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What I love most about Wellness is the vignette format.

It’s been a long time since I first noticed how swift changes in scenes serve couple stories particularly well—think The Maples Stories��, and Wellness is no exception to the concept. In depicting Jack and Elizabeth’s couple over a few decades, Nathan Hill successfully layers countless episodes that sometimes focus on both partners, and sometimes single one out. The result is as dynamic as it is deep, and amounts to fantastic characterization. This is nimble storytelling at its best for a novel that leans so steadily on psychology.

What I love almost as much is the tone.

Or maybe I love it just as much as the format, in fact. After The Nix, it was anyone’s guess what a second offering might read like, all these years later. Relief first washed over this reader, then mounting joy. Hill’s eloquent irreverence? That sharp eye trained on personal and collective shortcomings in today’s world? That heart, that balancing act between cynicism and good-natured humor? All the boxes are checked. In both The Nix and now Wellness, the author's voice feels like home to me.

And then there's everything else.

There is a myth-buster vibe to the novel, which tackles a vast array of beliefs. Wellness explores the pressure people put on themselves in an effort at self-improvement; less to do with the divine, more with the mundane. As we follow Jack and Elizabeth from their initial meeting in the nineties to their approach to middle age as Gen Xers (and parents), what we are made to reflect on is their quest for meaning while meaning markers evolve over time.

Themes like real estate, peer pressure, consumerism, and parenting ambitions are very present: again, a substantial part of this novel is about people looking for life hacks. But equally important are Jack and Elizabeth’s respective childhood, as significant chunks of this story explore how these two people became who they are today. Elizabeth grew up to be a perfectionist; Jack, an artist; neither is entirely satisfied. So Wellness is also about growing out of your own childhood, which can be the work of a lifetime. Interspersed among current-day interludes, these rearview-mirror chapters felt relatable, heartbreaking, and entertaining at once. A poetic wind blew over them.

On becoming who Jack was meant to be with the help of his visiting elder sister, despite growing up in a house devoid of art or books, with TV shows being of no assistance in providing models:

“Which was another lack that Evelyn sought to remedy. At the conclusion of that first week, she borrowed the Ford to go into town—ostensibly to fetch ingredients for a cake, as it was their mother’s birthday, but she came back also lugging a bag that she secreted to Jack’s room. It was filled with used books: Great Expectations. The Call of the Wild. The Great Gatsby. On the Road. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Books, she said, about people who leave home and go forth into the world and reinvent their very selves.��

Of special interest to me in Wellness was the private language that couples develop, and sometimes families: these favourite idioms that become distinctively ours, despite having been up for grabs by just about anyone all along. Hill has a definite knack for them. That’s all I will say.

While I found the ending saw an elaborate construction fold on itself in the equivalent of a blink, the road to get there leaves me marveling, and giving this book fewer than five stars just wouldn’t feel right.

Must I really wait north of five years for a third novel to come out, now?