Wellness is the kind of story I often enjoy - a multi-year spanning look at one couple, as they grow from young strangers to an older, married couple who have lost themselves along the way. There were moments in this that I connected with, and others which felt too drawn out, the minutiae too focused on for me to grasp it wholeheartedly. Well written, but think I would have enjoyed it more a few hundred pages shorter.

Wellness by Nathan Hill

“Jack had gotten an extravagant tattoo that he thought at the time made him unique. And yet, one look around the farmers market right now revealed how many people were equally bold and unique.”

The January pick for the @tiredmammybookclub was this modern marriage saga. Thanks to @panmacmillan for advance ecopy of this book.

I thought this book had some brilliant insights into marriage, medicine, positive vibes, manifesting, parenting. Elizabeth and Jack are two very intriguing characters. We meet them when they first meet as broke students in the 90s, the story quickly skips ahead 20 years. Now in their 40s, Elizabeth is disillusioned with her lot, and Jack isn’t far behind. Careers not going as expected, difficult relationships with their own families and navigating parenthood present some of the challenges explored here.

Risk is a common theme in the book, which I found really interesting. Managing risk as a parent, as a spouse, as an artist. Brandi was also a fantastic villain with her manifesting and general nonsense.

I enjoyed this but found it just too long, with too many tangents. If you like books that take a long look at a marriage, you’ll enjoy this.

I read this book as part of a bookclub, and read about 25% and wondered should I continue forward. At the same time, a number of others in the bookclub were saying the book was dragging and/or that they were abandoning it.
I gave it a break and went back to it - Initially I was then questioning my choice, but I kept going and it was worth it.

This is a long book and the author LOVES a tangent. There is huge detail in some sections, which is what I loved and hated about the book - if it was a tangent on a topic/area you were interested in you were in heaven, if you weren't interested in it, then it was very boring.

At the books heart is the story of a married couple and their boredom in their forties. It is a satisfying journey through their lives. We see how they first met, a story that I adored and was so sad that the book didn't continue on in their early years. We meet them 20 years later, married and parents. We get a good sense of their lives then and the social structure in which they live. And I was satisfied at the ending. I think both had gone through a journey in the book and we were brought on that journey and it makes you think about life in general. Always a good sign of a book I think.

Another fascinating part of the book was the history of the characters. We know early on that they both arrived in Chicago for university trying to escape their backgrounds. It takes time for their backgrounds to emerge and it is given to us at different times - this worked well as I physically read the book, but I know this switching back and forth is something I really struggle with on audio books. When we were brought to the mid 1800's without any context, I did wonder was this a book in a book type novel, but as it became clear, I really enjoyed this section, although I could understand how some people might think it was too much info.

So all in all, this was a great read if a bit too long and some tangents that I did not particularly like, but as character studies of individual people and how we live, I thought it was super. Would be happy to read more from this author, albeit not sure I could wholeheartedly recommend this novel to friends - they'd need to be in the space for a deep dive.

Thank you so much to Pan MacMillan for opportunity to read and review. I read a free copy via @netgalley.

Wellness by Nathan Hill is a well written character study following a couple through many years of their relationship. I found the younger versions of the characters to be pretty insufferable but I enjoyed following their story through the ups and downs of life. This is a very literary story and very slow paced but I found myself really enjoying it.

Thanks to Pan Macmillan and Netgalley for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review

This story of midlife marriage crisis is readable enough. There were some nice set pieces (particularly of Elizabeth's neurotic parenting).

The satire didn't really work for me, the targets (pop psychology, social media influencers, data-harvesting apps) have been written about many times before. I felt like you do when a work colleague is telling you a really long anecdote and you already know the punchline and your smile becomes increasingly fixed and you fantasise about throwing your swiftly cooling microwaved soup in their face.

I guess that's what happens when you take eight years to write a book, the humour might have been fresh when Hill started writing.

@currentlyreading__
Book 3 of 2024

Thank you to @NetGalley, the publishers and the author for the advanced copy of ‘Wellness’ ahead of publication in the UK a few days on 25th January. This was an epic book at over 600 pages and read like a sociological study of health, wellness, parenting, culture and psychology complete with citations for accuracy. It’s an astute portrayal of the morés of upper-middle class American relationships over the period of a few decades.

Jack and Elizabeth are in their 20s as the novel opens; living in Chicago and escaping their respectively difficult families. They live opposite and become magnetically drawn to each other. We move from the inception of their relationship, marriage, parenthood and the microscopic elements of their daily navigations through life.

I am intrigued by the idea that this has already been chosen by Oprah for her book club and can imagine this being made for TV in a stylish Apple TV production. I am certainly interested to see how it’s received by a UK audience.


#bookstagram #bibliophile #bookworm #book #booknerd #bookstagrammer #kindle #instabook #reader #bookobsessed #bookstagramuk #wellness

I had not read the author before, although he was on my radar as I had read very good reviews of his previous work The Nix. So, I went into this story blind and it turned out to be very satisfying.
The beginning couldn't have been more idyllic and had me immersed in the plot one hundred percent. It was a bit anticlimactic when, in the next chapter, we find ourselves 20 years later, with the couple during a mid-life crisis. Nevertheless, the interest only increased so that the 624 pages flew by.
This book is not only about the aforementioned mid-life crisis, but it also deals with diverse and topical issues such as real estate, social networks, the wellness industry, parenting, etc. in such a way that, in one way or another, you end up identifying with it.
Only one negative point in my opinion, and that is that some additional stories, such as the condensed milk story, although not uninteresting, can take you away from the heart of the story. I suppose this depends on what kind of reader you are.
Elizabeth and Jack stay with me, as they are flawed characters, which makes them very real. The final chapter is simply great.
No había leído con anterioridad al autor, aunque lo tenía en el radar pues había leído muy buenas críticas de su anterior obra The Nix. Por lo tanto entré a ciegas a esta historia y resultó ser muy satisfactoria.
El comienzo no pudo ser más idílico e hizo que me sumergiera en la trama cien por cien. Resultó un poco anticlimático cuando, en el siguiente capitulo, nos encontramos 20 años después, con la pareja en plena crisis de la mediana edad. No obstante, el interés no hizo sino aumentar de tal forma que las 624 páginas volaron.
Este libro trata no solo sobre la anteriormente mencionada crisis de la mediana edad, sino que aborda temas diversos y de gran actualidad como pueden ser el tema inmobiliario, las redes sociales, la industria del bienestar, la crianza de los hijos, etc de tal forma que ,de una forma u otra, terminas sintiéndote identificado.
Solo un punto negativo bajo mi punto de vista, y es que algunas historias adicionales, como la de la leche condensada, a pesar de no carecer de interés, pueden alejarte del meollo de la historia. Supongo que esto dependerá del tipo de lector que eres.
Elizabeth y Jack se quedan conmigo, pues son personajes imperfectos, que los hace muy reales. El capítulo final simplemente redondo.

Wellness is the love story of Jack and Elizabeth from their college years in the 90s. Jack is now a professor, and Elizabeth is a scientist. They’re in many ways your regular long married working couple with a family, just trying to get through the week!!
A long read but a worthwhile one with some humour sprinkled on top.

An exquisitely breathtaking, satirical, and exhilarating state of our times novel from Nathan Hill that is remarkable in how much it resonates. It is incredible just how deep, expansive, detailed, amd informative it is. I found it to be thought provoking, moving and gripping it, captivating and enthralling me from beginning to end. Many modern fads, aspects of social media, fitness tracking, and the 'wellness' industry are astutely observed and beautifully skewered, outlining their impact on our mental health. It casts a blistering, witty, smart, and insightful eye on love, marriage, and family, through a contemporary 1990s Chicago couple, Jack, a photograper, and Elizabeth, a scientist. However, sustaining a modern marriage through the years, and the inevitable changes that come, is not always easy.

They meet and bond, a relationship that illustrates the initial excitement, to where 20 years later, exhibiting the signs of growing apart, the strain and distance that marks their mid-life crisis and marriage. The narrative goes back and forth in time, shining a light on a past that have shaped the distinctly different identities of Jack, his anxiety, trauma and insecurity, and Elizabeth, with her fascinating relationship with her father and her family's ill gotten gains. We see their experience of being parents and being a family, and of not always getting it right. There is polyamoury, health scams, placebos, and the factors that lie behind the growth of conspiracy theories. The level of details included may not appeal to some readers, such as how social media algorithms work.

I cannot imagine what it must have been like for Hill planning and pulling together the varied strands in his storytelling, the sheer scope of it all, such as what it is to be human, psychology, art, living life, relationships, time, and belief, yet there is light amidst the madness and darkness. He has a real gift when it comes to the creation and development of his unforgettable characters. There is a humour that delights along with heartbreak in this profoundly emotive and engaging read, although I admit it does meander on occasion, and please do not be put off by its length, the pages simply fly by. I have no doubt this wonderful novel will be successful, personally I cannot recommend it highly enough to all readers! Many thanks to the publisher for an ARC.

Wellness is a behemoth read, but the central premise is simple: a love story - marriage and family and what that means in a messy modern world.

Jack and Elizabeth are both running away from unhappy, dysfunctional, yet very different childhoods towards a new and exciting life in 90’s Chicago.

Both are trying to find themselves, or more accurately, portray an image they feel is socially appropriate in their inner-city environment. At the same time, they forge ahead in their new lives amidst an array of emerging “new fangled” lifestyles and technologies.

Jack Baker, newly arrived from Kansas, is a talented photographer. Elizabeth Augustine is a quadruple major at DePaul. They initially live opposite each other, in facing apartments, and they watch each other, all the while falling in ‘love‘ yet believing they’re not good enough for the other. Still, one night, the inevitable happens, and the rest, as they say, is history.

But now, after some twenty years together, they are feeling adrift from each other, verging on the quintessential midlife crisis and silently questioning everything they ever thought they knew for sure about love and family life.

They have a young son, are still renting and are not anywhere near where they’d hoped to be with their careers at this time of their lives. Jack has fallen into fixed contract employment teaching photography at a university, and Elizabeth runs a wellness clinic. They’re frustrated. They’re circling each other with their initial spark fading. Yet, all the time, they’re searching to ‘be better’ for themselves, for each other and yes, for that image they want to portray to the world around them.

Wellness is a slow-building but intense read that will resonate with many. I laughed, cried, and wanted to scream at both these people to cop on.

I’ll be candid: when I started into this read, I struggled; it seemed drawn out and a slog, but once I got to know these characters, I didn’t want leave the book down.

I loved the deep dives into so many elements of contemporary society - art, psychology, diet culture, friendships, parenting, social media, and so much more.
4⭐

Many thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an advance copy; as always, this is an honest review.

Reads like a psychological, deep dive, character study of an American couple's long relationship over 600 pages.
So many issues, topics & interests, twists & subplots. Was like listening to a commentary of a complex long marriage, sometimes was too depressing, maybe me, not understanding a different culture.

Wellness
Nathan Hill

Firstly, full disclosure I loved The Nix which came out around 7 years ago. And I went into Wellness completely blind, not even having read any reviews. There are circa 15 pages of studies, articles and references at the end of this new novel covering topics such as psychology, philosophy, biology, economics and relationship science - which will give you a flavour of this biblical undertaking from Mr Hill.
BUT do not be put off by this, dear reader, because this is a story simply put about marriage and family and what that means today in a messy modern world.

This story is about Jack and Elizabeth, who are both running away from unhappy childhoods towards a new and exciting life in in 90's Chicago. Both, looking to recreate / find themselves and forge new lives against a backdrop of emerging "new fangled" life styles and technologies.

But now, after some twenty years together they are feeling adrift from each other, hitting the quintessential midlife crisis and silently questioning everything they ever thought they knew for sure about love, the truth and what it means to be a modern family in an ever more dysfunctional world.

This is a beautiful book, witty, whipsmart and moved me to tears at the end.

Ok, granted it's a mammoth read at over 600 pages and there are what seem to be unconnected and self indulgent tangents aplenty... but this is a masterpiece and if you are willing to invest your time you won't regret it when all the loose strings start to pull together into a beautiful bright ribbon bow 🎀!

This book is a fun and thoughtful book, poking fun at various more modern phenomena (influencer culture, the wellness industry, biohacking) and yet manages to avoid being cliched and expected. Instead, a deeper examination of the dangers of the isolation(ism) brought on by those things is reflected in the core relationship at the heart of this book- a couple who seem to understand each other less and less, even whilst they 'understand' the minutiae of their health and biology more than ever.

It was both a lot of fun but also a heartfelt novel examining the various ways we should not lose our human-ness, and humanity.

I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is a great read: an astute, laugh-out-loud novel that reminded me of Franzen’s work. If you are over 40, you may find that Hill’s observations are so painfully close to the mark they make you splutter with laughter into your oat milk latte.

Jack and Elizabeth met in their early twenties with all the hopes and hang ups that this time in our life brings. Now they are experiencing the stresses of mid-life. They have a young son, are still renting, and despite having relatively stable jobs, they have had to make compromises, and are not where they’d hoped to be with their careers at this time of their lives. Jack has fallen into fixed contract employment teaching photography at a university and Elizabeth runs a wellness clinic, uneasily aware that pragmatism has trumped her scientific principles. Their relationship has become a parenting partnership, a premise that is well examined in literature, but Hill writes about it with cutting humour, placing the couple in increasingly awkward situations and dilemmas. The question central to the novel is how a marriage can survive inevitable changes in our beliefs, as the morés of our society and culture evolve.

Some of the novel’s funniest sections are set pieces about Jack’s employer, the university, which has aggressively adopted a business perspective. Its torturously complex mission statement has had so much input from so many people that the English department staged a walk out in protest at the state of its grammar. It begins to rank its academics by the amount of online engagement they garner, a policy that proves to be a mixed blessing for Jack.

I will be recommending this to so many people. A fantastic read.

An absolutely amazing masterpiece of a novel. You really follow the characters through their life and see how they grapple with very relatable issues within their relationship and life. I think a very poignant description of a life lived, showing how everyone lives with themselves in the end of the day and how we are affected tremendously out upbringing and background.

There may be more talented writers in the world than Nathan Hill, but I'm not sure I've come across any. His debut, The Nix is one of my all-time favourite novels and I was overjoyed to hear a second novel was on the way.

So, what to make of Wellness? Well, it's a hugely impressive novel. The story focuses on the lifecycle of the marriage of Elizabeth and Jack, with diversions into critiques of the modern world. Hill is able to dissect the human psyche with scalpel-like precision, and really provoke you into considering the fundamental truths of life and society.

There's also so damn much to learn from this novel. By the end of it, I felt like I was more knowledgeable about several subjects and actually just a little...wiser. The massive amount of research Hill has put in leaps from the pages. And whilst I thought the dissection of Facebook was rather long, it was genuinely illuminating, and has be considering whether to delete my account.

So, why only 4 stars? Well, for me, Wellness just didn't quite coalesce into a fluent novel in the way The Nix did. At times, it felt more like a series of vignettes, or even essays. As mentioned earlier, I felt like I was learning a lot, and the majority of the sections were very interesting, but there were a few that I felt went on too long and disrupted the flow of the plot. It almost seemed like Hill was so proud of the research he'd undertaken that he felt he had to put every bit of it on the page.

When the book focuses on the central plot, it is very strong, and there are moments in the book that are deeply moving. But the power of these moments is slightly diluted by the overlong interludes. And perhaps as a result, the two main characters don't quite resonate in the way the leads in The Nix did.

However, I would urge everyone to read this book. It's scope and ambition are second-to-none, and it will more than likely be my book of the year, even though it's just fallen just short of a five star rating.

I finished this two days before the ToB longlist was published and hoped it would be on there.

It‘s a difficult book to review as it‘s so intense ( but fabulous); we follow Jack and Elizabeth as they first meet, and then look back to different parts of their lives and their (dysfunctional) childhoods. You‘ll recognise yourself in areas of this book, as well as your own relationships.

I liked the detailed offshoots about culture, psychology, art and much more, apart from one that lost / bored me a little bit. (Algorithms!)

This will be one of my favourite books of 2023, I think.

Nathan Hill - the author of the wonderful “The Nix” invites you to “Come With” on a journey into his brilliant second novel.

It was many years in the gestation, starting with a short story the author wrote some twenty years ago and which now opens this novel: two twenty-somethings (Jack an abstract photographer, and Elizabeth a scientist) both having moved to Chicago to escape their very different but equally difficult families, observing each other in secret over either side of a narrow alleyway between their apartments and slowly fall in love with how they perceive the other person could complement their own perceived inadequacies (while assuming the other is out of their reach).

From there the novel moves back and forth in time, exploring: the next 20 or so years of their relationship (including marriage, parenthood and the planned purchase of their forever home – a purpose built appartment in a trendy new development); as well as moving back to their childhoods (and some cases even before). The author has talked of this as a love story involving three characters with the third being time.

What though really distinguishes the book most of all is its detailed, and extensively researched exploration of the mind and relationships, the placebo effect, IT algorithms and human behavioural heuristics and so much more – all really in the service of exploring the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we allow others to tell about us.

In the acknowledgements, alongside a list of references that would put many non-fiction books to shame (and not just those written by the future chancellor of the UK), the author issues a “generalized thank-you to all the psychologists, sociologists, neurologists, evolutionary biologists, economists, sexologists, therapists, philosophers, doctors, data scientists, and everyone else working so hard to understand our strange, unruly, miraculous, and messy minds.”

In interviews he has talked brilliantly of his accretive writing process as like Slime “It’s sticky and goopy and really gross, and it drips through your fingers. But the more you play with it, the more it picks up the stuff of the world, the crumbs and bits of dirt or whatever. Weirdly, writing a novel feels like that — it’s this malformed idea that just collects things. With this book, any time I encountered something that was about delusion, belief, stories that shape our world, I thought, “Maybe this belongs in the book.” So, placebo, art, love are all, in a way, about this belief: two or more people sharing the same stories. I would encounter one of these things and think, “That belongs in the book. Let’s stick this to the slime and see what happens.”

And the book is also distinguished by a number of really bravura sections

“The Unravelling” features Elizabeth struggling over a couple of hours with a trip to the supermarket with their young child, her struggles she thinks despite (but in practice more because of) her extensive scientifically motivated research into parenthood. The chapter itself is replete with some 50 or more citations from IRL Child Psychology studies – a clever and deliberate attempt by Hill, in a book which deals heavily with ill-informed misinformation and deliberately-deceptive disinformation, to address the issue of being overwhelming from seemingly well-intentioned but perhaps context-inappropriate information – he has said “Parents now have access to all the ways that they might be screwing up their kids. A lot of my friends became parents at the same time, so I was watching them go through this panic. These are thoughtful, good parents who every day thought they were failures because they might have done one thing wrong, and this relentless need to be perfect felt like it was just eating up their souls”

“The House of At Least Fourteen Forgotten Gables” sets out pen portraits of previous generations of Elizabeth’s Augustine forbears – who have accrued wealth by a variety of convoluted exploitative or morally-dubious ventures (or even just pure scams) – a family history she has deliberately rejected (including any share of family wealth).

“The Meaning Effect” tells us about Elizabeth’s work at a foundation called “Wellness” which seeks to test and typically debunk homeopathic and other alternative medical treatments typically through testing against placebos. Elizabeth though increasingly becomes fascinated with the efficacy of the placebo effect (which she relabels the “Meaning Effect” due to her recognition that the “placebo effect was elicited by the sense of significance and substance surrounding the placebo itself; the context, story, ritual, metaphor and beliefs associated with the placebo. The placebo’s effect was, in fact, the brain’s response to finding meaning.”). Cleverly then Elizabeth decides, on the retirement of her mentor, to repurpose Wellness as a treatment clinic using undisclosed placebos, something which she tells herself is well intentioned, but we realise over time can also be seen as simply her adding her own inheritance to her family’s generational scams.

Later in the same section, a couple angling for a potentially polyamorous partnership proceed to precisely dissect Jack and Elizabeth’s marriage, and the way in which the other person’s behaviour – and real character - is almost the opposite of what first attracted them, in two 1-1 conversations.

“The Needy Users - A Drama in Seven Algorithms” is another on-point and brilliantly researched section – using the author’s painstaking reading of Facebook’s algorithm patent applications to look at how big tech platforms work, how they draw users in and how they deal with storytelling, he has said of his research “it doesn't know if a story is true or false, it just wants you to engage with it. It has no capability of discerning truth from falsity, from reality, from conspiracy—and nor does it seem to want to.” – all in the context of a online debate between Jack and his conspiracy theorist father.

As with “The Nix” the book is eminently quotable and really there is so much more I could say about this novel – but let’s leave it as that its one of my favourites of 2023 and that I believe it is a brilliantly told story about storytelling and belief.

Hugely talented author, well-rounded characters, but if it was shorter it might have left more of an impact on me. Highly recommended!

Thank you to NetGalley and Picador for the ARC in exchange for an unbiased review of this popular and well-written novel.

*** this arc was really difficult to read, the formatting was dreadful and it was incredibly difficult to read . I was really enjoying the book but had to give up at 30% as it was ruining what I knew was as going to be an excellent read. I was delighted to see an earlier than noted publication date and bought the book immediately and loved it. ***

Wellness by Nathan Hill.

This is a story about a marriage, about growing up and into your life , the search for happiness and fulfillment and about the stories we tell ourselves, our own personal folklore. It's an observation and examination of human behaviour and it educated me, entertained me, answered two questions I have had for a long time and made me feel a range of emotions along its lengthy way.

Jack and Elizabeth meet as students in the 90s, revelling in the thriving underground art scene of Chicago. Twenty years later they are struggling to strive. Parenting is challenging , so are the next steps to their forever home. Careers stall and change and their relationship is buckling from the strain. This is the framework for this book but it travels down so many paths. At times, it reads like non fiction and it never fails to be engaging. From supplements and health trackers, polygamy, art, corporate parlance, childhood trauma,Facebook and google algorithms, gentrification, falling apart in a supermarket, conspiracy theories, parenting and the constant quest to be better, be authentic, be real, live our best lives. It is the perfect ,at times cynical at others heart wrenching ,account of life in the 21st century.

I genuinely learned so much when reading this as the author deep dives into so many elements of contemporary society. The writing is original , warm, funny and detailed. It goes to unexpected places but at its heart it is a love story, a study of a marriage and it inhabitants.

One of the most original , vast and entertaining books I have read this year and worthy of it’s hype. Recommend.

4.5 -5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️