Wellness

“The story they’d always told themselves in their twenties was that suburban life was stifling and oppressive, but that’s not how it felt to her now. What it felt like now was liberation.”

Elizabeth is surprised to discover that what she believed to be true when she was younger turns out not to be true. She desires the mainstream life that she initially criticized as being “stifling and oppressive.” Whether this is truly what she wants or if the solution to her unhappiness lies elsewhere remains to be seen as the novel unfolds and her character undergoes growth and change.

“It was really discouraging that [Jack’s] relationship’s total cumulative score hovered in the mid-fifties, mostly dragged down by two things: first, his very low Need Fulfillment count, as he had not recorded meeting any of Elizabeth’s specific needs for at least a month now—and not because he wasn’t trying, but because she didn’t seem to have them. Needs. She could go for weeks without expressing a single desire, a single difficulty he could maybe help her with. Years ago he had fallen in love with exactly this quality—her independence, her poise and self-sufficiency—but now, more often than not, it made him feel peripheral, like he was just sitting around wondering: Do you need me yet? Do you need me ever?”

Jack is fearful that Elizabeth has grown unhappy in their marriage, partly because he does not feel that she has any use for him. He is unsure why this is or how to fix it. Elizabeth’s avoidance of expressing needs, which Jack refers to here, greatly contrasts Jack’s mother, who, it will later be revealed, was highly dependent on Jack to appease her foul moods.

“[Elizabeth] had chosen, willingly, freely, to have a child, and therefore, by implication, she had also chosen to give up countless luxuries and comforts: entire nights of restful sleep, a clean and spotless house, disposable income, relaxed and languid days without any conflict or rage. All of these pleasures she had sacrificed. And not only had she sacrificed them but, because she had chosen to do this, because she had done this to herself, she now pretended to be happy and contented at their absence.”

Elizabeth is initially dubious of her friends who leave behind the bohemian lifestyle for a mainstream comforts and traditional family relationships. She regards this as a kind of failing by giving in to social pressure. When it occurs in her own life, however, she is careful to clarify that she has consciously chosen a new lifestyle rather than sold out. Later, Elizabeth will theorize that choice—or at least the illusion of it—is the key element in the placebo effect’s success.

“Every couple has a story they tell themselves about themselves, a story that hums beneath them as a kind of engine, motoring them through trouble and into the future. For Jack and Elizabeth, that story was about falling in love at first sight, about two dreamers discovering their other half, two orphans finding a home, two people who understood each other—who just got each other—easily and immediately.

But stories have power only insofar as they’re believed, and suddenly, sitting there, watching Toby happily eat, Elizabeth wondered if her and Jack’s story wasn’t in fact just another highly embellished placebo, just a fiction they both believed because of how good and special it made them feel. And maybe all love was like that, a placebo, and maybe every marriage ceremony was part of that placebo’s elaborate ornamentation, its therapeutic context. And as soon as she considered this, it was as if the curtain came down, and just like her clients at Wellness upon being told the truth about their fake therapies, the story now longer compelled.”

Elizabeth doubts whether the love between her and Jack is authentic, or if it ever was in the past. While Jack longs for the closeness that they shared when they were younger, Elizabeth is unsure about what is missing from her life. Here, her work with placebos is referenced, indicating how strongly—and negatively—this work has come to shape her view of the way people interact and engage with the world. The novel casts the mythologizing stories couples “tell themselves about themselves” as incredibly important to the success of relationships—and these stories are yet another form of placebo. Being aware of the placebo effect on a daily basis has stopped Elizabeth from being able to take advantage of it, undermining her marriage’s story.

“[The Prairie on Fire] is based on a scene from a James Fenimore Cooper novel that Jack has not read. There’s something about a New York writer and a Boston painter attempting to depict the Midwest that seriously grates. It’s a scene from the Kansas prairie painted by someone who has never been to Kansas, based on a novel by a writer who has also never been to Kansas, and Jack finds he resents it. It’s similar to the resentment he felt years ago when city hipsters began ironically wearing the same John Deere hat that his own father actually, sincerely, wore: Jack was like, Fuck you. He’s weirdly protective of the rural Midwest, even though, as a young man, he tried very hard to escape it.”

Jack’s feelings toward his home are complex. On one hand, he dislikes his small Kansas hometown because of his painful childhood. Yet, he has been shaped by this place and undoubtedly it connects him to Evelyn, who was an immensely positive influence in his life. The mention of the ironic wearing of John Deere hats parallels Jack’s later mention of his anger at his father for using an anti-establishment song by “Rage Against the Machine” to promote values that oppose that which the band professed.

“Elizabeth was always mindful of the specific words she used during these exchanges. She told her clients to take a pill, and she told them they might start feeling better, but she never actually said it was the pill itself that would make them feel better […] It was a simple active ingredient: belief. Her patients were cured because, simply, they believed in the cure.”

This passage reveals how Elizabeth, Dr. Sanborne, and the other employees of Wellness skirt medical ethics when selling their clients pills that do not have any active ingredients. Elizabeth, however, comes to feel guilty and wrong for this practice, debating whether or not the giving of the placebo is a form of lying. She is particularly sensitive to being accused of exploitative practices because of her narcissistic and manipulative father. Ultimately, she will ask this same question of her marriage.

“A vision board, Elizabeth understood, was supposed to be an aspirational thing, but this one seemed more like a monument to suffering. She imagined all the hours Brandie must have spent her, fantasizing about a marriage more pleasing and secure than the one she actually had. It was like a road map of Brandie’s injured psyche, how shattered she must have been by her husband’s affair, how she probably went searching, desperate, for answers, discovered some pseudoscientific wisdom online, some philosophy that claimed she could control her life by controlling her thoughts, which must have appealed to her immensely, that she could personally dictate whether anything bad ever happened to her again.”

When Elizabeth peeks into Brandie’s “quiet room,” she sees the private vison board that Brandie has created to channel her belief in the power of positive thinking into her marriage. Though Brandie insists that she has come to terms with her husband’s infidelity—regarding it as a failing on her own part—Elizabeth sees that, on the contrary, Brandie is deeply hurt. Further, Brandie’s power of positive thinking cannot actually prevent bad things from happening—it is another placebo.

“It was because of Evelyn that Jack moved to Chicago. It was because of her that he applied to that school in the museum. It was her advice that led him to try to close the gap between feeling at home and feeling like he belonged.

And yet, in Chicago, he did not feel like he belonged. This was clear to him his very first week in the city, during the school’s orientation, when he was introduced to the bewildering bureaucratic architecture of college.”

Jack is initially frustrated upon moving to Chicago, where Evelyn insisted that he would belong but where he finds himself as alone as ever. The loneliness and isolation of his hometown, coupled with the positive experience Evelyn had in the city, compel him to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. With time, however, Jack finds a group of likeminded individuals with whom he identifies.

“Kate seemed alive—she had big gestures, big opinions, she had big glasses and big hoop earrings. She said what she pleased, had sex with whom she pleased, was committed to being entirely, truthfully, unapologetically herself. Which was refreshing. Jack didn’t think that he and Elizabeth lied to each other, exactly, but more like there was a kind of gulf between them full of diplomatically unspoken things. Their conversations dwelled instead on the banal details of planning, the errands that needed to be run, the groceries that needed to be purchased, the work and school schedules that needed to be coordinated, and questions—so many questions—about the facts of the day: What did she have for lunch? Did she like it? What was she reading? Did she like it? They didn’t ignore each other, but it felt like the total bedrock honesty that Kate displayed had been replaced or subsumed by this other kind of sharing—not intimacy but rather a kind of comprehensive friendly wiretap. They were always aware of what the other was doing and saying. Less so what the other was thinking.”

In keeping with the theme of The Limitations of Marriage, Jack contrasts Kate and Elizabeth. Though he still loves Elizabeth, he is saddened by the loss of the emotional and physical intimacy they had when they were younger, now replaced by the domestic “friendly wiretap” of adult life and responsibilities. He wonders if Kate has the answer in open marriage—but this desperate clinging to yet another quick fix solution is one of the novel’s many misleading placebos. Addressing the problems in Jack and Elizabeth’s marriage will require more than simply having sex with strangers.

“But even as Elizabeth hugged him, and even as she excitedly said she was calling Kate right now, Jack wondered if maybe it was another impulse he was honoring: not the impulse to be different, but the impulse to be the same. To go along with things. To be a part of a herd. Maybe it was that old childish impulse to fit in, to hide, to appease. He remembered the lengths he used to go to as a boy, the horrible things he would do to be agreeable, to avoid fights. He never said no back then, never stood up for himself.”

Jack agrees to try the sex party in the interest of making Elizabeth happy, not because it is something that he wants himself. Jack’s heightened sense of not fitting in comes to a head here; Jack’s awareness of his outlier status is important—it will eventually help him determine whether his marriage to Elizabeth can and should be salvaged.

“It was always the same problem: [Elizabeth] could no longer figure out how to be close to Jack without also feeling overwhelmed and suffocated by his expectations.

Not until, that is, she met Kate, who told a new story. According to Kate, the answer wasn’t closeness but rather separateness. Separate bedrooms. Separate lovers. More separated lives. Elizabeth listened to Kate talk about how the problem with modern marriage was actually all that togetherness, all that intimacy, that stupid drive to merge completely with the other person, and that the only way a marriage could survive the decades was to inject some mystery and distance and emancipation, and as soon as Elizabeth heard this and imagined a life of total autonomy spiced up with the occasional fun and ethical fling with a handsome new stranger on a night free of the responsibilities of marriage or parenthood, she knew right away: here, finally, was a story she could believe in.”

Unlike Jack, Elizabeth is excited and energized by the possibility of dramatic change and complete upheaval. Her interest in a new model of marriage echoes her enthusiasm about a strange design for their condo. Here, Elizabeth contrasts Kate and Kyle’s narrative about marriage to the one she and Jack have adopted: Kate expects much less from Kyle than Jack does from Elizabeth, which to Elizabeth sounds freeing and rife with potential for “mystery.” Elizabeth is just as prone to falling into the placebo trap as other characters; here, she finds herself “believing in a story” that keeps her focus on the hopeful perfection of the future.

“You’re crawling around looking in only the obvious places. You’re thinking, Maybe a new condo will fix things! Maybe an affair! Maybe an orgy! And sure, those things might make you feel good for a while, but the way-deep-down truth is that the absence you feel in your marriage, whatever it is, will still be there, and as long as you don’t acknowledge it, it will always be there, a hollow at its center.”

Kyle says this to Elizabeth as she talks of her dissatisfaction with her marriage to Jack. Kyle is frank in his assessment: Elizabeth’s and Jack’s marriage cannot be easily fixed, suggesting that what works for him and Kate (an open marriage) won’t for Elizabeth and Jack. His insight speaks directly to the theme of The Limitations of Marriage.

“[Elizabeth] hated that they’d done nothing to these windows. She hated that they’d had plans they could not live up to. She hated that soon they’d be abandoning these plans, moving to their new, unblemished Park Shore home and therefore leaving all this imperfection unattended to. A claw-foot bathtub they’d slowly worn down, the white turning a cloudy gray under their feet—they had planned to reglaze it but never did. It became a sort of metaphor for everything she and Jack had done wrong in their long relationship. They did not solve their problems; they merely became accustomed to them.”

Later, Elizabeth will realize that she frequently lives for the future, rather than the present, assuming it will be an improvement on the past. That notion is at work here as Elizabeth points out the ways in which her past self had attempted this but failed.

“[Elizabeth] recalled something she had said to Toby not long ago, that afternoon she was giving him those apple turnovers: Think only about how happy you’ll be in the future. She had tried, that day, to teach Toby how to displace his moment-to-moment desire, to untether his desire from the present moment and stow it somewhere downstream. For wasn’t that precisely what Elizabeth had always done? Hadn’t that always worked for her—looking to the future, envisioning a future better than the present? […] Looking back now, it suddenly seemed to Elizabeth that she’d been taking a kind of cosmic marshmallow test her entire life, always delaying and delaying, always waiting for a future better than the present, whatever that present happened to be.”

This epiphany is important for Elizabeth because it helps her identify the source of her unhappiness. She is astonished that she has not recognized this flawed thinking sooner, and its recognition of it now saddens her. Later, she will speak of her marriage as a placebo, suggesting that her approach to life is based on a false premise.

“Benjamin Quince had once told him that the hyperlink was the most important invention since the printing press, that the hypertext would someday disrupt all literature. In the future, Benjamin had said, readers would navigate a story themselves, without the rigid interference of an author telling them what to do or what to think. […] Jack has begun to think that Benjamin was half right. That is, indeed, exactly what people do now, people like this farmer, the Heartland Patriot, people like his own dad.

But they’re not doing it in literature. Because it turned out that hypertext didn’t disrupt literature. No, it disrupted reality. That’s what Jack thinks when he sees his father’s lunacy: The actual world has become one big hypertext, and nobody knows how to read it. It’s a free-for-all where people build whatever story they want out of the world’s innumerable available scraps.”

Jack’s assessment of the harm done to his father by technology is in keeping with what Dr. Sanborne will tell Elizabeth about the inaccurate threats that society perceives to be present. His father makes his own “story” about governmental threats, albeit not knowing that he is doing so, in a way that upsets Jack. Jack’s mention of “innumerable available scraps” highlights the human need to make chaos into patterns, even if those patterns are nonsensical conspiracy theories or superstitious beliefs about manifesting good thoughts into the world.

“In his last correspondence with his father, Jack had argued with the man about, of all things, algorithms, an argument that felt really important at the time but rather less so now; death had a way of recasting all other subjects as petty in comparison.

[…]

Why, Jack wondered, had Lawrence sought him out right at the moment of the cancer diagnosis? And why then never mention the cancer? Why stay silent when the cancer got worse? Why type so much furry online but never once talk about it in real life? These were questions Jack could not now, nor ever, answer—for his father was gone, in the ground, in a coffin, the ultimate black box.”

There is great irony in the way in which Lawrence, detached and distant from Jack when they lived in the same house throughout Jack’s youth, seeks closeness via technology when Jack is physically distant in Chicago. Lawrence’s inability to speak about what is bothering him has always kept others at arm’s length. It also parallels Elizabeth’s later admission that she has difficulty asking for help. Readers are privy to some of Lawrence’s point of view, in which he admits to wanting to apologize to Jack but never being able to fully do so.

“People are not experiencing the world with peace and tranquility. Our lives have never before been so free of immediate physical threats, and yet we’ve never felt so threatened. And that’s because, in the course of our normal everyday lives, with all the responsibilities of work and family, amid the churn of information and news and trends and spin, with the millions of choices available to us, with the horrors of the world served up to us every second on TV and computers and phones, we mostly just feel anxious, worried, precarious, vulnerable—basically the same emotions we would feel if there really was a famine, or if we really were being hunted.”

Here Dr. Sanborne points out to Elizabeth the irony of an advanced society: Though humans no longer face physical threats—thanks in large part to the technologies humans have created that keep them safe—they are more fearful than ever, convinced that they are indeed unsafe, when they are truly not. Technology, Dr. Sanborne points out, has turned on humanity—one of the repercussions of Technology’s Impact on Society.

“Is Jack right for you? Is Jack wrong for you? Well, that depends. Who is this Jack we’re talking about? Who is this you? What version? At what time? In what place? Which of your many funny reflections is the accurate one? Yesterday you were this person, today you’re that person, and tomorrow…who knows? But marriage promises consistency, certainty: you will be loved forever. And the moment we become certain of this is the moment it begins to slip away from us. Our certainty blinds us to how the world changes and changes and changes.”

Dr. Sanborne gives Elizabeth advice, though likely not the advice she expected. His answer is that there is no answer—that it is impossible to know if a person is one’s soulmate because people are forever changing and evolving. His words are in keeping with the theme of The Limitations of Marriage.

“It had been, at that point, in college, roughly ten years since his sister’s death, and yet still this was the memory that came crashing down upon him during these nights alone in the art department, or in bed trying to sleep, or sometimes seemingly out of nowhere, ruining otherwise perfectly fine days. Such was the nature of grief and guilt, that any stolen moment of good cheer had to be immediately repaid its equivalent in misery and regret and penitence. His mourning was so fully woven into him that he wasn’t entirely sure who he was without it. It was an everyday weight, pulling him down to this one awful fact anytime he strayed too far from it: that he had, in a distracted moment, in a dire lapse of attention, in a daydream, caused the death of his sister, and neither his subconscious nor his parents would ever let him forget it.”

Though Jack outwardly denies that his art has any emotional meaning—insisting the abstract designs are purely conceptual—he is aware that this is a lie. He is haunted by the death of his sister, never able to shake the guilt he feels that he mistakenly directed her to the wrong field that night. The abstract shapes resemble the trees amid the prairie grass, and Jack is forever impacted by the landscape of his home.

“His last evening in Kansas, the night before his father would drive him to Emporia and he would catch the bus to Chicago, Jack walked out into the north pasture at sunset. Nobody had set foot in that field since the night of the accident, and the grass, in places, was taller than Jack, blades thick and sharp, tassels bending in the wind. Young trees had sprung up here and there, including an elm in what seemed to be in the pasture’s middle—what would have been center field back when Jack and his father pretended the pasture was a baseball stadium—and Jack imagined that this spot, where this lone tree was growing, this was where Evelyn had died, this was her grave. She had a proper, official, headstoned grave, of course, over at Calvary Church, but this tree felt, to Jack, more real, more actually connected to her. There was, he hoped, some part of her that grew in some part of it.”

The field where Evelyn died conjures conflicting emotions for Jack. Because he feels responsible for her death (and, indeed, his parents are instrumental in this), the field will be a constant source of sadness. However, because of Evelyn’s love of the landscape as a subject for her art, Jack finds a love for the prairie too. It remains clear to him how important the prairie was to her, even though she, like Jack, was desperate to live elsewhere. For this reason, he finds comfort imagining the prairie as her final resting place.

“He was thinking it was a barbaric thing for his father to do, but he also felt a sudden rush of tenderness for the man. That Lawrence was going out into the blackened predawn to spare his delicate son a troubling sight—it made Jack wish more than anything that he could say thank you, for this one favor, and for all the other quiet charities his dad had likely performed, unnoticed. Lawrence, after all, could have told Jack to toughen up, to be a man, as so many of the other fathers did. But no, Lawrence had never asked Jack to be anything other than what he was. Lawrence had accepted Jack in a way Jack could not, he thought now, reciprocate. It was a massive failure of empathy, these last few years of bickering, a massive failure of generosity. Jack wished he could take it back, all the bitterness, all the pointless fighting on the internet.”

Jack’s relationship with Lawrence is detached when he is young, then contentious when they reconnect later in Jack’s life. As Jack learns that his father spared him from hearing the sound of the dying coyotes, he recognizes how kind his father truly was, though he was unable to show it. Jack feels remorse for their inability to repair their relationship at the end of Lawrence’s life.

“‘You have to let it breathe,’ his sister had advised, and maybe that was Jack in a nutshell: he let nothing breathe. He let nothing just be. He let nothing evolve or unfold naturally, without trying to control it or coerce it. His sister, on the other hand, had accepted the world’s inherent unpredictability, and even embraced it […] But for Jack, marriage and art were not about investigation or learning or growth. They were more like the snapshots you take and then pin down in the album: they were artifacts, mementos, fixed under laminate. He could not let them breathe.”

As the novel draws to an ending, Jack arrives at key insights into the aspects of his personality that have contributed to the distance between him and Elizabeth. The notion that he does not accept things as they are and instead constantly feels it is his responsibility to change or improve them to recapture a mythically idyllic past parallels the message sent by the Wellness industry in the novel’s present.

“‘I wish we could have grown up together,’ Jack said now, in the direction of the memorial he’d invented for his sister. And then he turned around and made his way to the car. It was clear to him, at last, what to do, how to solve the problem of his marriage. He had to finally take his sister’s advice. He had to—even though it terrified him—he had to let his marriage go. This is what he decided, out there in the pasture, in the shadow of that looming tree, the heavy wind in his face: it was time to let Elizabeth go.”

Jack, despite appearing to be more eager than Elizabeth to make the marriage work, seemingly gives up and decides to let their relationship end. This realization comes about by reflecting upon his sister, her death, and the advice she gave him when she was living.