Wardini Book Review: Wellness — Nathan Hill (Pan Macmillan, $39.99)

Wellness is the latest novel from New York Times bestselling author Nathan Hill

Wellness begins as a seemingly simple, whimsical romance, the story of a boy in love with the girl he can see through his lonely Chicago apartment building window, equally alone in her apartment.

The description of the boy avoids the creepiness of voyeurism through a wholesome tone, and the first of many smile and gasp-eliciting reveals in the first few pages.

This is the origin story of Jack and Elizabeth who meet in a run-down area of Chicago where they run wild and free, students of art, psychology and philosophy, in love with love and life.

It’s a story they will tell their child, new friends, acquaintances, and it comes to define something about them. Stories, though, are not always true, and the core of this novel drills down into that.

The parts of the novel span Jack and Elizabeth’s childhoods, the things that shape them and the truths and untruths that form their psyche.

We meet them as parents in midlife, when Elizabeth maintains they are at the bottom of life’s happiness curve.

She does her “Elizabeth thing”, which is to say she researches and reads and learns. Jack will do anything to make her happy, to continue the origin story, and at this midpoint in their lives the past, its, myths its pain, conspire to bring their story to a crisis.

The story delves into the many influences on the ways in which we perceive the world and its people. Parents, studies, friends and, in present times, influencers on social media, algorithms and bots designed to keep us interacting, looking, liking and clicking.

Wellness is a love story, and an analysis of how we become tangled in our busy brains, how desire and want and need conspire to suffocate rational thought.

The themes are big, the characters at once adorable and irritating, the imagery beautiful, the landscapes alive. It’s funny and heartbreaking and exasperating.

It’s a book to spend time in, a book that will keep you musing long after the last page.