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Incredible fiction that defines the current era.

Ok here’s the short of my review: this is one of the best novels I’ve ever read. This is fiction that is so well written and so relevant to modern life that it defines the current zeitgeist with its story. This is a book most concretely about a marriage between Jack and Elizabeth. It’s told over a kaleidoscope narration of when the couple meets in college and then twenty years later where their marriage has been predictably calcified and now complicated by a child and all the other highly relatable stressors of life. This story has some of the most fleshed out characters I’ve ever read. Nathan Hill takes his time telling the backstory of these two extremely traumatized individuals with wit, humor, drama and also extremely engaging information. Nathan Hill is an absolutely brilliant writer and storyteller and this book will draw you in with the first sentence and keep you there until the last sentence.

I laughed and definitely cried listening to the audiobook (which was also a phenomenal performance.) The very ending of this book left me in literal tears. How the backstory of the two main characters informs their current actions and their relationship with one another is simply one of the best things I’ve ever read.

This book is a perfect picture of life in the 2010s and now. In a generation, when people want to know what life was like for an adult right now, particularly married and with children, they should read this book and they will get a very good glimpse. This book is about the fracturing that has occurred. A fracturing of individuals because of the failure of their parents and communities. The fracturing of society into rural and coastal elites. A fracturing of our attention by the disruption of surveillance capitalism shoe-horned through social media. It’s also about a fracturing of understanding one another and the alienation that is imposed upon us by default of a culture that has become hollowed out and atomized for monetization. This book is about the endless "life hacks" that only mask the deeper issues that people have and obfuscate the solutions which are developing deeper connections with one another with compassion and understanding.

But please believe me: this book is not about cynicism. This book is about so much more than just being cynical of our society. This book is about the hope of pioneering into a new era and with that hope, the compulsion to try and understand where we are and how to move forward together knowing that life is more about coping than trying to obtain certainty.

Nathan Hill is clearly a smart guy and he brought a lot of concepts that you can tell he wants to talk about. He uses this book as his opportunity to riff on lots of social and cultural issues and he does it with style, humor and compassion.

I cannot recommend this book enough. It is so, so real but also a balm for the modern soul.