The Vine That Grows Slowly: On Nathan Hill's Wellness

He did it for the second time now — and I was ready, though barely. The first time I had picked up a Nathan Hill novel, it was because I trusted NPR. On my drive back home from work one evening, the radio announced that Nathan Hill had arrived with his debut — The Nix. As an obedient disciple, I took the next turn, parked in the Barnes & Noble lot, and walked straight to my house of worship. I started on the book that very evening. Oh boy — he had arrived, all right. It was a seemingly simple story of a son who rekindles with his mother, a woman who had abandoned him as a child. And yet the novel was anything but simple: it was a braided skein, weaving together the growing-up years of Samuel and his mother Faye — coming of age, first loves, political awakening, and the particular loneliness that comes with self-awareness. How many copies of that book I have gifted in his name, only Nathan Hill knows. (Well, he gets the royalties. I am sure he appreciates the sentiment.)

Years passed. I was browsing the shelves of Champaca — Bengaluru's beloved independent, women-run bookstore and café — on the opening day of their new Indiranagar branch in April 2025 when my eyes landed on a familiar name. Nathan Hill. But the cover looked different from The Nix. My fingers brushed the spine. It read: Wellness. It had been almost nine years, and I felt a small tremor.

I did not read the blurb. I bought it along with a few other books that evening, came home, wrote something inside each newly purchased volume to remember the day by, then slid Wellness back onto the shelf — making sure it was not on top. It was almost like I wanted it to disappear. Like when you spot an old love across the street and you wish the throb rising in your throat were not there.

During the Christmas break, S picked it up and read it. I watched him from the corner of my eye but never asked a single thing about it. He finished it faster than most books he reads. He recommended it to me, highly. I simply nodded. I was still getting prepared.

And then it happened — without fanfare, without announcement — one fine day I lifted it from the shelf and began.

Jack and Elizabeth come together the way an opera singer hits the high notes: effortlessly, inevitably. Nathan Hill's writing always does this to me — his sentences coil around my body like a soft vine, slowly, imperceptibly, never announcing themselves, growing inch by inch until I am entirely held.

By the time Jack and Elizabeth reach the trough of their U-curve — their forties, that disorienting plateau where the promises of youth have quietly expired — I had lived inside their backstories with full residency. Elizabeth's thorny familial legacy. The Kansas prairie that shaped Jack, his world painted in the flat, stoic palette of Grant Wood's American Gothic — that iconic 1930 oil painting of a farmer and his daughter standing rigid before a Carpenter Gothic house in Iowa, now permanently housed at the Art Institute of Chicago. Jack uproots himself from that world of tilled stoicism and lands, tentatively, in the art scene of Chicago. The novel sprawls across decades: from the gritty, exhilarating 1990s Wicker Park art scene to the anxious, curated wellness culture of the 2010s suburbs, and Hill never loses control of a single thread.

Hill's treatment of this couple — so magnificently lost, the way so many of us are in our forties — is where the novel becomes something beyond a love story. They are trying to be the best parents, researching their own souls, cleansing themselves, forever becoming something slightly different from who they were yesterday, and utterly failing even to get the ordinary day done. Wellness is, among other things, a sharp, hilarious, and ultimately compassionate satire of the wellness-industrial complex: the serums, the detox juices, the meditation apps, the studies that promise joy from within. These are capitalism's latest offensive against humanity's plainest instincts — instincts we lost long ago and are now chasing back with a ferocity that blinds an entire generation. We are, as Hill shows us, running like headless chickens, furiously optimizing lives we are no longer sure we wanted in the first place.

We were told lies about what life should look like. And when we arrived at the picture that was promised, we found that none of it existed as described. There is no going back. So we look inward and ask ourselves: why did we believe them? Why did we arrive here? Nathan Hill does not answer these questions — he is far too intelligent for that. What he does instead is hold them, and us, with enormous, tender care.

And then the ending. Jack takes a final photograph of the tree he has crowned as the ultimate monument of home. Elizabeth closes shop. They come around, separately, and see their forever burn. Nathan Hill is brilliantly, wickedly, beautifully precise.

Go read it.