Nathan Hill’s second novel, Wellness, is a clear-eyed exploration of the limitations of romance

Hill is at his cleverest while subtly poking fun at the post-truth internet generation’s modus operandi; first, “invent alternate stories for people to believe in, before needing to test the efficacy of those stories”.

Nathan Hill’s second novel, Wellness (Source: Amazon.in)

5 min readNov 23, 2024 03:52 PM IST First published on: Nov 23, 2024 at 03:52 PM IST

Marriage has been an enduring subject of fascination for the novel and the cinema because the contradictions that surround lengthy relationships — is it worth it to stake your life on a tiresome kind of stability? What do we need? What do we want? — are the most important questions of our lives. Nathan Hill’s expansive second novel Wellness carefully considers the trade-offs we make when we’re burdened by our own choices and time weighs heavily, taking its own toll.

There is a sense of urgency running through this sweeping, fast-paced novel that starts off in the 1990s, the pre dating-app era when landlines were de rigeur and an innocent lack of cynicism meant love at first sight wasn’t looked at, askance. Jack and Elizabeth, university students in Chicago, breathlessly seize every opportunity to gaze at each other unseen from their unlit apartments. When they finally meet in a local bar, they’re immediately inseparable, the rose-tinted months ahead replete with “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.” Naturally, the bewitched couple gallops towards marriage. Wellness fast forwards 20 years later to 2014 by when these erstwhile soulmates seem resigned to a stalemate that quietly crept up on them; life’s mundaneness proved to be crushing. In any case, no two people can ever agree exactly on how to live.

Elizabeth, a postdoc in health, relies on data to examine their mid-marriage malaise, comforted by the knowledge that the sadness must have served some prehistoric advantage to Neanderthal man. “I’ll be happy again by the time we’re 60,” she reasoned with Jack, already devastated by living in “separate master bedrooms”. Elizabeth’s ability to wring out a determined kind of logic from wildly inconsistent feelings and intellectualise happiness stems from her health hacking business practice called, you guessed it, Wellness. After helping her professor rubbish faddish cures, on his retirement, she turns Wellness into a clinic that offers cures by placebos. There’s a ton of data thrown in on the remarkable (if questionable) effectiveness of belief: “People exposed to fake poison ivy developed real rashes. And people given fake caffeine experienced real heart-rate jolts”. As the saying goes, it’s all in your head.

Hill is at his cleverest while subtly poking fun at the post-truth internet generation’s modus operandi; first, “invent alternate stories for people to believe in, before needing to test the efficacy of those stories”. It’s a fact that embellished realities are no longer considered lies and it’s hardly that difficult to find some dodgy study to support that placebos have actual physical manifestations. Future historians will analyse this current moment of self-healing belief and find a way to link it to this generation’s dreamy pursuit of perfection; a constant striving towards a better sort of life that promises all kinds of self-actualisation rewards, but which somehow, always remains tantalisingly out of reach. Wellness contains all the spices for an Edith Wharton-esque exploration of this contemporary life, except, there’s an information overload throughout that can make it feel daunting to finish. Exhausting passages on everything, the merits of protein powder and the science behind picky eaters, far from being immersive, take away from the storyline, which is a pity. My advice: skip them.

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In this age of information, it’s impossible to prevent the Instagram reels on pop psychology and Ted Talks on optimisation from seeping into fiction. Relentless possibilities lurk on our phones, tidbits on how we love, how we grow apart and how to survive, are simply part and parcel of our daily feeds. A reader experiences regular moments of deja vu in Wellness in between descriptive, tender portions on the limitations of romance. No book on marriage in the year 2024 can be complete without touching on the hot-button topic of polyamory and consensual non monogamy. The old-fashioned affair has given way to flexible coupledom made popular by the numerous TED Talks and YouTube shorts on alternative lifestyles. A younger friend raves about it telling Elizabeth flatly, “Till death do us part? Forsaking all others? No, that’s impossible.” Whatever the drawbacks of an irrational, torrid romance, if love isn’t your guide what will be? Wellness, occasionally caves under so many diverse new age ideas duly cited in an extensive bibliography but the meandering narrative gently guides the reader into appreciating how little we truly grasp about other peoples’ lives.

Kala is director, Hutkay Films