Wellness vs. Uncertainty

A book review of the book ‘Wellness’ by Nathan Hill

I’ve just finished the best novel I’ve read in a very long time. Wellness by Nathan Hill is a book I hope turns into something like a classic—read and pondered by many. It is full of enduring wisdom and universal themes worth discussing. If you’re not into fiction, allow me to go to bat for it before getting into my review of this novel.

What is so uniquely beautiful about fiction is that it has the potential to be even more honest than non-fiction. Nonfiction, especially memoirs, often champion the author-as-hero. The author-as-hero goes through hardship, challenges, illness or grief, while painting themselves in a hopefully-honest and usually-favorable light. Perhaps, though, it isn’t entirely honest, because, well, it’s vulnerable and uncomfortable to talk about the parts that you’re embarrassed about or ashamed of.

Fiction writers are held to no such self-aggrandizing or self-conscious limitations as non-fiction writers. Thus, a good fiction writer creates deeply honest and flawed characters, ones who broadcast a wider scope of their humanity—the ugly, the embarrassing, unbearably awkward or horrible parts, as well as the nice, humble, heroic parts. A good novel takes you deep into the dirtiest, darkest aspects of its characters. Characters who don’t have a heroic arc at all, but a rather depressing one. Characters that crumble and stay broken instead of rise above the challenge. Characters who lie and keep lying, who say judgemental things aloud, who are cruel because they can’t seem to stop themselves, who desperately seek acceptance and belonging. Characters who are wonderfully complex, who think awful things and make abhorrent mistakes—characters whom we read about and feel the familiar, uncomfortable pang of understanding. What we’re reading in this embarrassing fictional scene is so very relatable. So very human.

Novels can be doorways into the truth of the human psyche—and Wellness by Nathan Hill is one that does this very thing, in an extremely captivating fashion.

Wellness is the story of two people, Elizabeth and Jack, who each leave their respective childhood home and family after high school and move to Chicago. They fall in love during the 90s, concurrently with the elaborate birth of the internet. Over the course of the book, which flashes from past to present, we learn Jack’s and Elizabeth’s family history, how they grew up and were treated; their backgrounds similar only in that they were treated terribly by their parents. The book’s primary present day is set in the early 2010s, where Jack and Elizabeth are married and trying desperately to build and settle into their “forever home.” They have an 8-year-old son, Toby, who is hooked on video games and exemplifies many of the challenges of modern parenting.

Many of the characters in this book are obsessed with pursuing wellness, with improving some faulty aspect of their lives. They illuminate the oh-so-human habit of trying to fix what might not need to be fixed, and control what probably isn’t able to be controlled. Underlying the book’s characters and their pursuits of improvement is the message that so many of these pursuits, these ways we try to improve, control, or fix, might actually not be doing what we think or hope they’re doing. Instead, they may primarily be functioning as giving us the illusion of certainty.

Here are the main players—

There’s Benjamin Quince, Jack and Elizabeth’s anti-establishment realtor/meditation teacher who is helping them build their “forever home.” Benjamin is “fanatical about ingesting only organic and natural and authentic foods and supplements,” obsessed with being pure.¹ Jack runs into Benjamin at the farmers market’s “Restorative Acres” booth one morning, which the following passage accompanies:

“It was this obsession with purity—and, of course, it’s opposite: pollution, contamination—that occasionally reminded Jack of […] his mother’s church back home, the pastor’s exhortations against wicked thoughts and evil deeds. There was[…]a church-like quality to the farmers market: a bunch of similarly-minded people[…]coming to a place that offered salvation from an abstract bad guy—either Satan or late capitalism, depending. The stories were different, but the dominant aesthetic seemed about the same: both the church and the farmers market longed for a more pristine Earth, one as either God or nature originally intended, before humanity came along and fouled it all up.”²

(More on the relevance of this passage later.)

Then, of course, there’s Jack, who is bothered by the middle-aged pooch in his stomach, and so purchases a device called “The System.” The System, heralded as “the data-driven route to ripped abs,” is an orange wristband that Jack wears to measure various aspects of his health. Intent on decreasing Jack’s stomach pooch and increasing his overall well-being, The System somehow inputs and documents everything from his posture to his marital satisfaction.³

Elizabeth, who remains a voice of reason throughout, still longs for betterment in the areas of marriage and parenting. She reads every study on child-rearing she can get her hands on, chants feel-good mantras to herself like “I am good at being his mother” in challenging parenting moments, and frets over all of the ways her young son could potentially lead a dysfunctional life.

Elizabeth runs a company called “Wellness,” where she sells products to people seeking treatment for run-of-the-mill ailments. Every one of her products is a placebo, and about half of her clients, without knowing they’re taking a placebo, report a total recovery from the ailment they’re trying to conquer. The company, albeit ambiguous in its code of ethics, does improve people’s lives simply by giving them a reason to believe that they are able to get better, allowing their bodies to recover. It is mentioned more than once that placebo only works about half the time, and never with chronic issues—it works with ailments that the body has the ability to heal on its own, but something in the brain is either preventing the healing or perpetuating the pain.

There’s also Elizabeth’s friend Brandie, who runs the “Community Corps,” a group dedicated to improving the neighborhood. Brandie is a stay-at-home mom (not a full-time parent, but someone who full-time parents), stuck in a failing marriage. Brandie has an entire room in her house dedicated to vision-boarding her way to a better future. The room, which Elizabeth sneaks into one day, is covered in pictures of cheerful couples (whose bodies’ Brandie has pasted her and her husband’s face onto) and handwritten affirmations such as, “I will be HAPPY in this house. I WILL BE VERY, VERY HAPPY!!”

Brandie and her Community Corps crew consider themselves to be “aligned with Mother Teresa” in their pursuits. Their main belief, as Brandie tells Elizabeth, is that “the universe gives you whatever you put out there. Equal and opposite reactions, it’s simple physics.” They are people of the positive-vibration-manifestation variety: people who believe that with your thoughts you can essentially control your life, and when you are putting out negative vibrations, that is what you receive in return. The group is comprised of people who are essentially deluding themselves into believing their problems—problems like diabetes, unemployment, and being left by your wife—are actually totally solved, right now.⁴

Elizabeth’s science-backed, research-based placebo business runs parallel with the positive-vibration Community Corps in an interesting discussion of the power of belief. Both introduce the idea that one can affect their lives and bodies by choosing to think and believe differently—and both, frankly, involve invoking delusion. Whereas Elizabeth knows that her clients are improving because they mistakenly believe the placebo is actually treatment, the Community Corps is intent on surrounding themselves with only positive thoughts about their problems to believe that they have already disappeared. Elizabeth’s clients and the members of the Community Corps are each simply choosing to believe what they want to believe, which yields varying results depending on a variety of factors. They either fervently believe that their problems are nil by willing them to be, or place their faith in a sugar pill—in both cases, neglecting to view reality for what it is: full of uncertainty and full of challenges we cannot solve, with placebo treatments or positive thoughts or otherwise.

The characters of this book all share the very human urge to try and avoid the uncertain, problem-riddled reality of life. We pick and choose the versions of truth we want to believe in, we concoct elaborate ways to control our bodies, minds, and desires. We cling to what feels right, makes sense, or is a belief system that makes us feel better. We do this most likely because we want to have something to hold onto, something to trust—even while deep-down, we all know that life is ultimately unpredictable, unknowable, always changing.

Like the aforementioned comparison between church and the farmers market illustrates: we are all just looking for explanations, truth, and security amidst a life full of uncertainty and change. We are looking for something to really believe in. And we do that by…eating organic food, or going to church, or embarking on a fitness regime, or reading parenting studies, or vision-boarding really hard. Some of it works, some of it is probably true. A lot of it might be…placebo.

In an exquisite conversation toward the end of the book, Elizabeth seeks advice from her former boss, Dr. Sanborne. Sanborne, whose research also dealt with placebo, sums up the power of a sugar pill with this: “What placebo offers us is the illusion of certainty. It gives you a story that, once you believe it, triggers the body to finally do its own natural thing.”⁵ He goes on to explain why people choose to believe in things that, for all intents and purposes, probably act as a placebo. We prefer illusion, because it provides us with certainty, clarity, truth. Without it, we are faced with uncertainty and the scary reality that we don’t really know what’s going on, that we can’t really control any of it. And that’s hard.

In a final plea, Elizabeth asks Sanborne: “So if nothing is real, if certainty is just an illusion, what do we do? Believe in nothing?”

To which Sanborne responds: “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.”⁶

*

The point of this book, as I read it, is not to say that we shouldn’t believe in anything because we can’t ever really know what’s true and what is illusion. It’s not to say that we should give up all the practices and products that we believe make us better, more improved, well. (What about those supplements that really seem to work? That ideology that seems to really fit our worldview? Is any of it true, or are we merely soothed by the illusion of its apparent certainty?) The point of this book, as I read it, was to illuminate the fact that we can try to control and fix and solve as much as we want, but as long as we are avoiding the reality of uncertainty, we are avoiding living a full, honest life.

In Elizabeth’s words,

“Maybe the only stories that had neat and certain conclusions were lies and fables and conspiracies. Maybe it was like Dr Sanborne said: certainty was just a story the mind created to defend itself against the pain of living. Which meant that certainty was a way to avoid living. You could choose to be certain, or you could choose to be alive.”

So, then, lies our choice: to be certain, or to be alive with the rocky, beautiful, aching unknown.

Elizabeth concludes her thoughts with this: “between ourselves and the world are a million stories, and if we don’t know which among them are true, we might as well try out those that are most humane, most generous, most beautiful, most loving.”⁷

Isn’t that right? If we don’t totally know which stories are true—and if it’s possible that many of them are true—we ought to experiment with the stories that feel kind, generous, loving. We ought to live as if we have a say in what’s true or not.

Without spoiling any more of this incredible book you could read if you wanted to—it ends with the profound realization that in fact, nothing in your life needs to be fixed (and that believing in a “forever home” is absolutely another form of a soothing delusion). In fact, what could really use some alterations and improvement is your attitude, your perception about the problems you have, about the issue you have with accepting uncertainty and discomfort. Yes, there is tragedy, yes, there is grief and death; there are annoyances and arguments and so many random ailments your body deals out to you. But what if the only thing wrong is the idea that you should be able to escape the parts of life that feel uncomfortable, painful, or uncertain? What if by accepting the reality of discomfort, challenge, and uncertainty, the answers to our problems became clear —or we stopped needing those answers?

It is very possible be that you’re perfectly fine right now. It could also be that your pursuit of wellness is actually preventing you from being fine, right now. It could be that you don’t need to lose the stomach pooch or perfect your parenting strategies or eliminate more toxins. It could be that the things you do to be well and healthy work in a credible way, or it could just be placebo. Does it really matter?

Maybe we try discarding the illusion of certainty, choosing instead to be alive with the rocky, beautiful, aching unknown.

Maggie

1. Wellness by Nathan Hill, p. 48

2. Wellness by Nathan Hill, p. 349

3. Wellness by Nathan Hill, p. 79

4. Wellness by Nathan Hill, p. 275, 284

5. Wellness by Nathan Hill, p. 542

6. Wellness by Nathan Hill, p. 544

7. Wellness by Nathan Hill, p. 593