Sameer Gudhate Presents the Book Review of Wellness by Nathan Hill

There are books that arrive quietly, like soft rain tapping on a window. And then there are books like Wellness—that kick the door open, sit across from you in the dim light of a late-night café, and ask the kind of questions you’ve been trying very hard not to look at directly. The kind of questions that feel like staring into a mirror for too long.

What if love isn’t something we fall into once, but something we must choose again and again, even when the magic dissolves and all that’s left is the messy day-to-day grit of real life?

Nathan Hill—the author who first shook things up with The Nix—returns with a colossal, ambitious, wickedly funny, stunningly intimate novel about marriage, modernity, and the strange cult we now call “wellness.” It’s 624 pages long, but you don’t read it—you live through it. You survive it. You heal from it. And occasionally, you laugh out loud while doing so, which feels like oxygen.

At the heart of the book are Jack and Elizabeth, two college kids in 1990s Chicago who fall in love the way only the young do—recklessly, breathlessly, without any guard rails. They meet across dark apartment windows, gazing at each other’s silhouettes like characters in a private experiment—fitting for Elizabeth, who grows up to study placebos, illusions, and the stories we tell ourselves to feel better. Jack becomes a photographer who still believes in chemicals, film, and the kind of art you can touch, smell, and ruin. They marry. They promise the world. And like most of us, they believe love alone is enough.

Fast forward twenty years. Life has shoved its weight onto their shoulders. Parenting has wrung them out. Careers have disappointed them. Technology has rewired them. And they are now strangers living in the same house—two exhausted planets slowly losing orbit. Elizabeth seeks thrill inside mindfulness cults disguised as self-help groups, while Jack seeks meaning in fitness trackers and self-optimization. Algorithms dictate their anxieties. Facebook fights dictate their nights. They stand together, but worlds apart, and the space between them begins to echo.

Hill’s writing is electric. Big and generous and satirical but also tender and bruised. He writes marriage with the precision of a surgeon and the empathy of someone who knows the quiet strain of two people trying to remember why they chose each other. His sentences stretch and stretch until they snap into unexpected truth. The structure bounces across time—youth to parenthood, first kisses to last fights—and the effect feels like memory itself: nonlinear, emotional, messy.

There’s a moment in the book—small but devastating—when Jack buys a high-tech fitness band to track his progress, proof he is improving, becoming better, more lovable. He leaves it on the bedside table. Later, scrolling through the data, he discovers that all it recorded was the rhythmic pulse of his wife using a vibrator. I closed the book. Exhaled. Sat still. Because there it was—the quiet grief of distance, of being in the same room but light years away from each other.

Hill captures the absurdity of modern wellness culture—the hustle for self-optimization, the ridiculous buzzwords, the pseudoscience, the cultish retreats that promise enlightenment—but beneath the satire is a serious question:

Why are we all working so hard to fix ourselves instead of learning how to live with who we already are?

If I have a critique, it’s that some sections sag—there is a forty-page deep dive into social media algorithms that felt like walking through wet cement. And sometimes the novel’s abundance—its encyclopaedic appetite for everything—can exhaust. But maybe that’s deliberate. Modern life exhausts. Love exhausts. We’re all tired from trying to become the best version of ourselves.

Yet I loved this book fiercely. Because it reminds us that love isn’t magic; it’s maintenance. It’s choosing the same person over and over, even when they are difficult, even when we are broken. It’s believing gently, as Elizabeth’s mentor says—believe without arrogance, without certainty, without trying to manipulate the world into shape.

When I closed Wellness, I found myself thinking of all the tiny inventions we build inside our relationships—hope, illusion, forgiveness, stories, stories, stories. Maybe that’s the real placebo. Maybe it’s also the cure.

Read this if you love sprawling storytelling, if you’ve ever wondered what happens after the credits roll on the romantic comedy, if marriage or modern life has ever knocked the wind out of you. Read it if you’re human.

And maybe, just maybe, it will make you believe again—gently.

Grab the book. Let it challenge you. Let it hold a mirror up. Let it change something.

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