Art is useless, said Wilde. Art is for art’s sake—that is, for beauty’s sake. But why do we possess a sense of beauty to begin with? A question we will never answer. Perhaps it’s just a kind of superfluity of sexual attraction. Nature needs us to feel drawn to other human bodies, but evolution is imprecise. In order to go far enough, to make that feeling strong enough, it went too far. Others are powerfully lovely to us, but so, in a strangely different, strangely similar way, are flowers and sunsets. Art, in turn, this line of thought might go, is a response to natural beauty. Stunned by it, we seek to rival it, to reproduce it, to prolong it. Flowers fade, sunsets melt from moment to moment; the love of bodies brings us grief. Art abides. “When old age shall this generational waste, / Thou shalt remain.”
If the past 50 years have taught us one thing, it’s that the problem of reconciling quantum physics with gravity is much more difficult than anyone thought it would be. After so much trial and failure, it certainly seems that we are missing something big.
At some point during the past few years, I looked around to find my apartment — nay, my body — had become a temple to everywhere I’ve ever eaten. Mugs and hats from local grocers, hoodies from roadside diners, T-shirts and totes from damn near everywhere else. I’ve had to install more hooks in my kitchen mug rack. I’m thinking of buying a second dresser. I need a 12-step program for tote bags. What, exactly, is happening?
Yet, Hill’s penchant for super-abundance equips him well for the task of capturing the contours of modern American life. Wellness is the kind of novel that feels genuinely capacious and lively, full of interconnected rooms stuffed with unexpected fascinations. A reader emerges from Hill’s world of Wellness with a keener eye for the tragicomic maladies of marriage, and a greater ear for the strangely affecting rhythms and algorithms of 21st-century life.
I was in Los Angeles on one of the occasions when Malibu burned, in the 2018 Woolsey Fire. More than 30 miles away, in West Hollywood, not knowing any better, I went about my day, like everybody else, walking, shopping, doing errands, even as white ash fell onto our heads, as gently as snow. I thought about that day as I read Manjula Martin’s memoir, The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History. And I thought about everything we have learned and haven’t learned since, over the past five painful years of fire and smoke.