I am trying a new thing…each of my reviews will begin with “in five words,” wherein, wait for it, I sum up the book in five words. (It’s a HOOK baby… or that’s the hope.)
In Five Words: modern, love story, transformative, satire
My first-ever podcast guest, CliftonStrengths coach Heidi Convery-Liscum, recommended this book on Episode 10, she was effusive in her praise and said that it gripped her and she would not soon forget it. What she said made such a strong impression that I went out immediately to get this book at the library and I do not regret it. I read Hill’s first book “The Nix” and found it to be an unusual and biting delight, and this one is no different, in that it also made a lasting impression on me.
This book is for anyone who has looked around at their life and said, “Huh. So. This is it?” It’s about the introspection of middle age, when everything is perfectly fine, but not quite what you thought, to include yourself. It’s a searing look at the modern age, an examination of our culture of wellness, a ponderance of marriage and parenting, and an unflinching look at the algorithms of social media that are warping our view of the world.
Jack and Elizabeth were college sweethearts, having met after watching each other from afar for months through their apartment windows (I swear, it’s sweeter than it sounds). They came to Chicago from very different backgrounds to escape their respective pasts and find themselves and then each other. Twenty-ish years later in the present, they are married and parents to a complicated son, more intent on his computer than any IRL interactions.
Jack never reached the heights he hoped as a photographer and is fine teaching photography at a college, Elizabeth works for a mysterious company called “Wellness” that proports to give scientific solutions to problems that plague customers. Everything is resoundingly, boringly, fine. As they sink all their savings into designing Elizabeth’s dream apartment, their “forever home,” Jack is confused, and then dismayed to know she thinks that a design with seperate bedrooms is the way to go “you know, just in case.” Throughout the novel, we jump between the present and their fratured marriage to their shared and individual pasts, piecing together how they got to where they are today. This conversation between the two of them is a gutpunch into Elizabeth’s questioning.
“I wanted to find a good guy, and maybe have a beautiful family together and live in a nice, home and look what happened – I got all of that.”
“And yes now you’re bored.”
“No, not bored. Just no longer seduced by the mystery of it all. Life’s big hard questions – what will happen? Who will I become/have largely been answered. And now I feel like there’s this huge absence where the mystery used to be. And I guess that’s really what I’m after.”
This book is you looking at them looking at themselves, and their lives, in an unflinching mirror, but at the same time it forces you to look into the mirror at yourself. This passage him me hard, right in the face. Its Jack’s observations on the Farmer’s Market, something in my own life I consider to be “my happy place.”
Page 349 “It was the obsession with purity – and of course, its oppostive: pollution, contamination – that occasionally reminded Jack of the sermons he’d heard at his mother’s church back home, the pastor’s exhortations against wicked thoughts and evil deeds. There was, Jack sometimes mused, a kind of church-lie quality to the farmers market: a bunch of similarly minded people waking up a little earlier than they’d probably prefer to wake up on a weekend, coming to a place that offered salvation from an abstract bad guy – either Satan or late capitalism, depending.”
Okay, ouch Hill. That one hurt.
I could go on longer about this book (I’ve already race passed 650 words, unusual for me) but I’ll sum up quickly and say that I think what Hill has written is ambitious and successful. This book is an instant classic, very readable, and one I’ll be recommending frequently and often.
