Wellness

Jack attends Chicago’s Art Institute because of Evelyn, but quickly finds that he does not fit in. It seems all of the other students know immediately what to expect of college and are more well-traveled and experienced than Jack. He worries that his Polaroids of bent trees in Kansas will be deemed inartistic.

One day, Benjamin shows Jack the internet, explaining how hypertext works and guiding him through Benjamin’s master’s thesis. Benjamin also shows Jack how to access pornography online, which Jack looks at each night in the photography computer lab. Before long, Jack encounters a few problems: The computer cannot download the images quickly enough, plus, he wants to take them back to his apartment. He decides to take photographs of the images on the screen. When the photography professor discovers pornography in the machines’ caches, he confronts Jack. Jack pretends his photos are art and the professor declares them genius.

The novel returns to the present.

Jack and Elizabeth meet Kyle and Kate at a cocktail bar. Kate asks how the two met, and then Kate tells them of meeting Kyle at an orgy. Jack is taken aback, but Kate and Kyle explain their open marriage and encourage Jack and Elizabeth to join them at a future sex party. Jack declines, wondering what Elizabeth’s thoughts on Kate and Kyle truly are.

As they leave, a waiter criticizes Jack for calling the neighborhood abandoned in the 1990s. Jack is confused. Elizabeth is angry that Jack took so long to decide on a drink, telling him no one would have cared what he ordered and accusing him of falsely believing people are focused on him. They go to bed separately.

The novel flashes back to Jack’s childhood.

Jack sits in a high school classroom where the students—all remedial readers—attempt to read aloud. Jack and several other boys do not pay attention to the reading, but instead carve away at the palms of their hands with erasers. One of the boys has issued a challenge: Use the eraser to create a wound, and then to pour salt into the wound at lunch time. Soon, the teacher asks Jack to open the window, due to the heat of the room. The window stuck; Jack is unable to open it, but the girl who has been reading aloud—Daphne—steps in and opens it successfully. Jack fears he will be beaten up as a result of this.

The novel returns to the present.

The morning after the night out with Kate and Kyle, Jack and Toby go to the farmer’s market, as is their Saturday routine. They run into Benjamin, who tells Jack that the condo project is back on. Jack, thinking over Kyle’s criticism of him the night before, asks Benjamin if he is too vanilla. Benjamin agrees that Jack is fairly mainstream and launches into a diatribe about how misguided their anti-corporate mindset was during college.

At home, Jack and Toby make Elizabeth’s favorite breakfast of banana pancakes. Afterward, Elizabeth, expecting Jack has an ulterior motive for the breakfast, apologizes for exploding angrily at him the night before. They discuss Kate and Kyle. Elizabeth wants them to try new things together, to have new adventures. At the end of their discussion, Jack agrees to attend one of Kyle and Kate’s parties, in the interest of trying something new.

When she started working at Wellness, Elizabeth proposed to Dr. Sanborne that the company, instead of repeatedly proving that the placebo effect is indeed real, could shift direction to take advantage of the placebo effect by selling placebos. Dr. Sanborne found the idea interesting but worried about the ethics. When he retired and Elizabeth took over Wellness, she announced to the staff that they would be pivoting the company’s direction. She administered the first dose of the company’s “love potion”—in the form of a nasal spray—to a woman working in IT who loved her husband but lost desire for him. The woman insisted that the spray worked.

Now, Elizabeth thinks about how this manufactured closeness is the opposite of the solution that Kate and Kyle endorse.

Over the phone, Kate explains the dos and don’ts of the sex club. Jack and Elizabeth, upon arrival, complete forms and pay the fee for a 12-hour pass. The woman checking them in explains that the “gathering” skirts laws by calling itself a private club requiring membership.

Once inside, Jack and Elizabeth take a seat at a booth and survey the room. A few people are dancing in skimpy clothes. Elizabeth feels overdressed. When Kate and Kyle arrive, Kate takes Jack to the bar and Kyle sits with Elizabeth. Jack is anxious about not staring at the people in the room; and Elizabeth admits to Kyle that she is tense. Kyle asks what first attracted her to Jack, as Kate asks Jack the same question about Elizabeth. Both conversations flow easily. Elizabeth enjoys that Kyle is a skilled listener. Kate asks Jack to divulge his fetishes and Jack insists he has none. As Jack and Elizabeth reveal more, Kate and Kyle come to the same conclusion about Jack and Elizabeth’s marriage: Both are looking for “antidotes to whatever problem they had in a previous relationship […] but in doing so [have] end[ed] up, paradoxically in [a] relationship that [has] exactly those same problems” (397).

The four come back together, and then Kate and Kyle head to the buffet. Elizabeth steps outside for some air, but is confronted by protestors, including Brandie and the rest of the Community Corps.

When Jack was a teenager, he did not like what most other teens in Kansas liked. In college, he discovered that this kind of anti-establishment rejection of tradition was valued. He wrote paper after paper about the merits of hypertext. He got a tattoo that conveyed his life’s philosophy about multiple meanings, insisting he would never regret the tattoo because this philosophy would always be central to his identity.

But now, as a father and husband, Jack has changed. The things he rejected in the past now give him small bursts of pleasure. He regrets the tattoo, which is the ultimate sign that he has transformed. He is saddened by the thoughts that he will probably change again in the future and that both Elizabeth and Toby have changed.

Brandie distances herself from Elizabeth. In response, Elizabeth grows obsessed with cleaning the house, as if she is making up for some deficiency. One Saturday, it is Elizabeth’s turn to oversee the board game session Toby has weekly with five other boys at a bookstore. They arrive a bit late, and Elizabeth, tired and frenzied, oversees the boys’ purchase lunch and then set up the game.

She sits down with a book but is distracted by a comment that a man in line behind her made. He was annoyed with how long she and the group of boys were taking to order food. She decides to confront the man, but he is no longer in the bookstore.

Instead, she runs in to Brandie, who implies that she does not trust Elizabeth around children anymore. Brandie does, however, thank her for the “love potion” pills and says they are still working well. Brandie can no longer have Elizabeth in her life anymore, but fortunately Elizabeth has served her purpose. Outraged, Elizabeth tells Brandie that the pills are a placebo, then criticizes Brandie’s “no negative thoughts” approach to life. As they argue, Elizabeth realizes that she has been living her life like the delayed gratification marshmallow experiment, always presuming that she will obtain happiness and fulfillment in some distant future.

Community Corps renews its attack on the condo building. Elizabeth and Jack meet Benjamin at their unit, where construction has abruptly stopped. Benjamin proposes ways to appease the protestors.

Later, Elizabeth tells Jack that Brandie is fueling the protest and that it is directed at Elizabeth personally. Jack and Elizabeth fight; the fight escalates until an alert on Jack’s phone interrupts their yelling. Toby enters and announces to his parents that they have just “gone viral” (433).