Daphne Merkin writes for The Atlantic:
A Worthy Heir to David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon
In Wellness, Nathan Hill recounts a love story, but also much, much more.
…That Nathan Hill comes charging onto this depleted fictional scene with Wellness, a behemoth of a novel (624 pages, or nearly 19 hours of audio, if that is your pleasure), is all the more noteworthy as a result. The book swarms with characters, ideas, and sociological evocations, taking place over several decades: At one level, it is the straightforward up-and-down-and-up-again story of a relationship between two lonely souls, Jack Baker and Elizabeth Augustine, but it detours to reflect on the art market, real estate, interior design, parenting, sex, and many other topics. Hill, whose 2016 debut novel, The Nix, was as epic in scope as Wellness, is more reminiscent of the aforementioned Victorian novelists, with their energy and range, than he is of contemporary ones.
Based on Merkin’s recommendation, I bought the book on Audible, and when I’m out walking, instead of listening to podcasts or to music, I’m listening to this and I’m laughing:
* “That’s the first externality.”
“And what’s the second?”
“The second is divorce.”
“Excuse me?”
“Not that I’m implying anything specifically about you guys ,” Benjamin said, smiling broadly. “It’s just, you know, fifty percent of all marriages?”
“Uh – huh.”
“And a lot of couples now choose to cohabit after a divorce. For the kids.”
“They keep living together after they break up?”
“Oh sure. Many couples find it ideal. They have their own bedrooms, their own separate entrances. So in the event of divorce you can continue living in the same place with minimal traumatic disruption for Toby. And how nice would that be for him? No weekends away from home, no dispiriting sleepovers at Dad’s depressing little empty apartment.”
Jack looked at his wife. “Are you planning on getting a divorce?” he asked.
“Jack, it’s our forever home,” she said. “Shouldn’t it accommodate all possibilities?”* The song that all the little children were right now exuberantly singing was a popular dance number about a woman getting really drunk at a nightclub and having haphazard sex with a stranger and then blacking out so she doesn’t remember any of it the next day.
Except, no, that wasn’t exactly right. The song the children were actually dancing to and performing in front of their parents was — you had to listen carefully — a remake of that other more debauched song, this new version having been superficially edited, the adult singer replaced with a dulcet preteen, the most raunchy lyrics replaced with family – friendly alternatives. It was now a song sung by children, for children, part of a series of child – appropriate pop covers that was the only music ever broadcast during these playdates at Brandie’s big suburban Park Shore house. It murmured low in the background, usually, unless the kids decided, as they had today, that they wanted to put on a show. And so here they were, the kids, eight of them, ages six to eleven, all twirling, hopping, hands in the air, sometimes bobbing up and down in a kind of proto – twerk, staging in the living room their vague impression of how pop stars act in music videos. Meanwhile, the parents watched, clapped, hooted, and generally displayed maximal self – esteem – boosting support and encouragement.
* That very day, he searched the web for ways to tone one’s belly, which was when ads for the System began their assault. He saw the first one on Facebook, between two posts from his father in which, as usual, the old man was ranting, angrily, in all capital letters. That month’s worrying headlines had delivered so much grist for the elder Baker’s mayhemed mind: there was rioting in Missouri ( TERRORISTS! ), and airstrikes in the Middle East ( DIVERSION! ), and migrants drowning in the Mediterranean ( CRISIS ACTORS! ), and Ebola surging in Africa ( CORPORATE PLOT! ).
Jack, as usual, debated and commented and fought with his father, but ignored the ad.
Then he saw it again, this cryptic ad for something called the System, it suddenly appeared outside of Facebook, on some random website, up there in the top banner, and then the ad began following Jack around the web, showing up all over the place, cycling through slogans until it found the one that called to him most:
DON’T WORK HARDER, WORK SMARTER
HUGE GAINS, NO NOISE
THE DATA – DRIVEN ROUTE TO RIPPED ABS
And so on.
The System’s whole allure seemed built on the promise that it somehow peered into your body and extracted the most consequential data, data that would then be used to build a personalized, optimized workout program.* the Needy User algorithm, which identifies users who have been on Facebook for less than a certain threshold amount of time, or have less than a certain threshold number of connections with other users, or whose edges are less than a threshold level of robustness, and it categorizes these users as “needy,” and it assigns them a “neediness value,” and this value is then sent back to EdgeRank and added to the user’s edge score, which score then becomes so large that the needy user’s ranking goes way, way up, and thereafter any actions they take — their posts and links and photos and favorites and such — appear right there at the very top of all their friends’ newsfeeds.
The subjective experience of this, for Lawrence, is that he’s never once in his life felt more fully and uncomplicatedly accepted and loved.
Any little action he takes, anything that sends the tiniest ripple into the network, comes back as a wave of appreciation and support. He chooses a profile picture, and his friends seem to love it . He posts about the Chiefs game, and his friends seem to love it . Even just his comments about the weather and the wind generate a flurry of positive response.
It is the most contact he’s had with the wider world in years.
He’s a man who was once well known among the rancher families of the Flint Hills, and it turns out that many of these families are, surprisingly, now on Facebook, and further, they are so happy to see him, finally, after his long withdrawal, and it’s at this point he understands: This is why people join Facebook . This is what all the fuss is about. It feels friendly, lively, fun — people post jokes and comic strips and hilarious photos of cats and dogs and pictures of their children doing adorable things and inspirational quotes from celebrities or the Bible, and soon Lawrence learns about the “share” function and very quickly he’s also sharing just these things, never failing to draw nice little comments from his small pack of friends: “Wonderful, Lawrence!” “Thank you, Lawrence!” “God bless you, Lawrence!”* They find a view of the world that agrees with them, a spot that feels safe and secure, and they plant themselves on that spot and don’t move. Because if they did move, their certainty and security and safety in the world would fall apart, and that’s too scary and painful to contemplate. So people prefer their illusions — that the world is definitely a simulation, or that acupuncture is a thing, or that juice cleanses work, or that Ebola was created by the government. It’s a little assertion of sovereignty amid the chaos. In the face of insurmountable threats and distressing precarity and pain, the body longs, more than anything, for certainty. You could say that certainty is, in fact, the flip side of pain — it’s what pain looks like reflected off the fun – house mirror. When I see people on Facebook express their loud inflexible certainty about some political thing, what I believe they’re actually saying is I am in great pain, and nobody is paying attention . This is also true for people who believe deeply in soulmates, like, say, your husband. What Jack really needs is the illusion of certainty…
* “Believe what you believe, my dear, but believe gently. Believe compassionately. Believe with curiosity. Believe with humility. And don’t trust the arrogance of certainty. I mean, my goodness, Elizabeth, if you want the gods to really laugh at you, then by all means call it your forever home .”
This might be the first novel I’ve read this year.
