Autorentext

Nathan Hill

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • The New York Times best-selling author of The Nix is back with a poignant and witty novel about a modern marriage and the bonds that keep people together. Mining the absurdities of contemporary society, Wellness reimagines the love story with a healthy dose of insight, irony, and heart.
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"A stunning novel about the stories that we tell about our lives and our loves, and how we sustain relationships throughout time—it's beyond remarkable, both funny and heartbreaking, sometimes on the same page.” —NPR**

When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the gritty '90s Chicago art scene, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in the thriving underground scene with an appreciative kindred spirit. Fast-forward twenty years to suburban married life, and alongside the challenges of parenting, they encounter the often-baffling pursuits of health and happiness from polyamorous would-be suitors to home-renovation hysteria. 
 
For the first time, Jack and Elizabeth struggle to recognize each other, and the no-longer-youthful dreamers are forced to face their demons, from unfulfilled career ambitions to childhood memories of their own dysfunctional families. In the process, Jack and Elizabeth must undertake separate, personal excavations, or risk losing the best thing in their lives: each other.

Leseprobe
Come With

He lives alone on the fourth floor of an old brick building with no view of the sky. When he looks out his window, all he can see is her window—­across the alley, an arm’s length away, where she lives alone on the fourth floor of her own old building. They don’t know each other’s names. They have never spoken. It is winter in Chicago.

Barely any light enters the narrow alley between them, and barely any rain either, or snow or sleet or fog or that crackling wet January stuff the locals call “wintry mix.” The alley is dark and still and without weather. It seems to have no atmosphere at all, a hollow stitched into the city for the singular purpose of separating things from things, like outer space.

She first appeared to him on Christmas Eve. He’d gone to bed early that night feeling horribly sorry for himself—­the only soul in his whole raucous building with nowhere else to be—­when a light snapped on across the alley, and a small warm glow replaced his window’s usual yawning dark. He sat up, walked to the window, peeked out. There she was, a flurry of movement, arranging, ­unpacking, pulling small vibrant dresses from large matching suitcases. Her window was so close to him, and she was so close to him—­their apartments separated by the distance of a single ambitious jump—­that he scooted back a few feet to more fully submerge himself in his darkness. He sat there on his heels and stared for a short while, until the staring felt improper and indecent and he contritely returned to bed. But he has, in the weeks since, come back to the theater of this window, and more often than he’d like to admit. He sometimes sits here, hidden, and, for a few minutes at a time, he watches.

To say that he finds her beautiful is too simple. Of course he finds her beautiful—­objectively, classically, obviously beautiful. Even just the way she walks—­with a kind of buoyancy, a cheerful jaunty bounce—­has him thoroughly charmed. She glides across the floor of her apartment in thick socks, occasionally doing an impromptu twirl, the skirt of her dress billowing briefly around her. In this drab and filthy place, she prefers dresses—­bright flowered sundresses incongruous amid the grit of this neighborhood, the cold of this winter. She tucks her legs under them as she sits in her plush velvet armchair, a few candles glowing nearby, her face impassive and cool, holding a book in one hand, the other hand idly tracing the lip of a wineglass. He watches her touch that glass and wonders how a little fingertip can inspire such a large torment.

Her apartment is decorated with postcards from places he assumes she’s been—­Paris, Venice, Barcelona, Rome—­and framed posters of art he assumes she’s seen in person: the statue of David, the Pietà, The Last Supper, Guernica. Her tastes are manifold and intimidating; meanwhile, he’s never even seen an ocean.

She reads inordinately, at all hours, flicking on her yellow bedside lamp at two o’clock in the morning to page through large and unwieldy textbooks—­biology, neurology, psychology, ­microeconomics—­or various stage plays, or collections of poetry, or thick histories of wars and empires, or scientific journals with inscrutable names and bland gray bindings. She listens to music he assumes is classical for the way her head sways to it. He strains to identify book jackets and album covers, then rushes to the public library the next day to read all the authors that rouse and unsleep her, and listen to all the symphonies she seems to have on repeat: the Haffner, the Eroica, the New World, the Unfinished, the Fantastique. He imagines that if they ever actually speak, he will drop some morsel of Symphonie Fantastique knowledge and she will be impressed with him and fall in love.

If they ever actually speak.

She’s exactly the kind of person—­cultured, worldly—­that he came to this frighteningly big city to find. The obvious flaw in the plan, he realizes now, is that a woman so cultured and worldly would never be interested in a guy as uncultured, as provincial, as backward and coarse as him.

Only once has he seen her entertain a guest. A man. She spent an appalling amount of time in the bathroom before he arrived, and tried on six dresses, finally picking the tightest one—­a purple one. She pulled her hair back. She put on makeup, washed it off, put it back on. She took two showers. She looked like a stranger. The man arrived with a six-­pack of beer and they spent what seemed like an awkward and humorless two hours together. Then he left with a handshake. He never came back.

Afterward, she changed into a ratty old T-­shirt and sat around all evening eating cold cereal in a fit of private sloth. She didn’t cry. She just sat there.

He watched her, across their oxygenless alley, thinking that she was, in this moment, beautiful, though that word beautiful seemed suddenly too narrow to contain the situation. Beauty has both public and private faces, he thought, and it is difficult for one not to annul the other. He wrote her a note on the back of a Chicago postcard: You would never have to pretend with me. Then he threw it away and tried again: You would never have to be someone trying to be someone else. But he didn’t send them. He never sends them.

Sometimes her apartment is dark, and he goes about his night—­his ordinary, hermetic night—­wondering where she might be.

That’s when she’s watching him.

She sits at her window, in the darkness, and he cannot see her.

She studies him, observes him, notes his stillness, his tranquility, the admirable way he sits cross-­legged on his bed and, persistently, for hours, just reads. He is always alone in there. His apartment—­a desolate little box of unadorned white walls and a cinder-­block bookshelf and a futon condemned to the floor—­is not a home that anticipates guests. Loneliness, it seems, holds him like a buttonhole.

To say that she finds him handsome is too simple. Rather, she finds him handsom…