The Last 43 Pages of Nathan Hill's "Wellness"
A Thursday morning's catharsis
Subscriber, I must interrupt the post-Christmas, pre-New Years holiday interregnum to let you know that yesterday between 2:00 and 3:30am, I had one of the most moving, transformative, catharsis-as-the-Greeks-intended-it reading experiences of my adult life. The kind of experience that reawakens one to fiction’s potential to change lives and move needles both political and metaphysical, that reminds me why exactly I’ve chosen do the work I do. In the intervening time I have slept (a little) and gotten a tattoo of a bully breed as a Ghibli river spirit, but have not been able to stop thinking about the strange and powerful alchemy between myself and this book, particularly its last 43 pages.
Two things you should know before reading on: this essay contains hella spoilers for Nathan Hill’s Wellness, so stop reading now if you do not want this book spoiled. (And pray for our dear friend Fig Tree, who, when I came to them teary-eyed, asking if I could please talk about this novel – if, even though they haven’t read it yet, they wouldn’t mind it just a little bit spoiled – said, “Babe, you’ve spoiled so much of Wellness for me already – I don’t think I ever had a choice.”) Also, I approached this book with an already pretty large affinity for Nathan Hill and his writing after reading and loving The Nix in 2016 and then by some incredible dint of luck getting reviewed by him in the NYT. That said, no amount of enthusiasm for his writing or his superb generosity could possibly cause to happen what happened yesterday morning. That was a truly unique and remarkable coalescence of many things that resulted in this feeling of, like, peering under the hood of life itself, of having things deeply familiar to me defamiliarized in truly mind-bending ways, of feeling physically as if the top of my head were taken off.
OK, if you’re still reading this, I assume you understand that much of Wellness is about to be spoiled for you. Hopefully you’ve already read it. If not, hopefully you don’t mind spoilers!
Let me begin by setting the scene: Fig and I had just returned from a week away in a remote cabin in the woods of northeastern Iowa. It was a gorgeous getaway and definitely a crucible for change in its own right – the kind of vacation so gloriously, enrapturingly informative that you need to take a post-vacation vacation – and our drive back home would have been eight hours without breaks. Which means that we were on the road for something like eleven hours, traversing the winter-Gothic Midwest in our little Corolla, chatting animatedly under the kind of breathtaking grisaille sky that manages to communicate “sunrise” and “sunset” and “sunbeams” and “magisterial kingdom of heaven” and “impending storm” and “eerie light pollution” using only different shades of grey. And as “sunrise” segued into “nebulous daytime” and then into “sunset,” we went from chatty to migrained and desperate to never be in a car again, so by the time we got home we were pretty severely off-kilter and ready for bed. Though did I go to bed? Subscriber, I did not.
For you see, I hadn’t brought Wellness on the trip. I had only 43 pages of the book left, and didn’t want to lug along the hardcover only to read those 43 pages in half an hour and have to lug it back home. I had gotten the book as a gift in October, and had been reading it since meeting Nathan Hill at the Wisconsin Book Festival. My experience reading Wellness was, for the most part, an exercise in painful self-control: I was at the height of my semester busyness and was also bouncing around the country for various literary festivals. I had books to read for class and books to read for blurbing and tons of student work to read on top of it all. I must have read five or six other books in between starting and finally finishing Wellness, and they were all wonderful titles, but what I really always wanted to be reading was Wellness, I was feeling inexorably pulled back to it, was desperate for just a day or two when I could sit and do nothing but read this book. Like The Nix, Wellness is the kind of doorstopper that somehow also melts through your fingers[1]: it's over 600 pages long but also eminently readable, so that you will fall into a dreamlike trance for some hours and look up to find that 200 pages of the book are just – poof! – gone, dissolved into quicksilver and slunk under the door of your mind like Tolstoy-meets-Alex Mack. So, while I was indeed frustrated by how my busyness had kept me from uninterrupted time with Wellness, I was also a little bit grateful for it. Being forced to steal thirty or forty pages of this book here and there had the upside of allowing me to spend more calendar time with it, to not feel like I was gorging on it and then finding myself in the rather bittersweet situation of not having it to look forward to. I tried to remind myself of this silver lining whenever I started to get annoyed at my lack of reading time.
But by Wednesday night, subscriber, I was exhausted and cranky and done being the bigger person, the silver lining person. I was physically tired but not sleep tired – one of the truly hellish paradoxes of the post-road trip body – so I ate some peanut butter and a cannabis gummy and sat stubbornly down on the couch with Wellness, noting with righteous indignation the very, very small sliver of unread book described by my bookmark’s placement, my mood very distinctly one of I’m gonna get exactly what I want right NOW.
This last leg of my voyage with Wellness began on page 554, as we’re learning about the origins of Jack Baker’s artistic practice – that his style is born not out of some pretentious engagement with critical theory but of economic necessity and a need to render via chemicals on photo paper a version of the prairie fire that stole his beloved sister from him. Up until now, the book has been this superbly funny and heartfelt realist satire: We’ve watched as Jack and Elizabeth, a pair of Gen Xers who fell in love in the anti-establishment Wicker Park of the early 90s and are now preparing to move with their Minecraft-addicted son to a “forever home” in the suburbs, contend with sex and marriage under late-stage capitalism, with being from two very different and very troubled families (Jack comes from a Suffer Silently Kansas farm family and Elizabeth from a clan whose patriarchs have made heaps of money exploiting humankind’s baser – i.e. racist, imperial, violent – tendencies). I totally delighted in Wellness as I had in The Nix, watching Nathan Hill do this brilliant balancing act of telling a massively engaging story that also manages to explore some pretty dense philosophical themes. In Wellness, we grin and chuckle and wince as Jack and Elizabeth bumble through their middle-class lives, learning along the way about things like the uncanny power of placebo, various forms of spiritual charlatanism, the relationship-as-cult, behaviorist influence in everything from how we parent to how we process information, the disaffected-artist-to-juiced-up-gentrifier pipeline, and the surprising genealogy of fake news.
I had already told a friend that, as far as galaxy-brained contemporary domestic dramas go, the section of Wellness entitled “The Needy Users: A Drama in Seven Algorithms” already had it over “The More He Thought About It, the Angrier He Got,” my favorite chapter from The Corrections and all-time favorite thing I’ve read by Franzen.[2] Sitting on the living room couch, reading about Jack Baker’s budget photography, feeling the gummy beginning to kick in, I was still under the impression that this would remain my favorite section of the book, and that these final 43 pages would close with a wry grin and a nod to, I don’t know, a peaceable divorce? Their real estate developer friend somehow caught flagrante with that depressing Big Brother vibrator Elizabeth’s been using?[3] Their son’s Minecraft vlog going viral in some strange and hilarious way? That is to say, I had no idea what Nathan Hill had in store for me.
Perhaps you’ve taken a gummy when very tired or otherwise physically compromised and noticed that the effects are both strong and clarifying? You are not fuzzy-headed high so much as “inside the rung bell of the universe,” you are vibrating and listening to the lingering echo of a sound that was made minutes ago: that is to say, you are in multiple places in time at once. Because this is what my brain was doing of its own accord, and what I swiftly understood that the last 43 pages of Wellness were going to do, too: there would be no winking and nudging, no acerbic punchline – instead, I would be learning about the depths of Jack and Elizabeth’s trauma, would be visiting them at a handful of defining points in their lives that would show me their hurt as it had never been shown in the book before, and would explain to me how the telos of their relationship (and of all their adult endeavors, really) was to relieve this hurt, this howling psychic pain which is unique to neither of them but which serves to isolate them nonetheless. I would be the fly on the wall observing some of the most challenging, humiliating moments of their lives, and only after this would I be rewarded with a final flashback reminding me of how much they loved each other, and how they maybe could have grown together were it not for their entrapment in these shadows of the past.
And let me clarify that this interlude of howling psychic pain was not like A Little Life in tone or mood. It would not be a Nathan Hill novel if we shifted from hilarious observations about conservative conspiracy theories to people suddenly getting run over repeatedly by cars or brutally and graphically assaulted and abused.[4] Rather, we learn of these traumas in compassionately narrated snapshots that allow both Jack and Elizabeth to retain their humanity. The narrative voice makes a slight shift out of the chortling register in which Nathan Hill was cheerfully pointing out the various hypocrisies of modern life that unite us across all stratifications of class and politics. Instead, the tone he assumes in these final 43 pages is one of pure love and concern – for Jack and Elizabeth, of course, and also for those who’ve experienced things like what they’ve experienced – and this love and concern is combined with the kind of authorial confidence that we’re talking about when we call a novel “sweeping” or “panoramic.” Nathan Hill takes us through time, dilating and contracting it with sorcerous ease, and suddenly brings together very disparate characters under the thematic umbrellas of “placebo” and “wounded parent,” and these threadings of various needles happen with such alacrity and elegance that it was a little hard for me to believe what was happening: namely, that I was on a couch in Southern Illinois reading a book and not being transported through time by a benevolent interdimensional specter keen on showing me various facets of the human experience so I could learn a thing or two and maybe also sob a little along the way.
At this point, I took out my headphones and began listening to Coldplay’s “The Scientist.” This is probably the only Coldplay song I’ve ever listened to with any regularity – I’m not sure I’ve even heard a single album of theirs all the way through – and I don’t like listening to music with lyrics while I’m reading, as the words in my ears tend to distract me from the words on the page. But let me be perfectly honest with you, dear subscriber: sitting there in the rung bell of the universe, floating higher and higher up by the minute, I understood both that “The Scientist” was the thing that needed to accompany me during this final stretch of Wellness, and that I had long passed the point of possibly being distracted from this book by anything.
In these last 43 pages, we watch Jack learn that, contrary to what he’d believed (and what his mother had told him), he may not have accidentally sent his beloved sister to her death in a field of burning grass – in fact, it may well have been his mother’s doing. We see him visit his parents’ house after his father’s death, visit the basement into which his father had moved when he was actively dying of lung cancer after being devastated by the loss of the daughter who lit up his life. We watch Jack appraise his father’s effects – “the entirety of his father’s stuff would probably fit in a single cardboard box – it was the three cubic feet Lawrence’s life amounted to” – including the giant cabinet of “cancer-curing” snake oil he’d purchased from Facebook ads fed to him by the same algorithm that was feeding him all the alt-right conspiracy theories he grew to believe. We learn with Jack how much his father was trying to care for him in those final days when he was messaging him anxious apologies on Facebook, as well as in various times before, such as when he woke up before dawn to impale coyote carcasses on the fence surrounding the family farm – something he did to deter other coyotes, and that he did before Jack woke up because he wanted to spare his sensitive son the gruesome sight. We watch, devastatingly, as Jack visits the twisted and bent tree he considers his sister’s memorial – the selfsame tree that we see more than four hundred pages earlier, when Jack is showing his classmates at the School of the Art Institute the photos he took on his family farm, photos which his classmates roundly dismissed for their lack of “pomo” edginess.[5]
As for Elizabeth’s trauma, we’d been getting more measured hints of it throughout – being brilliant and creative and curious in a family that values profit above all else, terrifying flashes of her father’s rage and her mother’s emotional absence – and it finally culminates in a scene in which Elizabeth plays tennis with her father on the family’s private court. Her father is an intensely violent and fragile man, embarrassed by his lack of aptitude for school (and presumed lack of intelligence by his own father), and cannot stand the fact that his daughter is smarter than him. Elizabeth has spent her childhood and adolescence avoiding his wrath by downplaying her own achievements, a tendency that will follow her into adulthood. But on this day, during this game of tennis, Elizabeth decides that she will play to win, and winning against her junk baller father is, it turns out, pretty easily done when you apply a little psychology and physics to the situation. And when she does win, he loses his mind and throws his tennis racket at her. It hits her in the face, giving her two black eyes and a broken nose.
After being “tended to” by the many people in her father’s deep pocket – You’re fine, Elizabeth. His hand slipped. It was an accident. Your nose isn’t broken – Elizabeth climbs into the sealed-off fourth floor of her family’s mansion, which is totally infested by bats[6], and sits down to breathe in the ammonia-infused air, prepared to die. But as she’s beginning to suffocate, she realizes that committing suicide would be letting her father win, that she needs to go back downstairs and resume her life. Otherwise, her death “would perversely become one more thing for him to be weirdly proud of: Elizabeth was weak and stupid and dead and he was strong and smart and alive.” So she gets up and goes downstairs and, years later reflecting on this, is so happy she did, because she fell in love with a wonderful man and had a beautiful son. And maybe shrinking away from this family is not what she wants to do after all – maybe she wants to open herself to a love she’s been terrified of all her life.
Meanwhile, Jack is coming to a very different conclusion.
Beyond the obvious observations that could be made here, such as that Nathan Hill has infused a novel about Gen Xers trying to move to the suburbs with the urgency and soul-searching and near-universality of an Ibsen or Shakespeare play; or that moving through time like this and seeing other people’s pain so vividly but also with such beauty and compassion is a little dizzying and almost makes one want to burst into tears with relief after being daily bombarded with arguments against adopting said beauty and compassion as guides for one’s own life; or that Wellness is cinematic not just because the scene and character descriptions are on point, but because reading it – especially these last 43 pages – makes you feel the way you feel when watching a particularly affecting movie. This would be a movie that pushes past all your critical and judgmental faculties, that isn’t trying to manipulate or scare you, that just wants to show you something about the world, to tell a story using a medium in which certain aesthetic decisions have been made for you so you can slip into pure feeling with ease and immediacy. I remember being a child and watching Scar murder Simba’s father in that stunner of a stampede scene in The Lion King: my first exposure to Claudius, Hamlet, and the dead King of Denmark, but the scene itself has no Shakespearian counterpart, it’s pure fan fiction, and watching it will always make me breathless with emotion, affect me in a way that feels as personal as a dream. This is how the last 43 pages of Wellness feel to me as well.
Something that is extremely true of Nathan Hill but rarely said about him is that he speaks the language of the Midwest so fluently that he’s able to elevate it to high drama and poetry, able to show us first through the eyes of the art historian and then through the eyes of the talented young painter why exactly the Flint Hills of Kansas should be able to deliver us into fits of spiritual ecstasy. As a lifetime resident of Flyover Country, I can say with confidence that there is so much there there, so much painterly natural beauty to be seen and felt and admired. And the domestic pain of the Midwest is of a particular flavor that cuts across categories of race, class, and politics: even I, growing up the child of an ER doctor in a well-appointed home in the suburbs of Chicago, found myself nodding in recognition at some aspects of the Baker family’s working class Kansan suffering. For the Midwestern Prairie Wife: What’s it like to feel so unfulfilled and overlooked and unspecial it’s like a kind of soul-annihilation but you must keep quiet about it, you must act silently to coerce the world into behaving for you and then categorically deny any and all wrongdoing – you must appear to be right at all costs, and unassailable at all times, or else you will be exposed as worthless? For the Hardworking Midwestern Father-Farmer: What’s it like to watch the years of your life measured in crop yields and pay stubs, to watch the colorful visionary dreams of your youth dry up along with your respect for yourself, to become nothing more than a human key in a lock that must be turned again and again in order for your family to be fed and clothed and for your children to someday get crop yields and pay stubs of their own, to become a scary stranger to yourself as you explode and cry and then stonily succumb to unspoken shame? For the Child of the Midwest: What’s it like to grow up in a regional culture where any expression of anger or even discontent feels lethal, where absorbing adults’ emotions for them becomes an Olympic sport, where you are expected to show your love through your codependency? And while experiences such as these are certainly had all the time outside the Midwest, there is something about the Midwestern tendencies towards repression, equivocation, and denial that makes having these experiences especially easy and common. For years, I was horrified by the thought of someone being mad at me: to learn of someone else’s disapproval had the morbid weight of a late-stage cancer diagnosis. I was also extremely embarrassed whenever I wasn’t right about something, or when it appeared that a group of people didn’t like me – an embarrassment that hardened into shame and then eventually into bitter resentment. Having lived and healed from these things made it easy for me to understand and even relate to Jack’s horrifying Lady Macbeth of a mother, who is so jealous of her husband’s affection for her daughter that she’d sooner send that daughter to her death than talk honestly about this burdensome feeling that’s been blackening her heart for decades. I could relate to Jack’s father, too – for years I was consumed both by my work and my inferiority complex around my work, and thought that everything would get better if I just “got really successful” (I got comparatively more successful, and it didn’t). And any Midwestern childhood, whether spent in the cornfields or in the suburbs or even in a high-rise in Chicago, has this quality of scary uncertainty, the frequent crises of faith when obsessive people pleasing (your birthright and religion) fails to deliver you from your own psychic torment. An Iowa native himself, Nathan Hill seems to understand all this, and uses this knowledge to superlative effect in Jack’s trauma sequence.
As Chris Martin’s plaintive, boyish voice played over and over in my ears, I watched as Jack’s life sped up again: here he is enduring his “punishment,” which is to attend a whole lot of terrifying Evangelical church services several times a week for years, and to be indoctrinated with a no-sex-no-lust-hate-yourself ethos that takes things several steps beyond the puritanical high school “sex ed” many of us all over the country received and into the abusive, cultish Duggar territory one can stumble into with some frequency in the bible belt. Jack’s mother takes him to these services and bible studies, and she asks the congregation for its compassion, all but announcing to the public that her son is “rotten to the core,” that he deliberately killed his sister and needs to be forgiven. Nobody said it was easy, sang Chris Martin as I saw child Jack Baker sitting in the pew beside his fuming mother, eyes closed and shoulders hunched while she pronounced him a disgusting sinner. No one ever said it would be this hard, Chris Martin sang as adult Jack had a withering conversation with his now-elderly mother, who revealed herself to be so fearful that she was totally closed off to him – to any form of love, really. I had to put the book down several times with just twenty, fifteen, ten pages to go and stand up and walk in slow circles and contemplate the great, strange mystery of being alive. I floated higher. The sun came up. I cried.
For over a decade, I’ve been defaulting to “reading like a writer” and thus being forced to find new ways to enjoy my reading experience as an appreciator of craft, a connoisseur of interesting themes and trends, and a fierce advocate for either the death or revival of the author (depending on my mood). What a gift it is, then, to be swept up helplessly in the current of a book, to look up from the page and find myself feeling something, to be a little dizzy from the beauty and shock of it all. Wellness opened the floodgates for me, and I was six years old again and watching Scar let go of Mufasa’s paws at the cliff’s edge. I was also thirteen years old and watching the Marriage of Figaro at the Lyric Opera on a field trip to Chicago, not understanding why the soprano’s voice was making me tear up, but enjoying the euphoric feeling all the same. I was also twenty-one and shaking my head in amazement at the moment in “The Dead” when Gabriel realizes his wife, asleep in bed beside him, loves a dead man more than she will ever love him. I was also twenty-seven and watching Moonlight, my chest tightening as Chiron gets bullied as a child and then hardens into a stoically masculine adult. I suppose this is just the realm of deeply-felt art: when someone tells a story with candor and vulnerability and open-heartedness, the effect is an artwork that turns me, Mr. Creative Writing Pedagogy, back into a totally blank canvas whose only job is to feel.[7] So thank you to all the artists who set out to do this, and especially to Nathan Hill, whose books just keep getting better and better.
I’ll leave you with this absurd Instagram reel that floated unbidden into my feed minutes ago, as I was taking a screen-mediated break from writing this. This is a reel which, if you’ve read Wellness, will make a lot of sense to you and maybe even strike you as pleasantly uncanny?
If you haven’t already, you can order a copy of Wellness here!
[1] Normally I’m not big on mixed metaphors but personally I’m loving this one.
[2] In second place is “Mistakes Were Made” in Freedom – yes, I know, I am that truly rare breed: a millennial Franzen apologist. Sharpen your cancelation talons.
[3] This would of course never happen, even in a vastly, vastly inferior version of the book, but it’s still kind of funny to imagine.
[4] This is not intended as a knock on Hanya Yanagihara – I actually loved A Little Life – but Nathan Hill is a very different writer.
[5] Or maybe the pomo edginess of mocking other, more sincere attempts at pomo edginess? Feeling really lucky not to have been an art student in the early 90s right now!
[6] For everyone who claims to hate metaphor and think it’s treacly and precious when employed on a grand scale in realist litfic – please think again.
[7] Another mixed metaphor I quite like.
That. Was. AMAZING!! I don’t have anything profound to say about it except this is the kind of book that makes me joyous to be doing the thing I’m doing, that reminds me why it’s all worth it, because someone wrote that. At first I was like meh and then I was like WHAAT and then I was like OH and then I was like *sobbing on the floor.* Truly an accomplishment in the literary fiction genre and reminds me why I like it.
Picked up this book based on your recommendation. I will be returning to this once I finish it.