Quick Take
- Narration: Alberto Onofrietti narrates this Italian-language edition with measured intelligence, though listeners seeking the English original will need to seek out the US Audible edition.
- Themes: The slow erosion of a marriage, self-deception and the wellness industry, gentrification and the American dream
- Mood: Ironic and melancholic, with flashes of genuine warmth buried under accumulating disappointment
- Verdict: Nathan Hill’s sprawling novel of modern marriage is ambitious enough that even a slightly padded Italian edition repays the investment, though patience is genuinely required.
I had been meaning to read Nathan Hill’s Wellness since it came out in English, and when this Italian-language edition landed in my queue I decided to use it as an excuse to do something I rarely do, experience a novel in translation before returning to the original. Alberto Onofrietti’s narration of the RIZZOLI LIBRI edition runs to over twenty-one hours. That is a significant commitment for a novel that its Italian reviewers describe as, at times, notably long.
But length and ambition are not the same thing, and Wellness is unquestionably ambitious. Hill sets his story in Chicago in 1993, where Elizabeth and Jack arrive in their twenties, she studying psychology, he a photographer, and fall into each other’s orbit across a bohemian neighborhood where artists and students are beginning to gentrify an old industrial area. The parallel window frames of their adjacent apartments, each illuminated at night with different pursuits, is an image that does a lot of work in the opening chapters. It is elegant and a little too on the nose, and that tension between elegance and obviousness runs through the novel as a whole.
Chicago 1993 and the City as Character
Hill is writing a novel about what American cities were in a particular moment, the early nineties effervescence of neighborhoods on the edge of transformation, the specific texture of young intellectual life before the internet flattened everything, the way art scenes and academic ambitions coexist in the same cheap apartments. The Italian publisher’s edition captures this setting through Onofrietti’s narration with a kind of respectful distance: he reads the American material with care but without the insider granularity that a native Chicago voice might bring.
For Italian listeners, this is almost certainly a feature rather than a limitation. The Chicago of Wellness is a mythological space, the American city as idea, and Onofrietti’s measured rendering lends it a literary quality that suits Hill’s prose style. For English-language listeners who have read the novel in its original form, the Italian translation presents an interesting comparative experience, the satirical edge is somewhat softened, the cultural specificity slightly generalized.
The gentrification storyline is central to the novel’s architecture. Elizabeth and Jack settle into that bohemian neighborhood as young idealists and then, twenty years later, find themselves arguing about separate bedrooms and separate entrances in an expensive apartment on the top floor of a converted shipyard. That trajectory, from communal bohemia to isolated affluence, is the novel’s most pointed critique, and Hill renders it with an eye for the small hypocrisies by which people become what they once would have mocked.
Marriage Under the Microscope
The marriage of Elizabeth and Jack is the novel’s engine and also its most demanding element. Hill is not interested in the dramatic rupture, the affair, the sudden revelation, but in the slow, compounding process by which two people who genuinely loved each other find themselves living alongside each other rather than with each other. One Italian reviewer called it the story of whether Wellness is the swan song of contemporary conjugal love or an account of two souls crossing life fully side by side. That uncertainty is deliberate and well-maintained.
Elizabeth’s psychology training becomes the source of both insight and self-deception. She understands the mechanisms of attachment and avoidance in clinical terms but cannot apply that understanding to her own marriage with any consistency. Jack’s artistic identity, his relationship to image-making, undergoes a different kind of erosion, more about external validation than internal compromise, but no less damaging for that.
The wellness industry sections, which give the novel its title, function as social satire, and they are among the sharpest passages in the book. Hill is merciless about the way self-optimization culture sells the vocabulary of authenticity while systematically undermining any capacity for genuine self-knowledge. One reviewer’s characterization of the novel as being fundamentally about the stories we tell ourselves, a kind of placebo theory of identity, is the most accurate description I have encountered.
On the Length and What to Do About It
The honest thing to say about Wellness is that it is too long. This is not a controversial observation, the novel’s Italian reviewers note it, the English-language reviewers note it, and even sympathetic readers acknowledge that certain explanatory passages exceed what the narrative requires. At twenty-one hours in audio form, there are stretches where the satirical machinery feels like it is working without sufficient narrative friction to justify its operation.
One Italian reviewer noted that certain sections caused them to lose the thread of the story. That is a fair criticism. Hill is writing as a novelist who also wants to be an essayist, and the seams between those two modes are occasionally visible in the audio experience in ways they might not be on the page, where readers can skim more easily.
The question is whether that excess disqualifies the novel or merely inconveniences it. My answer, having spent a full week with Onofrietti’s narration as a commute companion, is the latter. The passages that genuinely earn their length, and there are many of them, particularly in the early Chicago sections and in the final quarter, are extraordinary enough that the longueurs feel like the cost of something real rather than simple editorial failure.
As a free audiobook in this Italian edition, the price of admission is only time. For listeners comfortable in Italian, or for those approaching it as a language exercise alongside their reading, it offers a twenty-one hour encounter with one of the more serious American novels of recent years. I recommend the patience it requires.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this the English-language edition of Wellness by Nathan Hill, or is it in Italian?
This Audible listing is the Italian-language edition published by RIZZOLI LIBRI, narrated by Alberto Onofrietti. The original English-language edition of Nathan Hill’s Wellness is available separately on the US Audible store.
How much of Wellness focuses on the wellness industry itself versus the marriage storyline?
The wellness industry serves as a recurring satirical thread rather than the sustained focus. The marriage of Elizabeth and Jack is the novel’s primary concern, with the wellness and self-optimization culture appearing as a lens through which their self-deceptions become legible. The title is more thematic than literal.
Does the novel have a resolution, or does it end ambiguously?
Hill ends Wellness on a note that resists easy comfort without being bleak. The ambiguity is intentional and consistent with the novel’s refusal to offer the kind of dramatic rupture or reconciliation that conventional marriage narratives typically provide. Readers who need resolution will find it unsatisfying; those who appreciate literary open-endedness will find it honest.
Is the twenty-one hour runtime justified, or is there significant padding?
Multiple reviewers in both Italian and English have noted that the novel is too long by roughly fifty to one hundred pages. The audio runtime reflects this. That said, the extended sections are more explanatory than inert, Hill is making arguments about American culture as much as telling a story, and those arguments require space. Patience is required but generally rewarded.
