When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the '90s, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in Chicago's thriving underground art scene with an appreciative kindred spirit. Fast-forward twenty years to married life, and alongside the challenges of parenting, they encounter cults disguised as mindfulness support groups, polyamorous would-be suitors, Facebook wars, and something called Love Potion Number Nine. 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 painful 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.
The beauty of Hill’s second novel is that every character is at least a little strange and no one is unworthy of sympathy ... Not some naive, crunchy-granola midlife-crisis novel ... A clear-eyed look at the difficulty to live honestly in a world where authenticity may be the most challenged idea of all ... Has an insistent pull. Hill’s writing can be gorgeous.
The ingredients are in place for a Franzen-esque exploration of The Way We Live Now, and, at least for a while, this is what the book delivers ... Hill is less interested in getting to the bottom of the modern predicament than he is in constructing an elaborate, back-story-laden plot machine that will, after hundreds of pages, solve all its characters’ problems with a series of satisfying clicks ... Hill intertwines past and present with militaristic precision, revealing the ways his characters’ histories come to bear inexorably, unambiguously on their present lives ... Hill...is so dogged about connecting narrative dots that he loses sight of the messiness of lived reality ... Hill’s storytelling abilities are impressive, if maddening, and underneath all the moving parts, his novels vividly capture lonely Midwestern childhoods and real yearning for connection and understanding ... What’s frustrating is that, characteristically, even this moment of artistic appreciation turns out to have an ulterior motive.
The book swarms with characters, ideas, and sociological evocations, taking place over several decades ... Hill’s ambition put me in mind of two other 20th-century novelists, Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, but Hill is less gnomic than the former and more humane than the latter ... Hill keeps his lofty intentions under his hat; only after one is well into the novel does one begin to realize that there are tales within tales ... Intermittently slides into too-muchness ... All of which is to say that 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. You just have to find the hours to read it in, which might mean skipping a new TV series or two.
