“Bien-Être”

A jury com­posed of jour­nal­ists and writ­ers François Armanet, Ari­ane Bois, Tiffany Gas­souk, Colombe Sch­neck and Éric Neuhoff will hand out the Lucien-Bar­rière Lit­er­ary Award dur­ing the Deauville Amer­i­can Film Fes­ti­val, under the aegis of Béa­trice Nakache Halimi.

The 2024 Lucien-Bar­rière Lit­er­ary Award goes to Nathan Hill’s “Well­ness,” pub­lished by Gal­li­mard in France.

The book

At the dawn of the 1990s in Chica­go, in the midst of artis­tic bohemia, a man and a woman live oppo­site each oth­er and secret­ly spy on each oth­er. Noth­ing seems to con­nect them, she is a psy­chol­o­gy stu­dent, he is a rebel­lious pho­tog­ra­ph­er. But when they final­ly meet, the love sto­ry begins imme­di­ate­ly between Eliz­a­beth and Jack. They have life ahead of them and even if their dreams and their back­grounds diverge, they are con­vinced that their love will stand the test of time. But what about twen­ty years lat­er? Once the cou­ple has become more gen­tri­fied, when they strug­gle with a tyran­ni­cal son, when desire slow­ly fades away and dreams are for­got­ten? The pur­chase of an off-plan apart­ment then becomes the reveal­er of all the dis­agree­ments between Eliz­a­beth and Jack. Deep down, were they made for each other?

Built with mis­chie­vous com­ings and goings in time, “Well­ness” is the aston­ish­ing fres­co of a love whose set­ting, Chica­go, los­es its soul as feel­ings dete­ri­o­rate. Nathan Hill dis­sects the cou­ple and the state of the Amer­i­can mid­dle class with panache, inge­nu­ity and irre­sistible humor. A great, thrilling Amer­i­can novel.