Wellness

Here's a professional review of Wellness from the New York Times .... it's a little critical of the "Just so" tidiness but fair. I'm glad I'm not a critic with my innate distaste for criticism. 

Here's an interview from the Chicago Review of Books with the author Nathan Hill: 

(which I will read eventually) 

And here are few of my rambles. 

Wellness.
 
A wonderful book of modern life, covering the period from say, 1992 grungey/artistic Chicago up to the modern day, with all the issues that effect our “Wellness” – the internet, knowing too much, trying to control our feelings, our unresolved past, raising kids, the pilot light going out on the romance in our marriage as life becomes a co-managed business enterprise.
 
And it’s all seen through the eyes of a couple that my wife, rightly and accurately, keeps saying “are a lot like us.”
 
Of course, when the husband is obsessed with porn, and overly needy, I wonder, what is she _really_ trying to say?
 
My wife read Wellness with her women’s reading group and then recommended it to me. I’d just finished reading Zone of Interest, which made me fall in love with Martin Amis all over again and made me hate the normalizing of insanity with a burning clarity. But it was a good bounce back from something so dark. 
 
Because it’s about real, modern family life and there’s no magic or technical trickery it invites comparison to Jonathan Frantzen. The comparison is apt, particularly when it comes to the near-parody arch-realness of the situations the characters find themselves in. LIke when Elizabeth, reads every study to be the perfect mom to her quirky kid, and all the kid still wants to eat is Kraft mac-and-cheese. Or when they get invited by a couple with an open marriage to a sex club for swingers etc and it ends up that this mismatch of a couple – she’s 26 and he’s this muscle bound middle aged guy – take them each aside and show them who they are with clarity.
 
The overall structure start with their romantic meeting, and then does a bunch of flashbacks to bring us to the present, A  tipping point- the tipping point? - in their relationship, when the magic is gone. 
 
Jack grew up on a farm in Kansas. Undersized and unwanted by everyone but his older boho sister, who comes to visit and inspire, he becomes an artist and moves to Chicago. 

Elisabeth is a child of privilege who wants nothing of her family's ill-begotten money. 

Both Family-of-Origin stories are cartoonishly effed up. Jack's mother never wanted him and let's him know; Elisabeth's father is threatened by her academic prowess and competes with her in really messed up ways. 

As pointed out in the NY Times review, some very important plot points are withheld, that explain much. 

Verdict - great, compelling read with alot to say about this situation we've all got ourselves into. So this is "Wellness" - with the internet and all of our ... whatever, intermittent fasting and optimizing and workouts. 

​Enough.