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.
Wellness is 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 ... spans more than 600 pages, but it somehow leaves the reader wanting even more. 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 — the conversations between Jack and Elizabeth, particularly when the two are engaged in argument, are almost preternaturally accurate ... And while there is profound sadness in this novel, it's tempered by Hill's sense of humor — he's one of America's funniest writers working today ... a perfect novel for our age, filled with a deep awareness of the Internet-poisoned, marketing-driven engineered emptiness of modern times, but also a compassionate optimism about our ability to find and maintain love nonetheless. It's a monumental achievement: a masterpiece by an author who has, in the space of two novels, become indispensable.
Can be very funny ... The social scope of Wellness may be broad, but its true concerns are intimate ... It is smart, a shrewd corrective to Gen X exceptionalism, and above all, a lot of fun ... I, for one, wouldn’t mind reading more novels that boldly attempt to make sense of our ever more fractured and absurd everyday lives, and that treat this subject as something important—even, now and then, one written by a white guy.
Hill is witty at exposing the ways intelligence and social background don’t necessarily make us more immune to manipulation ... Hill works through this, with some success, through sheer writerly grace ... If Hill’s novel has taught us anything, it’s that you need to be skeptical of the stories you hear. Even, sometimes. the ones he tells.
ome writers might stagger and cave under the weight of so many ideas and possibilities, but not Hill. The quiet genius of his writing is that he takes the reader effortlessly into every one of these worlds ... The result is utterly immersive: you simply have to turn the page, unravel more.
As a stylist, Hill lands on his feet most of the time ... There are times when this digressive novel sags under the weight of its own constantly proliferating climaxes and coincidences. It’s also the kind of novel where you learn absolutely everyone’s hair colour ... Yet, Hill’s penchant for super-abundance equips him well for the task of capturing the contours of modern American life. Wellness is the kind of novel that feels genuinely capacious and lively, full of interconnected rooms stuffed with unexpected fascinations.
Jack and Elizabeth’s staggering hidden traumas are suspensefully revealed. In astutely observed, hilariously satirical passages, Hill also weighs the sublime, the absurd, and the malevolent as he considers family and self, art and academia...with exhilarating insights and fluent compassion. 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.
Expansive, audacious, and bighearted ... With an ample supply of dramatic plot twists and a pair of protagonists who remain, even in their worst moments, deeply sympathetic, Wellness gives the lie to its character who says, 'traditional storytelling is dying.' In the hands of a writer as extravagantly gifted as Nathan Hill, it's very much alive.
Jack and Elizabeth’s story speaks to the way people craft narratives to give their lives meaning, and it asks whether believing in those narratives ultimately helps or harms. This stunning novel of ideas never loses sight of its humanity.
