Wellness

A week later, Elizabeth is again serving lunch to Toby. Jack enters briefly, comments on how pretty the plate of food looks, then takes a picture of it. He shows the photo to Toby, who agrees it is pretty, then immediately eats everything. Elizabeth is stunned. Jack explains that Toby’s refusal to eat is due to his not wanting to spoil the aesthetic of the plate—capturing it via photograph preserves it.

Elizabeth thinks suddenly of her marriage, wondering if it has been a mere placebo all along.

The novel flashes back to Jack’s childhood.

Jack is born when his mother becomes unexpectedly pregnant with him at age 37 in 1974. She is warned that he could be born with any number of disabilities due to her advanced age. This proves true: Jack is born prematurely and diagnosed with failure to thrive when he cannot gain enough weight. Jack grows up sensing that he has made his parents, especially his mother, angry by his inability to grow. He lives in the shadow of his older sister, Evelyn, the town’s homecoming queen. At age four, Jack becomes very sick, possibly with spinal meningitis. When the test results come back negative, doctors discover he actually has tonsillitis. Jack’s fear at complaining about his sore throat made a relative benign infection progress to an extreme.

In the present, Jack waits for Benjamin, who is teaching a yoga class to businessmen. He asks Benjamin about the delay in the construction of the condos. Benjamin explains that there have recently been protests about the project due to its intent to provide low-income housing. Benjamin is confident, however, that he can come up with a solution. He comments on what he perceives to be Jack’s poor health and shows him a cabinet full of tinctures he has accrued.

Jack goes to work. The university CFO comes to his class, wanting to discuss how Jack plans to improve his Impact algorithm. When he leaves, Jack begins his lecture on landscape painting, explaining to the class that artists are often not free to create what they want but must create what rich people demand.

In his lectures on landscape painting, Jack notes that the prairie is often overlooked as a subject, deemed not worthy of capturing. Even in the Art Institute museum, the only prairie painting is “The Prairie on Fire.” Jack often studies it, partly to avoid the crowds at Grant Woods’s “American Gothic,” a famed painting of a stoic farmer couple. Jack recalls his father, a Kansas farmer, explaining controlled burns to him, which “The Prairie on Fire” seems to accurately depict.

The novel flashes back to Elizabeth’s family’s roots.

Elizabeth’s ancestry is eminent. Her great-great-grandfather Alvin Augustine, who lived from 1835 until 1920, invested in a new product—canned condensed milk that does not require refrigeration. Alvin entered into an agreement with the canned milk producer to transform Alvin’s land into railroads to transport his product in exchange for buying his fuel exclusively from Alvin. Alvin thus became wealthy by clearing timber for fuel for the trains, in part after swindling several landowners out of their land.

Alvin’s oldest son Everett, who lived from 1870 to 1950, felt pressure to be financially successful. After his first endeavor in the cotton industry failed, he invested in an unpopular medicinal powder. His third attempt was a financial firm that proved to be a Ponzi scheme. After this, Everett sank into a depression until his father met the director of the real-world film “Birth of a Nation,” an infamously racist piece of pro-Ku Klux Klan propaganda. The director predicted a rise in KKK membership, which proved to be accurate. Everett became a leading robe maker, due to all the cotton he had in warehouses.

Everett’s oldest son, Elizabeth’s grandfather Cornelius, was born in 1926 and died in 1980. Cornelius joined the Marines and was sent to Japan after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After misunderstanding Japanese citizens asking for water while offering him gold, he took the gold home and began a gold supply company.

The narrative remains in the past.

In college, Elizabeth comes across a posting on the theatre job board: A psychology professor is looking for student actors for a research experiment. Elizabeth prepares a resume and meets with Dr. Otto Sanborne, an elderly man who warmly invites Elizabeth to sit down, then offers her a cookie. He briefly excuses himself and while he is gone, Elizabeth wipes away the crumbs from the cookie. When he returns, Dr. Sanborne asks why she cleaned up the crumbs. He has just conducted an experiment on her: An open bottle of bleach is hidden in the room and he insists people are more likely to clean up when they smell it.

The study he recruits Elizabeth for will involve determining whether someone can be essentially manipulated into falling in love. Elizabeth begins the next day.

The novel returns to the present.

At Wellness, Elizabeth prepares to see a new client named Gretchen. Wellness is currently testing a product that promises to restore gut bacteria to the state of early humans. Elizabeth is surprised when “Gretchen” turns out to be Brandie. Brandie insists she needs the “love potion” that Elizabeth has told her about: Brandie’s marriage is not going well and her husband has been unfaithful.

Elizabeth is hesitant, but then thinks about the behavioral issues Toby has been having at school. If he were threatened with expulsion, Elizabeth could call on Brandie, who has power as a leader in the Parent Teacher Association and would be indebted to Elizabeth. Elizabeth gives Brandie the pills, prefaced by a long explanation of the research behind them involving theories of coupling in early human societies. Brandie is grateful.

The pills, however, have no active ingredients and are merely placebos.

The novel flashes back to Elizabeth’s childhood.

On her 14th birthday, Elizabeth is staying with her parents at the historic Augustine home in Connecticut. She has moved so frequently that she rarely has any friends, but is excited because a girl named Maggie Percy gave her a note inviting her to come on a fall trip with Maggie’s family. Elizabeth’s father gifts her a large amount of tennis gear for joining the team, and insists they play immediately after breakfast. Elizabeth does, playing unhappily and poorly. After the game, her father insists they drive to the mall. On the drive, Elizabeth tells him of her new interest in theatre and he criticizes its impractical nature.

At the mall, her father returns the tennis racket, claiming that it is flawed because his daughter could not hit any shots with it. He buys her several Advanced Placement study guides at a bookstore, and then formal dresses for the dinners they will be having at the Augustine house that summer. When they return to the parking lot, they discover that a blue van parked next to them has scraped some of the paint on Elizabeth’s father’s BMW. In response, he instructs her to measure all of the accessible parking spots in the lot, reporting back to him which ones are not compliant with the legal minimum size, even by less than an inch. With this information, he wins a class action lawsuit that pays for a new BMW.

The novel returns to the present.

Elizabeth goes to Brandie’s home for a meeting of Community Corp, a group Brandie has started to improve the community through the power of positive thinking and avoiding framing problems in terms of negatives. Brandie leads Elizabeth through an exercise wherein Elizabeth connects her fear of Toby’s having tantrums to the explosions of temper her father had when she was a teen. Elizabeth’s father demanded perfection, yet did not want Elizabeth to exceed his accomplishments.

The group insists that people can manifest what they want by telling themselves that it is already true. Elizabeth is dubious and excuses herself to find the restroom. Instead, she discovers Brandie’s “Quiet Room,” where Brandie has covered a bulletin board with photos of her and her husband as well as magazine photos of couples.