Wellness by Nathan Hill

This is a winner that was recommended to me by a friend while we were on a wild adventure in Argentina. She is also the source of the recommended podcasts from Parnassus books each week, for which I will be forever grateful she turned me on to. What a jewel that is! Ok, I read a review of this which called it a tale of the tragicomic maladies of marriage, which is a bit funny and very true. However, I see it more of an exaggerated account of the baggage that each member of the couple brings into their relationship from their families of origin, and how they form a team and try to avoid those exact mistakes onto their offspring, thereby creating their own set of issues to be passed on through their children to their grandchildren, and so on. Jack and Elizabeth meet as students in 1990s Chicago. They live in neighboring buildings and, at night, watch one another through dark windows, imagining themselves into each other’s lives long before actual intimacy occurs. This courtship through glass can’t help but have the aura of a scientific experiment – and scientific experiments are Elizabeth’s area. She works at a lab that specializes in placebo studies, exploring the porous border between real and imagined remedies. The organization is known by the name “Wellness”--which is not what it is about, we come to find out. It is more about manipulation, which is at the heart of this. Jack and Elizabeth come from families with a malignant dose of it--her father and his mother--and it leaves them damaged, so much so that they feel lucky to find each other. They then have to figure out how to make the whole thing work, and it is a messy story about how they manage that.