An Interview with Nathan Hill
Thomas Sokolowski
Photography Credit: Erik Kellar
Nathan Hill’s best-selling debut novel, The Nix, was named the # 1 book of the year by Audible and Entertainment Weekly, and one of the year’s best books by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Slate, and many others. It was the winner of the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction from the Los Angeles Times. Nathan’s second novel, Wellness, was also a New York Times bestseller and was picked by Oprah Winfrey for her book club. It was selected as one of the best books of the year by NPR, Amazon, and Audible. Nathan’s novels have been published worldwide in more than two dozen languages. A native Iowan, he lives with his wife in Naples, Florida.
When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the gritty ’90s Chicago art scene, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in the thriving underground scene with an appreciative kindred spirit. Fast-forward twenty years to suburban married life, and alongside the challenges of parenting, they encounter the often-baffling pursuits of health and happiness from polyamorous would-be suitors to home-renovation hysteria.
For the first time, Jack and Elizabeth struggle to recognize each other, and the no-longer-youthful dreamers are forced to face their demons, from unfulfilled career ambitions to childhood memories of their own dysfunctional families. In the process, Jack and Elizabeth must undertake separate, personal excavations, or risk losing the best thing in their lives: each other.
—Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Purchase Wellness through Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group's website.
Thomas Sokolowski: When I read, I very rarely laugh out loud. But Wellness had me chuckling. Your comedy is achieved through situations with terrific wit, often absurd; in Wellness, there are swingers showing an incredible amount of PDA outside a school, and a new CFO ushers in the policy that professors will have their salaries determined by the size of their social media networks. The dystopian nature of the book, though funny, corrals us into the realm of terror. And the whole book, at least for me, even when it’s hilarious or romantic or heartfelt, remains just a bit profoundly terrifying.
The narration remains matter-of-fact; there is a sort of subjective observer who dips into the consciousness of these characters. And so, there’s a narratorial irony—a space between the characters’ minds and the omniscient narration. This space is essentially invisible, but I have an inkling that it is what allows comedy to exist in Wellness, even when the novel dives into characters who are deeply troubled and worried. How do you manage comedy while keeping the content serious?
Nathan Hill: You’re right to point out the ironic gap between my narrator-slash-implied-author and my characters. Often the characters are a little under-aware of a thing’s absurdity, which I think is a true thing that happens in life. I mean, one of the reasons, narcissists get away with all their nonsense is by convincing us that the nonsense is actually normal. And our sense of what is and is not normal is greatly influenced by social cues—for example, there are certain psych studies where subjects in a waiting room are made to believe there’s a fire nearby, but they will wait and wait an excruciatingly long time to react to the fire if the people around them are also not reacting. So, yeah, I like to put characters in slightly outrageous situations that they take to be more or less normal. Meanwhile, there’s a narrator sort of smirking in the distance. It’s roughly the prose version of that meme with the dog surrounded by flames saying, “This is fine.”
Often the characters are a little under-aware of a thing’s absurdity, which I think is a true thing that happens in life. I mean, one of the reasons, narcissists get away with all their nonsense is by convincing us that the nonsense is actually normal.
TS: Wellness is brimming with research. Not only did I feel emotionally enlightened after reading the novel, I felt informed. When you go into a historical novel, you expect research. But when you pick up a novel about contemporary marriage and are met by a vast bibliography, you can only be impressed.
One of my favorite parts is the chapter where Elizabeth and Toby do battle in the grocery store. You filled this section with parenthetical citations. For me, this turned the process of integrating research into fiction (and sort of concealing it) completely on its head. Can you speak about your research process?
NH: People can obviously be misled by information that’s false—as in the case of misinformation or disinformation—but I think they can also be misled by information that’s true. That’s the problem for Elizabeth in that chapter: she’s a victim of what you might call information overload. She has access to so many true facts that the truth becomes obscured. She’s experiencing in a distilled way what the rest of us experience all the time: that we’re on the receiving end of a firehose of information without context, data without wisdom. A vast forest for the trees problem. And in order to really capture that feeling, it seemed necessary to me that the information I presented was actually real—which required quite a lot of time on Google Scholar and in various academic databases. My research technique is usually pretty organic: I find a study that’s interesting and relevant, and then I read the other studies cited in that study, and then I see which other, newer studies have cited those older studies, and I read those too, and on and on, kind of spiderwebbing out into the literature. It’s a very improvisational, breadcrumbs-heavy method.
My research technique is usually pretty organic: I find a study that’s interesting and relevant, and then I read the other studies cited in that study, and then I see which other, newer studies have cited those older studies, and I read those too, and on and on, kind of spiderwebbing out into the literature. It’s a very improvisational, breadcrumbs-heavy method.
TS: The opening of Wellness is beautiful and a brilliant hook. Perhaps it’s because I’m a big fan of short stories, but one of my favorite parts of a novel is finding chapters which can stand alone. I feel like the opening chapter, and many chapters throughout, are so well crafted they can stand alone as pieces of art. If I’m not mistaken, I believe the opening chapter did begin as a short story. Do you have any thoughts on how you achieve this, or any comments on your writing process?
NH: Yes, the first chapter did indeed come from a short story I wrote almost twenty years ago. I had just moved to New York City at the time, and I was pretty lonely. I was living in a tiny studio apartment in Queens, and the view out my window was just a wall of other windows in another apartment building. And I imagined two people, also lonely, glimpsing each other through their respective windows and slowly, from a distance, falling in love. I wrote that as a short story, and then forgot about it until, years later, I was casting about for the beginning of a new book.
The other chapter in Wellness that began as a standalone story is the final chapter, which I originally wrote to commemorate a friend’s wedding. Because it was written for such a special occasion, it naturally had this quality of high romance that I thought would be appropriate for an ending.
So, I decided these two short stories would serve as bookends for the novel, with everything in between being new material.
TS: I can nerd out a bit about point of view management in novels. Most of Wellness is told through past tense. But I found it super interesting that you chose to write some chapters which take place earlier in these characters’ lives in present tense. Do you have any thoughts or advice on how to choose and handle point of view?
NH: The English language has this wonderful ability to render something in the past using present tense verbs. We use this technique a lot when we’re speaking, especially when we’re telling funny stories or jokes, e.g. “So, I walk into the pub, and there’s Larry sitting at the bar…” When we hear something like that, we understand immediately that the story happened in the past but that the speaker is recasting it in the present so that the punchline lands with more immediacy. (Stand-up comedians do this all the time—I’ve actually learned a lot by analyzing the syntax of stand-up). And I like to do something similar in my books. Some scenes just work better in present tense, others better in past, and I’ll often pick the tense that’s best for that particular scene. When I did this in The Nix, I was really nervous about it; it was a truism of my creative writing education that verb tense must be kept consistent. And yet, do you know how many readers complained about my inconsistent verbs? Zero.
As for POV, writing in a close third-person was a real challenge in Wellness, since one of the arguments the book is making is that there are parts of us that are mysteries even to ourselves, that we are often unaware of why we behave the way we do. Like, how do we know we’re acting out of authentic selfhood versus acting because of social pressure, or because of trauma response, or because of the large historical forces sweeping through us? These are questions that have been on my mind a lot lately, but are, unfortunately, real headache-producers for fiction. How do you write from a character’s close POV while also cluing the reader that the character is lying to herself? How do you let the reader know something that the character himself does not know? Sometimes the answer is to cheat a little, POV-wise, as in the chapter in Wellness where Jack is a toddler and rushed to the hospital, where I move briefly into an omniscient POV to explain what’s happening in his young brain. I do something similar in the algorithm section, explaining what’s happening with certain underlying social media algorithms in a way that none of the characters would understand. I find that readers are pretty forgiving when you break a POV pattern, provided you’re breaking it to call attention to something very important.
TS: Wellness does some very complex things with time. But just on the sentence level, I was amazed by how you were able to manipulate time with some long, swooping sentences. You even just use the phrase "come with” as a sort of time traveling device to move us through various moments of Jack and Elizabeth’s early relationship in a relative instant. Can you talk about your own creative process when mapping out Wellness?
NH: I was inspired by the Greek idea of “kairos,” which is one of two words in ancient Greek that we English-speakers translate as “time.” The other one is “chronos,” which is where we get the word chronology. Chronos is countable, quantitative, forward-moving time. Kairos, on the other hand, is more of a felt version of time: a layering of present and past, a moment in the now that is shot through with history. You can think of kairos as a kind of gateway to the past, an occasion, or a thing that connects us to another era.
In Wellness, I wanted to capture that feeling when certain moments in time are connected to each other, when we suddenly access these former versions of ourselves: the self we were when we were going through that awkward and ugly phase; the self we were when we were small and afraid; the self we were when we were out of our element and made to feel ashamed. These people trail us, sometimes inhabit us. When someone’s having a fight with their spouse, they are responding to a problem in the present, sure, but they are also simultaneously that four-year-old helpless child who was injured in some important memorable way that shaped their map of the world and made them on guard for that thing forever. Our brains reinvent, in the present, that painful moment from the distant past, making it no longer distant. And I wanted to recreate that feeling, by putting scenes from very different eras right next to each other—sometimes even in the same sentence—to arrange the book kairologically rather than chronologically.
I was inspired by the Greek idea of “kairos,” which is one of two words in ancient Greek that we English-speakers translate as “time.” The other one is “chronos,” which is where we get the word chronology.
TS: From hip Chicago to yuppie Chicago to the prairie, the settings in Wellness work so well to capture who these characters are. I really just love the descriptions of how fire shapes and preserves the prairie. Do settings help you form your characters? And do you have any thoughts on writing settings which are personally familiar to you versus those that are unfamiliar?
NH: Settings that work best for me are the ones that are a little—but not totally—unfamiliar. It’s almost as if I need a sense of longing or nostalgia about the place for it to qualify as a good setting. It’s hard for me to write about where I actually live, because there’s not enough mystery, and not enough yearning. It’s important for me to choose a setting where there’s some kind of gap to cross. I have a lot of nostalgia for my many summers spent living in Chicago, so it felt right to set the book partly there. And I was writing Wellness during the 2020 pandemic lockdown, when I was feeling deeply claustrophobic, stuck in my house. It was a time when I longed for wide-open spaces, and the landscape from my own life that I most associate with openness is the Flint Hills of Kansas. So, I decided to go there in my writing. Basically, if I feel a kind of emotional spark for a place, I’ll follow it.
TS: Writing child characters is difficult. Children in fiction can often seem a bit invisible. Or perhaps they fall into clear tropes such as the child genius. However, in Welness, Toby is a force, an “eat-the-marshmallow-right-now kind of boy” who, when very young, sounds like the “toddler equivalent of a Valley girl.” Of course, he is more complicated than all that and takes us for a surprise. And I find Toby, even when he’s Elizabeth’s prime antagonist, incredibly lovable. Do you have any thoughts or advice about peripheral or supporting child characters?
NH: When I was a child and I was worried about something, I was not aware that my worries were, from an adult perspective, often pretty silly and quaint. I worried about things sincerely, with all my heart. So, my key for writing child characters is to write them like they’re adults, to treat them as seriously as I treat adults, but to allow the focus of their desires to be decidedly kid-like. The things that children want are usually childish, but they want them with adult ferocity.
So, my key for writing child characters is to write them like they’re adults, to treat them as seriously as I treat adults, but to allow the focus of their desires to be decidedly kid-like.
TS: When listening to discussions on you, I’ve heard names tossed around in comparison such as Richard Powers, Delillo, Updike, Franzen, Philip Roth, and Richard Yates. Who are your influences?
NH: I love all those authors, and I’ve learned a lot from each of them. But you know how certain books just hit you at the right time in your life? Like how there’s something about the timing that allows the book to land in a significant way? There are two authors who hit me like that. In college, I discovered Donald Barthelme at a time when I was getting frustrated with the deeply serious and often cheerless prose I was being made to read in other classes. Barthelme was smart, but also zany and very, very funny. I believe it was the first time I’d read something for a literature class that made me laugh, which I didn’t know was allowed, humor, not in quote-unquote “serious literature.” I was completely smitten. Then in grad school, it was Virginia Woolf—I loved her ability to get so incredibly interior, to inhabit her characters in extreme close-up, so that the tone of her books is like hearing someone’s “brain voice” from the inside, like being a psychic fly on the inside wall of somebody’s skull. Literature is the only invention we have that can do this.
So, I feel like I’ve been trying to fuse those two impulses ever since: the playfulness and humor and screwball absurdity of Barthelme, and the deep interiority of Woolf.
TS: In your debut novel, The Nix, the protagonist plays Elfscape, a massively online game. In Wellness, Toby has a bit of a Minecraft addiction. And a younger Jack also had to take care to hide Dungeons & Dragons contraband. By chance are you yourself a gamer?
NH: There have been times in my life when I’ve been a dedicated—and sometimes obsessive—gamer. I was very into vanilla-era Warcraft and played it religiously through its “Lich King” expansion. I tried to come back to the game last year, re-subscribing for “Dragonflight,” its most recent incarnation. I found that, in my time away, the community had undergone a weird and radical gameplay optimization. Like, in any important game encounter, every action you take is now logged by third-party apps and then parsed and compared to every other player in the world so that you (and all your teammates) know exactly how good or bad you are. It’s become this ruthless game of maximized efficiency and constant surveillance. It’s as if the community has taken the inhuman imperatives of late-stage capitalism and imported them into their game, for some reason. I find it oppressive and deeply unfun.
This is all just to say: no, I’m not playing any games at the moment.
TS: Avoiding spoilers, I just want to say that I really appreciate how Wellness wraps up. Do you have any philosophies on what makes a suitable ending?
NH: My own philosophy is that I feel duty-bound to end on a hopeful note. Mostly that’s because of the length of my books. If I asked someone to read 600-plus pages and then the ending is a bummer? That just strikes me as rude.
TOM SOKOLWSKI completed an MFA at the University of Central Florida where he was awarded a Provost’s Fellowship. He's currently a PhD candidate at Florida State University, and his fiction is featured or forthcoming in The Masters Review, The Barcelona Review, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. Tom is a veteran of the Florida Army National Guard. He lives in Tallahassee and is married to the poet, Olivia Sokolowski. Find him online at tomsokowriter.com.