Does Nathan Hill wink at us in Wellness?

In his excellent debut novel, The Nix, Nathan Hill drops the trenchant and timely line: “It’s no secret that the national pastime is no longer baseball. Now it’s sanctimony.” Along with being accurate and hilarious, the line may be an invitation to humility and de-escalation in approaching the work of criticism.

I will take that invitation seriously as I explore a curious dimension of Hill’s sophomore effort, Wellness, which came out last fall. Pivotally, Hill inserts a sly wink that none of the book’s initial reviews mentioned. This wink might be intended to provide an insight to the story outside the story, but it also holds the potential to flip readers’ sympathies. It either explodes the scope of the satire or transforms the work into a broader allegory on a kind of blindness.

Wellness, like any good novel, is not any one thing, or even about any one thing. It opens more than it closes, making it fiction rather than polemic. Its center is the love story of Jack Baker and Elizabeth Augustine, two young White people who move to Chicago to attend university. As the novel begins in the early ’90s, Jack and Elizabeth join a wave of students and artists moving into the near northwest side neighborhood of Wicker Park. The origin story of their relationship is a quin­tessential meet-cute. The rest of the book explores the complicated interplay of myths, metaphors, and manipulations that lend meaning to their love story, marriage, parenting, and lives.