With his first novel, Ghosts of the Old Countrythe American Nathan Hill evoked a younger – and more erudite – version of Jonathan Franzen.
He confirms this impression with this second novel, just as impressive as the previous one, with the difference that we completely lose interest during certain passages.
Well-being follows Jack and Elizabeth, who met in Chicago in the 1990s as college students. Twenty years later, they’re still together and parents to a young boy. Like their old neighborhood, they’ve become gentrified and are about to buy their first home; except that things are going badly for their relationship.
Nathan Hill engages in a very contemporary reflection on marriage and family, on these lures that make us believe in happiness, healing or success, and on this “sacrosanct American tradition” according to which we can leave our past behind us to reinvent ourselves. The big downside is that the author gets bogged down in long scenarios that quickly become dry. You have to get to the middle of the novel – almost 350 pages – to begin to glimpse the common thread of the story.
Yes, it is an ambitious novel that demonstrates great genius; the author has also consulted a host of works on psychology, sociology and many other subjects, listed in an impressive bibliography at the end of the novel, to try to understand “what our strange, undisciplined, miraculous and messy heads are made of”. He would only have had to abandon this didactic tone for one to get a real pleasure out of reading it.
Well-being
Gallimard
677 pages