Reviews for Wellness : a novel
Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.
Strangers fall in love watching each other through their apartment windows across a Chicago alley. Jack escaped his stifling household in the Flint Hills of Kansas to attend art school. Elizabeth fled her wealthy, “inhuman” East Coast family to study psychology and seemingly everything else. It’s 1993 in Wicker Park, a struggling neighborhood colonized by artists seeking cheap rents. Jack and Elizabeth, enraptured and entwined yet actually knowing little about each other even in marriage, alternate as deeply questioning narrators. Benjamin, an unscrupulous and manipulative trend-exploiter, accelerates brewing marital conflicts as Jack’s early success as a conceptual photographer dead-ends in a lackluster teaching career; Elizabeth pursues dubious research projects at a chameleon-like facility called Wellness; they have a son, and invest in a ludicrously extravagant suburban home. Jack and Elizabeth’s staggering hidden traumas are suspensefully revealed. In astutely observed, hilariously satirical passages, Hill also weighs the sublime, the absurd, and the malevolent as he considers family and self, art and academia, the power of suggestion, ethics, gentrification, parenting peer pressure, health fads, open marriages, and the digital trifecta of online addiction, algorithms, and profiteering with exhilarating insights and fluent compassion. 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.
Library Journal
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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
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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.)
Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
A bittersweet novel of love gained, lost, and regained over the course of decades. “They stare across the alley, into dark apartments, and they don’t know it, but they’re staring at each other.” It’s not an outtake from Hitchcock’s Rear Window but instead the wistful longings of two lonely people. Jack Baker, newly arrived in Chicago from Kansas in the 1990s, is a talented photographer who bristles when practical-minded people ask him what his work is about—to say nothing of why he works with Polaroids, which, a hipster friend reminds him, “are mass-produced, instant, cheap, impermanent.” Yes, and that’s the point, for though Jack comes from the windblown prairie, he’s pretty avant-garde. Elizabeth Augustine is a quadruple major at DePaul, “five majors if you count theater, which I have no talent for but enjoy nonetheless,” and exactly the woman Jack hoped he would meet. Life proceeds: That arty hipster becomes a real estate mogul who plants them in a development very much outside their price range until Elizabeth pulls down the big bucks from the psychological research firm that gives Hill’s latest its simple title. “Basically they were a watchdog group, a subcontractor for the FDA and FTC, sniffing out bullshit,” Hill writes, but Elizabeth, scraping by while Jack pulls down pennies as an adjunct professor, discovers that there’s hay to be made creating bullshit rather than exposing it—making airplane seats narrower, for instance, and then selling once normal-sized seats at a premium. Hill romps through our soufflélike culture with a nice sendup of academic literature and broad jabs at memes ranging from organic food (“one-hundred-percent bioavailable”) to progressive parenting, open marriage, and cult behavior (“Elizabeth knew...that the thing that most effectively strengthened and deepened delusions was being surrounded by people who shared the same delusions”) while delivering a story that suggests that while love may not conquer all, it makes a good start. A warmhearted satire that chronicles our “perfectly, stupidly, dreadfully elegant” accommodations to life. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
