Wellness

The novel flashes back to Jack’s adolescence.

It is 1984, and Evelyn is home for their mother’s birthday. She teaches Jack to paint the prairie each morning, while explaining why the prairie has historically been an unpopular subject for landscape painters. Jack fears his mother will not like their father’s gift, as each year she complains about this privately to Jack, but this time, his father gets her a sandwich press that she mentioned liking. Ruth is seemingly pleased, but when the process of making a sandwich goes awry, she complains.

Outside, Evelyn tell Jack that their father actually proposed marriage to Ruth’s younger sister first. Because the girls’ father would not allow the younger daughter to marry, their father felt obligated to propose to the older sister instead. Jack is surprised to learn this and even more surprised that his father revealed it to Evelyn.

The novel returns to the present.

Jack and his mother attend a lunch in a church basement after Lawrence’s funeral. There is a lengthy description of the many food items offered on the lunch buffet. A minister says a lengthy prayer. The event goes by in a blur for Jack.

After the funeral, Jack returns to his childhood home, to which he has not been since he left at age 18 for Chicago. His old bedroom is filled with stuff that his mother has purchased over the years, though she cannot explain why she has purchased it all. They talk a bit about his father. After he stopped burning the land, the prairie morphed into a forest. Lawrence’s lung cancer—which doctors attribute to the prairie fires—was diagnosed in 2008, the same year Lawrence joined Facebook and reconnected with Jack. Jack learns that his father was stripping wood from abandoned local barns to sell as “authentic reclaimed barn wood” (509). His mother is eager for Jack to go, and Jack understands that she has not forgiven him for leaving.

The novel flashes back to Jack’s adolescence.

The technique used for prairie burns is very dependent on how wet or dry the grass, and on the absence or presence of wind. One day, Jack and Evelyn are outside, watching Lawrence and his crew conduct a burning. They both find it fascinating, though their father does not understand why. Evelyn photographs the scene with a Polaroid camera, but Jack is forced to go inside. He retreats to his bedroom, where his mother finds him. For the first time, she sees the art posters Evelyn has given him displayed in his room. She cautions him against following in Evelyn’s footsteps by pursuing art, and, when Jack tries to carefully protest, Ruth tears down his posters and destroys them. Evelyn later consoles him, assuring him one day he will escape and showing Jack the photograph she has just taken. It depicts a single flower that survived the burn. Evelyn says the flower is symbolic of Jack.

After dinner, Jack appeases Ruth by taking care of many household chores. Lawrence has decided to continue the burn that night, though it is rare to conduct a burn in the dark. Ruth gives Evelyn permission to paint outside, but there is a misunderstanding about where the burn will take place. While she paints, Evelyn is caught up in the burn and killed.

Elizabeth remembers her first study with Dr. Sanborne on the validity of love at first sight. The experiment required her to ask participants a series of questions which grew increasingly invasive and personal. This caused the same physical symptoms—such as sweating and an increased heart rate—as falling in love, so subjects mistook fear for love. Elizabeth performed the experiment on Jack when they met. For this reason, she worries their relationship is inauthentic.

Now, she asks Dr. Sanborne, long retired, to meet her. Elizabeth confesses her fear that her marriage is false because she experimented on Jack. Dr. Sanborne gives a lengthy analysis of research on love and on the placebo effect. Much is still unknown about both, so there is no way to fully explain why either works as it does.

The novel flashes back to Elizabeth’s adolescence.

A few weeks after having to measure spaces in the mall parking lot, Elizabeth goes to a dinner her father is hosting where several business associates present him with an award. During the dinner, he constantly reminds her not to slouch; when he tells the group that she has enrolled in college preparatory courses for the fall, Elizabeth lists the philosophers she has been reading, but stops when she remembers her mother’s mandate against bragging. As dinner ends, her father tells Elizabeth that the family is likely moving to Washington, DC, in the fall, so Elizabeth will not be able to go on the trip with Maggie Percy.

The next morning, Elizabeth plays a game of tennis against her father while his colleagues watch. She decides, for the first time, not to let her father win. Her father becomes so enraged that he breaks three rackets during the game. He throws one at Elizabeth and hits her with it.

The novel flashes back to Jack’s young adulthood.

It is 1992, and Jack is in college. Photography is still analog and because art supplies are expensive, so he resorts to salvaging materials that other students have thrown away. Because the discarded photo paper is usually no longer able to be manipulated by light, Jack uses a new technique, experimenting with chemicals. He writes abstract papers calling his work conceptual art in a way that pleases his instructors, but when he works on these pieces, he is really thinking about Evelyn.

After Evelyn’s death, Lawrence became even more silent and detached, not working and just watching television numbly. Ruth began working several different jobs. She accused Jack of directing Evelyn to the wrong field that night on purpose, out of anger for how much more Evelyn was loved and her many skills and talents. Ruth insisted Jack attend church four times a week. By his senior year of high school, however, Jack quit church and made up his mind to leave Kansas.

He applied to the Art Institute using Evelyn’s landscape paintings. Before he left home, he took countless photographs of a lone tree that had sprung up in the middle of the field where she died. He still pretends this tree is her grave.

The novel returns to the present.

Jack sorts through his father’s possessions, which are sparse. He is shocked, however, to find a cabinet filled with supplements and other health treatments. Ruth notes that Lawrence grew to distrust doctors, which makes his online fanaticism make a bit more sense to Jack. When Jack brings up Evelyn’s death, Ruth reveals that Lawrence blamed Ruth, certain that Ruth had intentionally sent Evelyn to the wrong field out of jealousy for how special she was to Lawrence. Jack is angry, as this is exactly what his mother accused him of doing. Now, she isn’t sure exactly what happened on that night, nor where the miscommunication occurred. Jack is unsurprised when Ruth refuses to apologize.

As he leaves, he thinks about Evelyn’s painting lessons. Jack has an epiphany about what has gone wrong in his marriage, and then decides he must let Elizabeth go.

Jack returns to Chicago, but tells Elizabeth he needs to spend some time apart and will be staying at the Shipworks building for a while. Wellness is closing permanently: Brandie has been publicly revealing that their products are placebo on social media. Elizabeth packs up the building and recalls the time her father threw the tennis racket at her. Though she was physically and emotionally hurt, everyone insisted it was an accident. Elizabeth was never consoled, one of the many times during her adolescence when she needed help and no one gave it to her. After the racket incident, she retreated to the servants’ quarters. As she cried, Elizabeth heard a scratch and, upon opening an attic door, released dozens of bats. The fumes used to exterminate the bats also flooded into the room and made Elizabeth lightheaded; she momentarily considered dying by suicide.

Elizabeth comes across an article de-bunking the conclusions drawn by the marshmallow experiment. The article argues that the children who delayed gratification and waited to eat the marshmallow were from wealthy families—they believed in the promise that they could have two in the future. The other children were from homes where access to something positive in the present did not mean that the future would offer similar options—they made the rational choice to eat the marshmallow in front of them. Elizabeth apologizes to Toby for making him engage in the apple turnover experiment and he explains that he ate the turnover immediately because he believes that she is perfect. Elizabeth is shocked into an epiphany—she has purposely fallen short of achieving perfection throughout her adult life to appease her father, who hated when her successes outdid his.

She heads to Shipworks to see Jack, but runs into Benjamin on the way. He tells her all of the investors have pulled out of the construction due to the protests. It is unlikely that they will be able to successfully sue, as the investors are largely illegal offshore shell companies. To recoup some of their money, he has instead set fire to the building for the insurance. Benjamin assures Elizabeth that Jack vacated the building before setting the fire, but Elizabeth rushes over anyway. She sees Jack watching the fire and decides that perhaps he is her soulmate after all.

The novel flashes back to the beginning of Jack and Elizabeth’s relationship.

Twenty-something Jack and Elizabeth lounge together in her Chicago apartment. They muse about what it means to be a couple and about the concept of soulmates.