explanations—from psychology, popular culture, or other traditions/systems—for how their relationship unfolds?  

3. Which of the wellness trends mentioned in the book (Benjamin’s diets and supplements; Jack’s failed workouts; Elizabeth’s and Lawrence’s various healing potions, etc.) have you heard of or participated in? Did they produce the desired effect? Do you believe now, and did you believe then, that the product(s) or technique(s) “worked”?

4. Do you believe that Elizabeth and Jack are soulmates? Do you believe they believe they are? How does their own version of their love story change over time?

5. When Elizabeth and Jack discuss marriage on their first date, she says, “They say that marriage is hard, but it seems to me if it’s that hard then you’re probably doing it wrong” (page 36). If someone had said that to her later in the novel, ten years after they met, what do you think she’d say—are they “doing it wrong” because of their challenges?

6. What did you make of Toby’s explanation for why he ate the first apple turnover when Elizabeth tried the marshmallow experiment on him? What does this exchange reveal about the assumptions we make from scientific experiments, even when the results are “statistically significant”?

7. Discuss Elizabeth’s “unraveling” in the grocery store. Has anything like this ever happened to you? Which stressors that she was responding to seem unique to the present moment of the novel, and which are more universal to motherhood/parenthood?

8. Kate and Kyle seem to “diagnose” the problems in Jack and Elizabeth’s marriage fairly quickly at the Club. Why do you think they were so blind to their oppositional, enabling qualities? Do you think they knew those truths all along?  

9. How might Jack’s art have developed if he hadn’t gone to art school, where he was introduced to a much more commercial and intellectual approach to art than what he learned from Evelyn?

10. Are there works of art that, like American Gothic does for Jack, evoke certain personal memories or identities for you? If so, which pieces and why?

11. Jack interprets the history of landscape art—especially of the plains—to mean that “the things we think are beautiful are only the things that have been depicted beautifully. And if it’s not depicted, it’s not seen. It never enters the imagination. It becomes a nothing” (page 209). How does this manifest in his own art, as it does (or does not) represent his grief and guilt over Evelyn’s death? Does his nonrepresentational style make Evelyn’s memory more or less of a “nothing”? Consider the images placed throughout the novel meant to illustrate Jack’s art.

12. Elizabeth’s ancestors use a variety of tactics to get ahead in business—mostly manipulation. In what ways do these men embody the plight of America? Is their work any different from the landscape artists Jack looks up to?

13. How do art and science intersect in the novel? Consider the strategy and motives behind Jack’s non-photos and the creativity of Elizabeth’s placebo experiments at Wellness.

14. What is the difference between the affirmations that Brandie’s Community Corps believe in and Elizabeth’s placebo work at Wellness?

15.  How does the city of Chicago change and transform over the course of the book? What inspiration do Jack and Elizabeth take from this place where they emigrated to, to dissolve their connections to their hometowns?

16. Benjamin predicts that the internet—specifically hypertext—will free readers “from the hegemony of the book” (page 311); on the internet, “there’s no gatekeeper. No overlord telling you what to do. You pick your own way through the story, navigating a sea of information, constructing personal meaning out of a big constellation of meanings” (page 312). Does the novel suggest this is true, or do people make grand meanings of their lives even without the internet? What forms and media do these stories unfold in, and how are they shaped by the internet? Consider Jack’s entrée into photography and Lawrence’s attempt to seek connection after his cancer diagnosis.

17. Why is Jack so troubled when he sees that the theories of art and society he prescribed to as a young man have been adopted by his father in his Facebook screeds?

18. What is Lawrence looking for on Facebook? What might have happened differently if he hadn’t encountered Jack on the platform, friended him, and then was unfriended by him?

19. What do you think really happened to Evelyn the night she died—who was to “blame,” Ruth or Jack? Did she seem to prophesy her own demise?

20. Consider Jack’s reflection on his tattoo—and the nature of the self: “He realized that his current self—which seemed to him pretty stable and suitable and more or less true—was no more true than his younger self. Someday another person would emerge, a total stranger, and around him new friends would emerge and a new city would emerge and a new wife and a new son would emerge and they’d be an entirely new family” (page 408). How are Elizabeth and Jack totally different by the end of the book? What parts of them remain the same?

21. Though they have very different material upbringings, Jack and Elizabeth seem to play similar emotional roles in their families—especially regarding the ways Jack’s mother and Elizabeth’s father deal (or fail to deal) with their own insecurities. How do these roles play out in their marriage, in their work lives, and as parents? What coping mechanisms do you image Toby developing in response to his parents’ personalities? Consider Elizbeth’s reflection: “This, it turned out, was the most savage, most hurtful thing about being a parent: it wasn’t just coming face-to-face with all your own shortcomings and inadequacies, but it was also seeing those shortcomings embodied in your child” (page 175).

22. What was the impact of learning more of Jack’s and Elizabeth’s pasts later in the novel, as opposed to in the beginning? How might your impressions of them been different if you knew their childhood stories earlier?

23. Per Toby’s Minecraft universe, “Diamond was the strongest stuff there was, sure, but sometimes the made-up things [netherine] were even stronger” (page 589). Where does this idea prove to be true in the novel—and in your life experiences? What does this suggest about the value of both art and the placebo effect in supporting our human frailties?

Come With

He lives alone on the fourth floor of an old brick building with no view of the sky. When he looks out his window, all he can see is her window—­across the alley, an arm’s length away, where she lives alone on the fourth floor of her own old building. They don’t know each other’s names. They have never spoken. It is winter in Chicago.

Barely any light enters the narrow alley between them, and barely any rain either, or snow or sleet or fog or that crackling wet January stuff the locals call “wintry mix.” The alley is dark and still and without weather. It seems to have no atmosphere at all, a hollow stitched into the city for the singular purpose of separating things from things, like outer space.

She first appeared to him on Christmas Eve. He’d gone to bed early that night feeling horribly sorry for himself—­the only soul in his whole raucous building with nowhere else to be—­when a light snapped on across the alley, and a small warm glow replaced his window’s usual yawning dark. He sat up, walked to the window, peeked out. There she was, a flurry of movement, arranging, ­unpacking, pulling small vibrant dresses from large matching suitcases. Her window was so close to him, and she was so close to him—­their apartments separated by the distance of a single ambitious jump—­that he scooted back a few feet to more fully submerge himself in his darkness. He sat there on his heels and stared for a short while, until the staring felt improper and indecent and he contritely returned to bed. But he has, in the weeks since, come back to the theater of this window, and more often than he’d like to admit. He sometimes sits here, hidden, and, for a few minutes at a time, he watches.

To say that he finds her beautiful is too simple. Of course he finds her beautiful—­objectively, classically, obviously beautiful. Even just the way she walks—­with a kind of buoyancy, a cheerful jaunty bounce—­has him thoroughly charmed. She glides across the floor of her apartment in thick socks, occasionally doing an impromptu twirl, the skirt of her dress billowing briefly around her. In this drab and filthy place, she prefers dresses—­bright flowered sundresses incongruous amid the grit of this neighborhood, the cold of this winter. She tucks her legs under them as she sits in her plush velvet armchair, a few candles glowing nearby, her face impassive and cool, holding a book in one hand, the other hand idly tracing the lip of a wineglass. He watches her touch that glass and wonders how a little fingertip can inspire such a large torment.

Her apartment is decorated with postcards from places he assumes she’s been—­Paris, Venice, Barcelona, Rome—­and framed posters of art he assumes she’s seen in person: the statue of David, the Pietà, The Last Supper, Guernica. Her tastes are manifold and intimidating; meanwhile, he’s never even seen an ocean.

She reads inordinately, at all hours, flicking on her yellow bedside lamp at two o’clock in the morning to page through large and unwieldy textbooks—­biology, neurology, psychology, ­microeconomics—­or various stage plays, or collections of poetry, or thick histories of wars and empires, or scientific journals with inscrutable names and bland gray bindings. She listens to music he assumes is classical for the way her head sways to it. He strains to identify book jackets and album covers, then rushes to the public library the next day to read all the authors that rouse and unsleep her, and listen to all the symphonies she seems to have on repeat: the Haffner, the Eroica, the New World, the Unfinished, the Fantastique. He imagines that if they ever actually speak, he will drop some morsel of Symphonie Fantastique knowledge and she will be impressed with him and fall in love.

If they ever actually speak.

She’s exactly the kind of person—­cultured, worldly—­that he came to this frighteningly big city to find. The obvious flaw in the plan, he realizes now, is that a woman so cultured and worldly would never be interested in a guy as uncultured, as provincial, as backward and coarse as him.

Only once has he seen her entertain a guest. A man. She spent an appalling amount of time in the bathroom before he arrived, and tried on six dresses, finally picking the tightest one—­a purple one. She pulled her hair back. She put on makeup, washed it off, put it back on. She took two showers. She looked like a stranger. The man arrived with a six-­pack of beer and they spent what seemed like an awkward and humorless two hours together. Then he left with a handshake. He never came back.

Afterward, she changed into a ratty old T-­shirt and sat around all evening eating cold cereal in a fit of private sloth. She didn’t cry. She just sat there.

He watched her, across their oxygenless alley, thinking that she was, in this moment, beautiful, though that word beautiful seemed suddenly too narrow to contain the situation. Beauty has both public and private faces, he thought, and it is difficult for one not to annul the other. He wrote her a note on the back of a Chicago postcard: You would never have to pretend with me. Then he threw it away and tried again: You would never have to be someone trying to be someone else. But he didn’t send them. He never sends them.

Sometimes her apartment is dark, and he goes about his night—­his ordinary, hermetic night—­wondering where she might be.

That’s when she’s watching him.

She sits at her window, in the darkness, and he cannot see her.

She studies him, observes him, notes his stillness, his tranquility, the admirable way he sits cross-­legged on his bed and, persistently, for hours, just reads. He is always alone in there. His apartment—­a desolate little box of unadorned white walls and a cinder-­block bookshelf and a futon condemned to the floor—­is not a home that anticipates guests. Loneliness, it seems, holds him like a buttonhole.

To say that she finds him handsome is too simple. Rather, she finds him handsome insofar as he seems unaware that he could be handsome—­a dark goatee obscuring a delicate baby face, big sweaters disguising a waifish body. His hair is a few years past clean-­cut and now falls in oily ropes over his eyes and down to his chin. His fashions are fully apocalyptic: threadbare black shirts and black combat boots and dark jeans in urgent need of patching. She’s seen no evidence that he owns a single necktie.

Sometimes he stands in front of the mirror shirtless, ashen, disapproving. He is so small—­short and anemic and skinny as an addict. He survives on cigarettes and the occasional meal—­boxed and plastic-­wrapped and microwavable, usually, or sometimes powdered and rehydrated into borderline edible things. Witnessing this makes her feel as she does while watching reckless pigeons alight on the El’s deadly electrified lines.

He needs vegetables in his life.

Potassium and iron. Fiber and fructose. Dense chewy grains and colorful juices. All the elements and elixirs of good health. She wants to wrap a pineapple in ribbon. She’d send it with a note. A new fruit every week. It would say: Don’t do this to yourself.

For almost a month she’s watched as tattoos spread ivy-­like across his back, now connecting in a riot of pattern and color that’s migrating down his slender arms, and she thinks: I could live with that. In fact, there’s something reassuring about an assertive tattoo, especially a tattoo that’s visible even while wearing a collared work shirt. It speaks to a confidence of personality, she thinks, a person with the strength of his convictions—­a person with convictions—­contrary to her own everyday inner crisis, and the question that’s dogged her since moving to Chicago: Who will I become? Or maybe more accurately: Which of my many selves is the true one? The boy with the aggressive tattoo seems to provide a new way forward, an antidote to the anxiety of incoherence.

He’s an artist—­that much is clear, for he can most often be found mixing paints and solvents, inks and dyes, plucking photo papers out of chemical baths or leaning over a light box inspecting film negatives through a small round magnifier. She’s amazed at how long he can look. He’ll spend an hour comparing just two frames, staring at one, then the other, and then the first again, searching for the more perfect image. And when he’s found it, he circles the frame with a red grease pencil, every other negative is x-­ed out, and she applauds his decisiveness: when he chooses a picture, or a tattoo, or a certain bohemian lifestyle, he chooses devotedly. It is a quality that she—­who cannot decide on even the simplest things: what to wear, what to study, where to live, whom to love, what to do with her life—­both envies and covets. This boy has a mind calmed by high purpose; she feels like a bean jumping against its pod.

He’s exactly the kind of person—­defiant, passionate—­that she came to this remote city to find. The obvious flaw in the plan, she realizes now, is that a man so defiant and passionate would never be interested in a girl as conventional, as conformist, as dull and bourgeois as her.

Thus, they do not speak, and the winter nights pass slowly, glacially, the ice coating tree branches like barnacles. All season it’s the same: when his light is off, he is watching her; when her light is off, she is watching him. And on the nights she isn’t home, he sits there feeling dejected, desperate, maybe even a little pathetic, and he gazes upon her window and feels like time is zipping away, opportunities gone, feels like he is losing a race with the life he wishes he could lead. And on the nights he isn’t home, she sits there feeling forsaken, feeling once again so bluntly dented by the world, and she examines his window like it’s an aquarium, hoping to see some wonderful thing erupt from the gloom.

And so here they are, lingering in the shadows. Outside, the snow falls plump and quiet. Inside, they are alone in their separate little studios, in their crumbling old buildings. Both their lights are off. They both watch for the other’s return. They sit near their windows and wait. They stare across the alley, into dark apartments, and they don’t know it, but they’re staring at each other.US

Additional information

Weight	32 oz
Dimensions	1.4700 × 6.4300 × 9.5200 in
Imprint	Knopf
Format	General Trade
ISBN-13	09780593536117
ISBN-10	0593536118
Author	Nathan Hill
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	FIC045000, FIC016000
Subjects	funny stocking stuffers for adults, fiction books, best books, best books 2023, new york times best sellers, top books, dark comedy, new release books, wellness books, highest rated fiction books, wellness book, oprah book club list 2022, nathan hill, wellness nathan hill, wellness ebooks, nix, wellness book nathan hill, book wellness by nathan hill, wellness by nathan hill, novel, wellness, family, parents, music, comedy, FIC045000, fiction, memory, Literature, novels, couples, saga, funny books, historical fiction, nostalgia, dad gift, FIC016000