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Wellness: A novel Hardcover – September 19, 2023

by Nathan Hill (Author)

4.1 5,465 ratings

Editors' pick Best Literature & Fiction

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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.

From the Publisher

WARNING: California’s Proposition 65

Editorial Reviews

Review

“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 Reviews

About the Author

NATHAN 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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf; First Edition (September 19, 2023)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 624 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593536118
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593536117
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.43 x 1.47 x 9.52 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #68,501 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #789 in Fiction Satire
- #1,796 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
- #5,202 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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Nathan Hill

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Nathan Hill’s best-selling debut novel, The Nix, was named the #1 book of the year by Audible and Entertainment Weekly and one of the year’s best books by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Slate, and many others. The Nix 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.

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Customers say

Customers find the book engaging and thought-provoking. They describe the narrative as compelling, beautiful, and intriguing. The pacing is described as brilliant and masterful. Many find the story heartfelt, moving, and genuine. Readers appreciate the unique blend of satire and realism, with witty and playful writing style. Character development is appreciated for its depth and empathetic look into the characters' lives. However, opinions differ on the writing quality - some find it well-written and easy to read, while others feel it lacks clarity and complexity.

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Readability Storytelling Pacing Heartfelt story Satire Character development Writing quality Length

56 customers mention "Readability"41 positive15 negative

Customers enjoy the book's readability. They find it engaging and fascinating, with a brilliant writing style. Readers appreciate the layers and insight into the characters.

"I’m gobsmacked, and have remained so from page one to the last word. An epic, sweeping, transformative, colossal..." Read more

"If you are around 45-55 and married, this is a helluva read. It will likely tap into all your own concerns and neuroses in the best way...." Read more

"Wellness by Nathan Hill Wellness is a well-written, engaging, and thought-provoking novel...." Read more

"...really reflect on and dissect what I have just read, I find the book too unwieldy to do so...." Read more

46 customers mention "Storytelling"36 positive10 negative

Customers find the book's storytelling engaging and thought-provoking. They praise the well-written story with an interesting plotline. The story is genuine and moving, with a precisely organized plot development.

"...It’s about everything, sort of like INFINITE JEST is about everything, and it’s a parabola, like GRAVITY'S RAINBOW is a parabola, but it’s neither..." Read more

"...It will likely tap into all your own concerns and neuroses in the best way...." Read more

"...Wellness is a well-written, engaging, and thought-provoking novel. The New York Times describes Wellness as "a unique blend of satire and realism."..." Read more

"...The sudden revelations are subtle, stark and shocking. These particular scenes are so finely-drawn, steeped in melancholy and illuminating clarity...." Read more

22 customers mention "Pacing"16 positive6 negative

Customers find the book engaging. They praise the author's thoughtful, brilliant writing style and observant storytelling. The book is described as an ambitious masterpiece with clever plot development and excellent recursive revelations. Readers appreciate the creativity, imagination, and attention to detail.

"...There’s a preoccupation with eternal love, health and well-being, the potent obsession with fitness and strength...." Read more

"...I can objectively say that Wellness is quite the ambitious masterpiece - Nathan Hill is clearly brilliant...." Read more

"...were sometimes curious, sometimes bizarre, sometimes dull...." Read more

"...that entails, offering up sharp, sometimes funny, and acerbic commentary on physical fitness, wellness, toxic positivity, tenure, work, success,..." Read more

14 customers mention "Heartfelt story"14 positive0 negative

Customers find the story heartfelt, genuine, and moving. They describe it as relatable, uplifting, and compassionate. The book explores intimate relationships through an insightful exploration of modern life.

"...And this touched my heart, a poignant guidance from the scientist that mentored Elizabeth: “Believe what you believe…but believe gently...." Read more

"...A very empathetic, and real, look into both the husband and wife characters. The first 2/3 are amazing, alas the end is only ok...." Read more

"...These particular scenes are so finely-drawn, steeped in melancholy and illuminating clarity...." Read more

"...This latest tale, while more intimate than his previous work, retains the sprawling and impactful quality that characterizes his writing...." Read more

10 customers mention "Satire"10 positive0 negative

Customers enjoy the book's satire. They find it relatable, funny, and witty. The writing is described as a unique blend of satire and realism. Readers describe the book as absurdist, philosophical, and thought-provoking.

"...door-stopper of a book, a windswept and fiery, burning satire of a 1990s marriage between a modern couple in Chicago, Jack and Elizabeth...." Read more

"...Nathan Hill's writing is smart, witty, and engaging...." Read more

"...There are numerous story arcs. While some are undeniably satirical, others focus on the complexities of modern life, tackling the growth of..." Read more

"...It is thought-provoking, engaging, sad and funny. No 600 page novel can be described as a breeze, but Wellness comes close. I couldn't put it down...." Read more

8 customers mention "Character development"8 positive0 negative

Customers enjoyed the character development. They found it empathetic and relatable, adding depth to the central characters' lives.

"...A very empathetic, and real, look into both the husband and wife characters. The first 2/3 are amazing, alas the end is only ok...." Read more

"...psychology, art, and algorithms, among others, adding depth to his central characters and shedding light on their lives...." Read more

"...came together with twists and turns that made the characters life mysteries feel real and compassionate." Read more

"...The beginning started wonderfully; I was engrossed. I loved the character development and the way the plot was shaping up...." Read more

30 customers mention "Writing quality"17 positive13 negative

Customers have different views on the writing quality. Some find it well-written and engaging, while others feel it's overwritten and difficult to read due to excessive explanations and digressions.

"...The prose is gracefully placed on the page, despite the legion of info (critics would say info-dumping) that the text provides...." Read more

"...It's a long one, though, and very dense reading at times...." Read more

"...The first 2/3 are amazing, alas the end is only ok. Very easy to read and get drawn into" Read more

"Wellness by Nathan Hill Wellness is a well-written, engaging, and thought-provoking novel...." Read more

16 customers mention "Length"6 positive10 negative

Customers have different views on the book's length. Some find it substantial and engaging despite its 600+ pages, while others consider it too long and depressing.

"...The book is overlong and takes a diversion of 3 or 4 chapters with Jack arguing with his estranged father about how to use the computer, email,..." Read more

"Hill’s magnum opus is an ambitious endeavor. It’s an exhaustive, deep-dive into modern marriage and American culture...." Read more

"Little long but so good...." Read more

"...creativity and brilliance of the writing and the story, but it was quite long and involved." Read more

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switterbug/Betsey Van Horn
Masterpiece
Reviewed in the United States on November 2, 2023
Verified Purchase

I’m gobsmacked, and have remained so from page one to the last word. An epic, sweeping, transformative, colossal (adverbs and adjectives are just not enough!) door-stopper of a book, a windswept and fiery, burning satire of a 1990s marriage between a modern couple in Chicago, Jack and Elizabeth. There’s a preoccupation with eternal love, health and well-being, the potent obsession with fitness and strength. How past years’ discarded identities generate the self of today, afraid or unafraid of tomorrow.

Jack is a photographer, but his pictures arise from the chemicals and fixatives in the darkroom, not from the camera. Elizabeth is a scientist who peddles placebos to rejuvenate passion. WELLNESS spans twenty years forward, but reaches back, to their childhoods, shifting back and forth in time. Or should I say Time, since Time is essential here, it subverts the narrative and liquidates expectations. It’s about everything, sort of like INFINITE JEST is about everything, and it’s a parabola, like GRAVITY'S RAINBOW is a parabola, but it’s neither the former or latter. The prose is gracefully placed on the page, despite the legion of info (critics would say info-dumping) that the text provides. Hill straddles the line between saying and pontificating, which may cause some readers to recoil.

Hill has created his own radical, non-starry-eyed romance, a 90s mosaic of Gen X ideology, as Jack and Elizabeth assemble and inhabit their identities via several and ongoing selves throughout the years, to someday evolve or diminish into what they are now. The stakes, at first, seem fairly mellow. I mean, the worst that I thought could happen is a break-up. Hooooold on, about those stakes. Hill drove them hard through my heart. It’s heavy, at times I felt my throat closing up. This isn’t a book I could read non-stop, I had to take breaks to release the tension, otherwise I would explode!

It's also about perception and paradox, connections and loneliness, greed and loss, manipulation and madness. The narrative winds through a buffet of subjects, and love is the polestar, and the threat. Love at first sight is endorsed and dismantled, but never abandoned. There’s so much breadth, from artists to investors, groupthink to prairie fires, children to ancestors, “forever homes,” the World Wide Web, health, sickness, and cures, social media, absence--and the faith in metaphysics, that our souls can travel at night.

Paradox: “…that was a pre-globalized world, a pre-9/11 world, a pre-housing bubble world…when they all sort of understood implicitly that however much they resented and resisted the mass economy, they would also have little trouble eventually finding a job and livelihood within it.”

Thematically rich in artful contradictions, as a new friend earnestly says to Elizabeth: “He practices the art of nothingness, while you practice the science of nothingness. You’re both obsessed with it: nothingness, emptiness, blankness, absence. Don’t you find that really meaningful?”

And this touched my heart, a poignant guidance from the scientist that mentored Elizabeth:

“Believe what you believe…but believe gently. Believe compassionately. Believe with curiosity. Believe with humility. And don’t trust the arrogance of certainty.”

This book is so deep, vast, mind-bending, and provocative, I just can’t do it justice. It’s written for all of us, all the Time, wherever you are, visible and manifest.

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G Reader
Mostly great
Reviewed in the United States on January 19, 2025
Verified Purchase
If you are around 45-55 and married, this is a helluva read. It will likely tap into all your own concerns and neuroses in the best way. A very empathetic, and real, look into both the husband and wife characters. The first 2/3 are amazing, alas the end is only ok. Very easy to read and get drawn into

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booksandbliss
if you're trying to decide if this book is for you or not...
Reviewed in the United States on February 15, 2024
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I was so excited to get my hands on this book; it seems to have all the themes that speak to me. As a fellow Gen X'er, straight, married with child, educated, and moderately if not highly neurotic, this book seemed to be written for a demographic like me.

And indeed, by the second page I had declared that I was in love with the story and the writing. Like Jack and Elizabeth's courtship, the book starts on a high note. Nathan Hill's writing is smart, witty, and engaging. I made it halfway through the book without much difficulty, even though I was initially kind of daunted by the length.

It was around page 300 that I found myself losing steam, not unlike Jack and Elizabeth's marriage. Picking up the book each day was no longer a priority for me...the story had started to bog down with long chapters on parenting, the placebo effect, prairie fires, Facebook algorithms...I normally love reading about parenting, and I can so relate to Elizabeth's neuroses parenting in the 2000's, but that long drawn-out chapter on her stress feeding her son had my eyes criss crossing...Hill has clearly done his research and he has an extensive bibliography at the end of the book to show for it. The intervening chapters are basically academic journal articles and mini-lectures weaved into the story. If you love academic and intellectual discussions and diverse and detailed tangents you may relish this, but if you just want to read a straightforward story then you will likely find this tedious.

The irony is that while I feel I am the perfect demographic for this book, I am also part of a demographic that doesn't have the bandwidth to appreciate and enjoy this book. I can objectively say that Wellness is quite the ambitious masterpiece - Nathan Hill is clearly brilliant. Unfortunately, I am exhausted and burnt out, from decades of work, childcare, parent care...from technology and the polarization found on social media...from all the things that this book satirizes. As much as I want to really reflect on and dissect what I have just read, I find the book too unwieldy to do so. By page 400 I just wanted to be done, but I had come too far to DNF (abandon it). There is a mild payoff in the penultimate chapters, when we see the traumas that took place in Jack's and Elizabeth's youth that had shaped the people they became. It was just a long wait for that payoff. By the time I was done I was crying in my head "Get me something fast and easy to read next!" (But one of these days, I would like to sit down and take some time to think more about the book.)

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Margaret Nero
Brilliant
Reviewed in Canada on March 18, 2024
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Wellness is by far the most incredible book I’ve read in a long time! Nathan Hill weaves contemporary topics so cleverly into the lives of the two main characters. I enjoyed learning about topics such as algorithms and placebos. A wonderful book- I highly recommend it!

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Kneale Grainger
So Good!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 17, 2025
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I expected 'Wellness' not to measure up to 'The Nix'.
It turned out not only to be just as good but quite different.
Mr Hill's prose is brilliant - never difficult to read even when articulating difficult concepts.

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Steph
Funny and dark
Reviewed in Germany on February 9, 2025
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If you like funny/dark contemporary novels about post modern marriage and culture, you will love this.

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Agnès
Bien être
Reviewed in France on March 2, 2025
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Excellent roman sur l'histoire d'un mariage ,vraie profondeur psychologique,facile à lire même en anglais. grand prix de littérature américaine.

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Mr Fast
Demasiado woke
Reviewed in Spain on July 14, 2024
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Demasiados intentos por parecer moderno, junto con una excesiva longitud de la novela, me hicieron dejarlo a la mitad.

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Wellness: A novel Hardcover – September 19, 2023

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Funny and dark

Bien être

Demasiado woke