The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
An easy pill to swallow
The US novelist Nathan Hill returns with a sparkling satire on the modern ‘wellness’ industry, via placebos and pushy parents
WELLNESS by Nathan Hill 624pp, Picador, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP£20, ebook £9.99
This novel, the American author Nathan Hill’s second, is about the manipulation of human hope and fear, and the credulity on which it feeds. What used to be called the “pursuit of happiness” is now the quest for “wellness”, a modish concept that has been exploited to make money by tech bros and neo-hippies alike.
But Wellness is also a fairly traditional family story, about a couple who meet in Chicago in the 1990s and settle down together, with marriage and a son – or as near to settling as the techno-turmoil of the past 30 years will allow. They are Jack Baker, a photographer from Kansas, and Elizabeth Augustine “of the Litchfield Augustines”, the daughter of generations of wealth. (This interest in the different sides of American society will be familiar to readers of Hill’s 2016 debut, The Nix.)
Elizabeth feels more central to Hill’s story than Jack. She works for a business called Wellness, which invents “alternative stories for people to believe in”. This means, say, diverting air-travellers’ frustrations over smaller bag allowances by letting them pay for enhancements such as extra legroom. This way, “they would be less unhappy about the dreadful experience because, ultimately, they chose to have it. They did it to themselves.”
But Elizabeth’s work also harnesses a positive aspect of human credulity: the placebo effect, the body’s tremendous power to heal itself, which just needs to be prodded into action. “She told her clients to take a pill, and then she told them they might start feeling better, but she never actually said it was the pill itself that would make them feel better.” The active ingredient in the pills she provides – including a “love potion” that rekindles an old friend’s relationship – is “belief ”.
Elizabeth is signed up to her own concepts: she believes every report or study she reads about human behaviour, not least on the U-curve of human happiness as we age. Suffering from midlife malaise, she assures
Jack that “eventually, in our sixties, we’ll both be as happy as when we first met. That’s what the science says, anyway. Isn’t that something to look forward to?” It also gives us one of the book’s many terrific set pieces, where she tries to persuade their young son, Toby, to try healthy foods through reliance on a string of academic studies on childrearing. (Any parent who has tried this sort of thing will know that the main problem is that the baby hasn’t read the book.)
Next to a wife who says things such as “I would like to be sexually pleased, but maybe sometime later in the week”, Jack seems less colourful. “Short and anaemic” following childhood ill-health, he’s a photographer specialising in photographs of “nothing”, just as Elizabeth prescribes pills full of nothing. His best scenes are in his backstory, especially a funny section in the early 1990s in which he persuades a college professor that his pornography printouts, the hard-won fruit of dial-up internet access, are really a postmodern study on “the cultural production of reality”.
The variety and ingenuity of Hill’s satirical prods – from realestate development to Facebook algorithms – is impressive, and Wellness works best in its individual scenes. He introduces a topic, riffs a little, then drops us down into the detail. It’s surprising, too: when a swingers’ orgy is on the cards – “it’s more like just a party that lacks certain important boundaries” – a scene that could be played for laughs becomes affecting.
Wellness, however, is less successful in its larger scale – and a 600-page book really needs to work at scale. The narrative engines that run the length of the novel aren’t that exciting: will a marriage make it? Will a property build be completed? And the larger themes, such as how urban America has “plundered all the world’s money and capital and jobs and people” and “catastrophically emptied” its rural parts, never really take off.
Still, there’s more than enough page-by-page pleasure here to make the whole a success. If at times Wellness seems to be about nothing, and at other times about everything, then I suppose it’s a true reflection of life, after all.