Wellness

Jack and Elizabeth

They meet at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1993 — Jack Baker, from rural Kansas, reinventing himself in the city; Elizabeth Augustine, from privileged suburban circumstances, inventing herself for the first time. Their early relationship has the specific energy of two people who are becoming who they want to be in each other’s company, and Nathan Hill renders this period with the sharp clarity of someone who knows exactly how youth and mutual construction work.

Wellness follows them over roughly three decades: through the early years of marriage in Chicago’s rapidly gentrifying Wicker Park, through a move to the suburbs, through the birth and raising of their son Toby, and into the contemporary moment when the marriage is under the particular strain of two people who have grown in different directions without quite noticing when the divergence started.

The novel is 688 pages long, and the length is not padding. Hill has written a genuine double portrait — two equally weighted, equally developed protagonists whose stories are told in parallel with occasional intersection. This is formally unusual for a novel about a couple, and it pays substantial dividends: Jack and Elizabeth are recognisable as a unit while remaining genuinely separate as people, a balance that marriage fiction often fails to maintain.

The Wellness Industry

The title refers not primarily to health or fitness but to the broader cultural phenomenon: the infinite self-improvement industry that sells meditation apps, optimisation protocols, personality frameworks, therapeutic retreats, and dietary supplements as solutions to the specific kind of modern unhappiness that is too comfortable to call suffering and too real to ignore.

Elizabeth, in the novel’s contemporary sections, has become deeply embedded in wellness culture. She consults alternative practitioners, tracks her various inputs and outputs, attends retreats, and has made the language of self-improvement into the primary vocabulary of her inner life. Hill’s satire of this world is sharp and funny, but it is also — and this is where the novel exceeds what satire can do — genuinely sympathetic to the need that wellness culture addresses even while examining why its solutions are inadequate.

The wellness industry, Hill implies, is what happens when people have genuine emotional and existential needs that the available structures — family, community, organised religion, therapy — don’t adequately address. The industry fills a real gap with products that feel like solutions but produce a maintenance-intensive relationship with the self that forecloses the harder, slower work of genuine self-understanding.

The Marriage Plot

The central question of Wellness is what two people can know about each other and about themselves after twenty-five years of shared life, and what happens when the answer turns out to be: less than they thought. Jack and Elizabeth have both kept secrets — not dramatic secrets of betrayal but the subtler kind, the secrets of who they were before they became who they are now, and the secrets of how they present themselves to each other.

Hill is expert at the specific texture of long-term relationship estrangement — the way familiarity produces certainty about another person’s thoughts and feelings that is actually a sophisticated misreading, the way the compressed communication of intimate partnership gradually replaces actual knowledge with confident assumption. Jack and Elizabeth know what the other is going to say before they say it. They are often wrong.

Chicago and the American Century

The novel’s Chicago — Wicker Park in the early 1990s, gentrifying before its characters’ eyes — is rendered with sociological precision and affection. The specific quality of that city at that moment: the music scene, the art community, the class dynamics of a neighbourhood being transformed from working-class to bohemian to wealthy without ever quite negotiating the transition openly — is as richly evoked as any American urban landscape in recent literary fiction.

The gentrification thread is one of the novel’s most quietly devastating elements. Jack and Elizabeth arrive in Wicker Park as part of the cultural displacement they didn’t choose but benefit from; they move to the suburbs partly because the neighbourhood has moved on from the version they loved; their son Toby will grow up in circumstances entirely different from either of theirs. This material is not polemical but it is politically aware — the class dynamics of American urban life are embedded in the personal story rather than imposed on it.

Hill’s Second Novel

Nathan Hill’s first novel, The Nix (2016), was widely celebrated as a major debut. The eight-year gap before Wellness produced anxiety in readers who loved The Nix and expectation in the literary world more broadly. The second novel is better. It is more controlled, more formally ambitious, and more emotionally complex than the first — a rarity, and a measure of what a writer can accomplish with time and seriousness.

At its best, Wellness belongs in the company of the great American marriage novels — with The Corrections, with American Wife, with the better Updike. Like those books, it takes seriously the proposition that the domestic and personal are as interesting and as difficult as the public and historical, and that the story of two ordinary people trying to understand each other over a lifetime is a subject that literature has no reason to be embarrassed about.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — One of the great recent American novels. Earns every page of its 688-page length.