RFBC #21: Wellness
Does Nathan Hill’s follow-up to The Nix beat the sophomore slump?
Nathan Hill’s debut novel, 2016’s The Nix, was one of that year’s best-reviewed books, landing on best-of-the-year lists at the New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, and National Public Radio, among others. It also won the Art Seidenbaum award for First Fiction from the Los Angeles Times. What would he do for an encore? Was The Nix a flash in the pan, like, say, Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, another big book from a promising young writer? Or did Hill have another hit in him?
It took seven years and 624 pages to answer the question, and that answer was Wellness. It’s the story of Jack and Elizabeth: from their storybook meeting as students in Chicago who live across the alley from each other in pre-gentrification Wicker Park apartments, to a crisis in their marriage after 20 years together. Wellness has a lot of things that made The Nix such a pleasure to read: love, humor, family drama, and sympathetic-but-flawed characters you could root for.
But is it any good? That’s the question we tackled at the March 2024 meeting of Radio Free Book Club. Please note: Spoilers follow. So if you’re planning to read Wellness, please come back at another time—and please check out our podcast. We promise it’s a lively, insightful discussion.
Show notes:
The RFBC crew for our December 2023 show was Indianapolis writer Ken Honeywell; author and ex-Butler University professor Susan Neville; writer/baker/woman about town Traci Cumbay; and book club noob/dedicated reader/dog mom Kristin Baxter-Howell. Our show was recorded at Listen Hear in Indianapolis and produced by our friend Galileo for 99.1 WQRT-LP.
Blame Kristin if you don’t like Wellness: it was her selection. It’s not often that we ask someone new to Radio Free Book Club to pick the book. But we knew Kristin had great taste, and Ken loved The Nix, so it all made sense to us. (BTW: Ken was the only one who had any prior knowledge of Nathan Hill, but both Susan and Kristin had also read The Nix by the time we recorded the show.)
There’s so much to talk about. Psychology. Grief. Art. The academy. Gentrification. Young love. Marriage. Parenting. The placebo effect. Social media. Self-improvement. Swinging. We could have talked about Wellness for another hour, easily.
Come with. Those two words. If, after reading Wellness, they don’t make you feel a little mushy, then you’re a cold-hearted cynic or you’re just not paying attention.
Nathan likes to show us his research—and there was a lot of it that went into Wellness (and The Nix), particularly in the section called “The Needy Users” about the way social media algorithms manipulate us—all of us—into believing crazy things that pit us against one another. Kristin would have cut it. Susan wanted to give it to all her students.
Was Elizabeth any better than a snake oil peddler? More specifically, was she any better than Brandie, who was “curing” diabetes and fixing all sorts of relationship issues with positive thinking…while Elizabeth was giving people placebos designed to trick them into getting better? Well…probably not. She wasn’t making the same overt claims Brandie was. But she was implying them. Regardless, it was delightful when Elizabeth gave Brandie the love potion.
Who was the worst person in Wellness? Brandie was awful, and Traci called her out immediately. Jack’s mother was awful. But for sheer awfulness, it was difficult to beat Elizabeth’s father. Her mother was a piece of work, too, but her father’s shaming, bullying behavior elevated him to a whole ‘nother level of ugliness.
The ending divided us. We were all charmed by the last little chapter, a callback to the opening section where Jack and Elizabeth fall in love. But the “real-time” ending didn’t work for everyone. Kristin and Traci rolled their eyes a little. Ken and Susan fell for it. Susan noted that John Barth once referred to ending a novel as “a controlled crash.” We all laughed.
Would we recommend it? All four Radio Free Book Club readers heartily recommended Wellness—and the three of us who’d read The Nix would recommend it, as well. Wellness is funny, moving, and definitely thought provoking on a lot of levels. We all loved it.
Bonus recommendations: While acknowledging she was late to the party, Traci recommended Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. Kristin recommended Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles (and Susan added her enthusiastic thumbs up). Susan recommended the book we’re discussing on our next show—see below—and the latest winner of the Booker Prize, Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song. Ken recommended the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning The Stories of John Cheever.
Next month: We’re excited to talk about a first novel with a local connection: Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, the award-winning poet who got his BA at Purdue and his MFA at Butler. Is it as good as eveyone’s saying? We hope you’ll find out with us.
