Nathan Hill explores the competing realities of modern life in new novel

There is no one great American novel, but American novels considered great do share some characteristics. Perhaps the most important feature is a compelling individual story that also reveals the culture of the country at a particular moment in time. “Grapes of Wrath,” for instance, draws you into a family whose vivid characters struggle through a very American economic catastrophe, and “The Great Gatsby” highlights a uniquely American self-made man who nurtures a romantic torch that could be carried by anyone who’s ever mourned a lost love.

Nathan Hill’s monumental novel “Wellness” is, at its core, a love story. It’s the story of a marriage, from its fairy tale beginnings through its weathered middle years. The relationship at the center both reflects and is shaped by many of the technologies of the past 30 years that have transformed everyday life.

This novel is very American, and it reads as pretty great.

The story begins in Chicago in 1993. Jack is a photography student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Elizabeth is an over-achieving student at DePaul (juggling multiple majors, she wants to study “the whole human condition”).

Jack and Elizabeth live in adjacent industrial buildings in a neighborhood undergoing an artsy gentrification. They notice each other through their windows, but each considers the other unattainable (he appears to be effortlessly cool, she appears to be perfect). When they do finally meet at a club where Jack is photographing local bands, their conversation runs into the next morning. This origin story of love at first sight — first from afar, then an electric initial encounter — will be told and retold through the years, confirming for them and anyone who hears it that they were meant to be.

Hill, whose previous novel was the award-winning “The Nix,” can be a compassionate storyteller when warranted, especially here regarding Jack and his childhood, and can also conjure caricatures of modern life so sharp they can draw blood, like parenting trends that change every few months, overly bureaucratic universities, fanatical neighborhood groups and the spinning-top that is the current real estate market. Paragraphs are packed with keen perceptions and beautiful descriptions, which always build to the larger story, whether it’s a prairie at dawn or a child revealing a simple but striking insight to a parent.

By 2014, Jack is an adjunct professor and Elizabeth runs Wellness, an innovative health center. They are parents to eight-year-old Toby and are about to move from the city to a Chicago suburb. Jack’s college friend Benjamin, now a real estate magnate, jokingly describes their new condo development as “the confluence of real estate’s three magic l’s … Liberal, leafy, and loaded.”

Jack and Elizabeth can barely afford their new neighborhood, but, like many other 21st-century parents, they stretch themselves for the blue-chip school system as much as the fancy home. They also hope a move will tamp down the restlessness that has seeped into their marriage. They’d like to believe it’s just fallout from work schedules and raising a young child, but that’s getting increasingly harder to do.

In her job at Wellness, Elizabeth has seen the power of belief. Wellness had begun as an independent lab for the FDA to test products with possibly fraudulent claims. To confirm a product’s effectiveness, half of Wellness’s participants use the real product and half use a placebo.

Elizabeth was intrigued to find that the placebo was often nearly as effective as the real product. She considered the results less an indication of a product’s inadequacy and more a sign of the placebo’s power. When she becomes the director of Wellness, part of their offerings are customized products that are placebos (like a “special” juice mixture to impart energy and focus), not to scam people but to prompt their own bodies to help them. These are so successful that when clients are told they have been their own change agent, many refuse to believe it.

In Elizabeth’s view, the key to a placebo’s success was “the story surrounding the thing.” This is also a recurring theme in “Wellness,” the power of the stories characters tell themselves that can expand or warp their lives.

Jack and Elizabeth each came to Chicago to reinvent themselves. Now that they’ve reached a romantic plateau, parts of their pasts previously withheld now have the potential to crack apart their carefully constructed relationship.

To tell their tale, “Wellness” doesn’t so much go back and forth in time as insert background stories at opportune moments. The novel is set in the present, in the same way we live in the present, with memories suddenly emerging and pulling us back to the past in sometimes surprising ways. Or, as one character muses, “Our lives are bound by time, but our memories are not.”

Jack and Elizabeth each grew up in distinctly American settings. Jack fled his insular, poverty-tinged Kansas prairie town, where at home he had to calibrate his actions around his mother’s moodiness and at school hide his artistic interests.

Elizabeth comes from a long line of New England robber barons. Her social radar was hyper-tuned from a young age; she had wealth, privilege and a father given to unpredictable and terrifying rages.

The novel’s frequent dips into the past also reveal, in grand and granular ways, the incremental, overwhelming makeover of everyday life. Hill skillfully highlights the progression, starting from how early dial-up modems changed the way we communicate to how the first hyperlinks changed the way we read.

Present-day sections are infused with algorithms and social media, underscoring how the alternate selves and alternate worlds they create are as much a part of our lives as fast-food drive-throughs and next-day deliveries. Jack’s teaching evaluations are largely based on the traffic clocked to his university website. Their son Toby not only plays Minecraft, but he also practices his reactions in front of a mirror to prepare for a stream where he watches other gamers play online. One character slowly tumbles down the fetid rabbit hole of his Facebook newsfeed, buffeted about by ever more sophisticated algorithms.

Hill convincingly creates a world of multiple competing realities. Who are you if different parts of you exist in so many places at once?

If I have one cavil about “Wellness,” it’s that, although it is not connected to “The Nix,” there is some distracting overlap in character types between the two. In “The Nix,” a young woman leaves her backward-thinking town for a bigger life in Chicago; a young professor gets drawn into university nonsense; a secondary character helps to propel the plot by smartly spotting trends and gleefully, often amorally, profiting from them. That said, in a novel stretching over 600 pages, these few similarities don’t diminish the rich storyline Hill has crafted in “Wellness.”

With great heart, “Wellness” asks, should you continue to live the half story you’ve always told, or can you inhabit a more complete story, despite the danger that may entail?