Wellness By Nathan Hill Review – The Tragicomic Maladies Of Marriage

A penchant for super-abundance in this follow-up to The Nix helps to capture the contours of modern American life

Nathan Hill’s second novel monitors the health of a 21st-century marriage. A recent Oprah book club pick, it bears many of the hallmarks of big American social novels of the last 20 years by Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon or Jennifer Egan. It also shares many qualities with the author’s New York Times bestselling debut, 2016’s The Nix, another non-linear novel of fantastic abundance that explores public and private lives in Chicago and its surrounds.

But where The Nix focused on the aspirations and failures of the baby boomers, Hill turns his attention here – in just 624 pages, to The Nix’s 752 – towards generation X’s quest for joy through “wellness”. His chosen lens for this exploration of physical, mental and marital health is, appropriately enough, a young couple in love.