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I’m gobsmacked, and have remained so from page one to the last word. An epic, sweeping, transformative, colossal (adverbs and adjectives are just not enough!) door-stopper of a book, a windswept and fiery, burning satire of a 1990s marriage between a modern couple in Chicago, Jack and Elizabeth. There’s a preoccupation with eternal love, health and well-being, the potent obsession with fitness and strength. How past years�� discarded identities generate the self of today, afraid or unafraid of tomorrow.

Jack is a photographer, but his pictures arise from the chemicals and fixatives in the darkroom, not from the camera. Elizabeth is a scientist who peddles placebos to rejuvenate passion. WELLNESS spans twenty years forward, but reaches back, to their childhoods, shifting back and forth in time. Or should I say Time, since Time is essential here, it subverts the narrative and liquidates expectations. It’s about everything, sort of like Infinite Jest is about everything, and it’s a parabola, like Gravity's Rainbow is a parabola, but it’s neither the former or latter. The prose is gracefully placed on the page, despite the legion of info (critics would say info-dumping) that the text provides. Hill straddles the line between saying and pontificating, which may cause some readers to recoil.

Hill has created his own radical, non-starry-eyed romance, a 90s mosaic of Gen X ideology, as Jack and Elizabeth assemble and inhabit their identities via several and ongoing selves throughout the years, to someday evolve or diminish into what they are now. The stakes, at first, seem fairly mellow. I mean, the worst that I thought could happen is a break-up. Hooooold on, about those stakes. Hill drove them hard through my heart. It’s heavy, at times I felt my throat closing up. This isn’t a book I could read non-stop, I had to take breaks to release the tension, otherwise I would explode!

It's also about perception and paradox, connections and loneliness, greed and loss, manipulation and madness. The narrative winds through a buffet of subjects, and love is the polestar, and the threat. Love at first sight is endorsed and dismantled, but never abandoned. There’s so much breadth, from artists to investors, groupthink to prairie fires, children to ancestors, “forever homes,�� the World Wide Web, health, sickness, and cures, social media, absence--and the faith in metaphysics, that our souls can travel at night.

Paradox: “…that was a pre-globalized world, a pre-9/11 world, a pre-housing bubble world…when they all sort of understood implicitly that however much they resented and resisted the mass economy, they would also have little trouble eventually finding a job and livelihood within it.��

Thematically rich in artful contradictions, as a new friend earnestly says to Elizabeth: “He practices the art of nothingness, while you practice the science of nothingness. You’re both obsessed with it: nothingness, emptiness, blankness, absence. Don’t you find that really meaningful?��

And this touched my heart, a poignant guidance from the scientist that mentored Elizabeth:

“Believe what you believe…but believe gently. Believe compassionately. Believe with curiosity. Believe with humility. And don’t trust the arrogance of certainty.��

This book is so deep, vast, mind-bending, and provocative, I just can’t do it justice. It’s written for all of us, all the Time, wherever you are, visible and manifest.