Nathan Hill’s second novel monitors the health of a 21st-century marriage. A recent Oprah book club pick, it bears many of the hallmarks of big American social novels of the last 20 years by Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon or Jennifer Egan. It also shares many qualities with the author’s New York Times bestselling debut, 2016’s The Nix, another non-linear novel of fantastic abundance that explores public and private lives in Chicago and its surrounds.
But where The Nix focused on the aspirations and failures of the baby boomers, Hill turns his attention here – in just 624 pages, to The Nix’s 752 – towards generation X’s quest for joy through “wellness”. His chosen lens for this exploration of physical, mental and marital health is, appropriately enough, a young couple in love.
Jack and Elizabeth meet as students in 1990s Chicago. They live in neighbouring buildings and, at night, watch one another through dark windows, imagining themselves into each other’s lives long before actual intimacy occurs. This courtship through glass can’t help but have the aura of a scientific experiment – and scientific experiments are Elizabeth’s area. She works at a lab that specialises in placebo studies, exploring the porous border between real and imagined remedies. The organisation is known by the name “Wellness”.
When Jack and Elizabeth finally get talking at a local gig, it’s a meet-cute worthy of a middling romcom – but one senses that’s partly the point. There’s something unreal about the stories our lovers form about each other from the outset. The first days of their romance are full of seductive exchanges, “an altogether manic and ceaseless conversation, a conversation that feels sometimes like falling down stairs, barely keeping upright, taken by gravity, skipping, grasping, and then somehow landing, magically, on one’s feet, intact and triumphant”. That word “magically” is a clue – young love may feel like a perfect midsummer night’s dream, but like many of the “wellness” potions Elizabeth’s company studies, it will not provide a long-term cure for pre-existing conditions: Jack’s clinginess; Elizabeth’s restlessness; the inevitable demands of new parenthood. We know that the future holds trouble for this couple even as we root for them.
As a stylist, Hill lands on his feet most of the time – and the young couple are equally confident of their footing, at first. “They say that marriage is hard,” Elizabeth tells Jack on an early date, “but it seems to me if it’s that hard then you’re probably doing it wrong.” Jack agrees wholeheartedly – but he’s an artist, not a futurist. At his first gallery show, he needs to be told by a stranger why his photographs won’t sell to investors: “The chemicals will degrade, the image will dissolve. A Polaroid is not a durable good.”
One of the qualities that makes this novel feel different from many other relationship narratives is how it treats time. Like Zadie Smith’s Swing Time – another state-of-society novel that follows two characters from youth into middle age – we get to know Hill’s couple both forwards and backwards: the novel’s alternating sections hop back and forth across two decades. This means we get the pleasure (and occasional redundancies) of hearing the stories the couple tell each other, and then seeing how history matches up. The reader takes on the role of scientific observer – mirroring, in a sense, Elizabeth’s own early work at Wellness, where she “tests claims made by specious health-related products to see if the products achieved results any better than placebo”.
But, as you might expect, it turns out that the greatest profit in the American healthcare system lies not in exposing tall stories, but in spinning them – and their marriage starts to suffer from similar crimes of narrative distortion. Elizabeth knows exactly what to say to persuade her husband to go to a sex club – she needs “a new thrill”, a “shot at mystery”, now motherhood and their happy marriage has answered all the “big important questions” in her life. Only later will she force herself to reflect on the thrills and dangers of her own facility with fiction. Meanwhile, Jack is trying to turn his own insecurities into muscle, buying himself a new kind of fitness-monitoring bracelet. But when he leaves this gadget by the bed, it succeeds only in recording the steady sound of his wife using a vibrator. Self-care is a serious business – one that can go any number of ways.
There are times when this digressive novel sags under the weight of its own constantly proliferating climaxes and coincidences. It’s also the kind of novel where you learn absolutely everyone’s hair colour. (We hear of “long grey hair”, “long and straight grey hair,” and “long straight hair that used to be hazelnut brown but was now fully grey and in some places even white”.)
Yet, Hill’s penchant for super-abundance equips him well for the task of capturing the contours of modern American life. Wellness is the kind of novel that feels genuinely capacious and lively, full of interconnected rooms stuffed with unexpected fascinations. A reader emerges from Hill’s world of Wellness with a keener eye for the tragicomic maladies of marriage, and a greater ear for the strangely affecting rhythms and algorithms of 21st-century life.
• Jonathan Lee is the author of The Great Mistake (Granta).
• Wellness by Nathan Hill is published by Picador (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
