“On a scale of one to ten, how much did your parents love you?”
Jack and Elizabeth are the two human beings we’ll be dealing with for exactly 720 pages; two protagonists we’ll have to explore and discover, and at a certain point we’ll have to side with, or worse yet: confront. Wait, don’t let the page count intimidate you, because more than a mountain to climb, the text is a sea to navigate.
It’s a book that questions you and forces you to reflect. It’s about the life of a couple: two young people who, like in a fairy tale, gaze at each other, fall in love, get married, have a child; then come the plans: their forever home.
But before defining forever, it’s good to know who you are now, what you want, and what you need to be happy. But the answer to all this isn’t simple; the author knows this well, and so to help us discover who Jack and Elizabeth really are, he transports us not only to their past but also to their past. He shows us their origins, precisely the ones from which they ferociously fled. There’s only one goal: you can never escape any past.
We are the sum and strange mix of genetics, experiences, traumas, life and death we inherit, and a good human being would say that until you come to terms with your roots, you can’t build your future. But Jack and Elizabeth, precisely at the moment they want to come to terms with their past, complicate their lives, lose each other, drift apart, lose sight of anything forever, even the near future. Nathan Hill seems to be asking us a question: can we really let out the ghosts—our own or others’—that lurk in our closet? Or better yet: is it really worth it?
The title is like the refrain of a song, it resonates everywhere and hides on every page, in the words spoken and those implied by the author.
We loved it; the story captivated us from the first moment, and the further we read, the more it seemed like it could never be enough. Emotionally, we felt tossed from one part of the text to another, and more than feeling the desire to find a safe harbor to head towards, we wanted to shipwreck between the written lines.
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Nathan Hill, Wellness, Rizzoli, Milano, 2024
Original edition: Wellness, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2023