Earlier today, President Joe Biden signed the most sweeping set of regulatory principles on artificial intelligence in America to date: a lengthy executive order that directs all types of government agencies to make sure America is leading the way in developing the technology while also addressing the many dangers that it poses. The order explicitly pushes agencies to establish rules and guidelines, write reports, and create funding and research initiatives for AI—“the most consequential technology of our time,” in the president’s own words.

The scope of the order is impressive, especially given that the generative-AI boom began just about a year ago. But the document’s many parts—and there are many—are at times in tension, revealing a broader confusion over what, exactly, America’s primary attitude toward AI should be: Is it a threat to national security, or a just society? Is it a geopolitical weapon? Is it a way to help people?

The Biden administration has answered “all of the above,” demonstrating a belief that the technology will soon be everywhere. “This is a big deal,” Alondra Nelson, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study who previously served as acting director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, told us. AI will be “as ubiquitous as operating systems in our cellphones,” Nelson said, which means that regulating it will involve “the whole policy space itself.” That very scale almost necessitates ambivalence, and it is as if the Biden administration has taken into account conflicting views without deciding on one approach.

One section of the order adopts wholesale the talking points of a handful of influential AI companies such as OpenAI and Google, while others center the concerns of workers, vulnerable and underserved communities, and civil-rights groups most critical of Big Tech. The order also makes clear that the government is concerned that AI will exacerbate misinformation, privacy violations, and copyright infringement. Even as it heeds the recommendations of Big AI, the order additionally outlines approaches to support smaller AI developers and researchers. And there are plenty of nods toward the potential benefits of the technology as well: AI, the executive order notes, has the “potential to solve some of society’s most difficult challenges.” It could be a boon for small businesses and entrepreneurs, create new categories of employment, develop new medicines, improve health care, and much more.  

If the document reads like a smashing-together of papers written by completely different groups, that’s because it likely is. The president and vice president have held meetings with AI-company executives, civil-rights leaders, and consumer advocates to discuss regulating the technology, and the Biden administration published a Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights before the launch of ChatGPT last November. That document called for advancing civil rights, racial justice, and privacy protections, among other things. Today’s executive order cites and expands that earlier proposal—it directly addresses AI’s demonstrated ability to contribute to discrimination in contexts such as health care and hiring, the risks of using AI in sentencing and policing, and more. These issues existed long before the arrival of generative AI, a subcategory of artificial intelligence that creates new—or at least compellingly remixed—material based on training data, but those older AI programs stir the collective imagination less than ChatGPT, with its alarmingly humanlike language.

[Read: The future of AI is GOMA]

The executive order, then, is naturally fixated to a great extent on the kind of ultrapowerful and computationally intensive software that underpins that newer technology. At particular issue are so-called dual-use foundation models, which have also been called “frontier AI” models—a term for future generations of the technology with supposedly devastating potential. The phrase was popularized by many of the companies that intend to build these models, and chunks of the executive order match the regulatory framing that these companies have recommended. One influential policy paper from this summer, co-authored in part by staff at OpenAI and Google DeepMind, suggested defining frontier-AI models as including those that would make designing biological or chemical weapons easier, those that would be able to evade human control “through means of deception and obfuscation,” and those that are trained above a threshold of computational power. The executive order uses almost exactly the same language and the same threshold.

A senior administration official speaking to reporters framed the sprawling nature of the document as a feature, not a bug. “AI policy is like running a decathlon,” the official said. “We don’t have the luxury of just picking, of saying, ‘We’re just going to do safety,’ or ‘We’re just going to do equity,’ or ‘We’re just going to do privacy.’ We have to do all of these things.” After all, the order has huge “signaling power,” Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a computer-science professor at Brown University who helped co-author the earlier AI Bill of Rights, told us. “I can tell you Congress is going to look at this, states are going to look at this, governors are going to look at this.”

Anyone looking at the order for guidance will come away with a mixed impression of the technology—which has about as many possible uses as a book has possible subjects—and likely also confusion about what the president decided to focus on or omit. The order spends quite a lot of words detailing how different agencies should prepare to address the theoretical impact of AI on chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats, a framing drawn directly from the policy paper supported by OpenAI and Google. In contrast, the administration spends far fewer on the use of AI in education, a massive application for the technology that is already happening. The document acknowledges the role that AI can play in boosting resilience against climate change—such as by enhancing grid reliability and enabling clean-energy deployment, a common industry talking point—but it doesn’t once mention the enormous energy and water resources required to develop and deploy large AI models, nor the carbon emissions they produce. And it discusses the possibility of using federal resources to support workers whose jobs may be disrupted by AI but does not mention workers who are arguably exploited by the AI economy: for example, people who are paid very little to manually give feedback to chatbots.

[Read: America already has an AI underclass]

International concerns are also a major presence in the order. Among the most aggressive actions the order takes is directing the secretary of commerce to propose new regulations that would require U.S. cloud-service providers, such as Microsoft and Google, to notify the government if foreign individuals or entities who use their services start training large AI models that could be used for malicious purposes. The order also directs the secretary of state and the secretary of homeland security to streamline visa approval for AI talent, and urges several other agencies, including the Department of Defense, to prepare recommendations for streamlining the approval process for noncitizens with AI expertise seeking to work within national labs and access classified information.

Where the surveillance of foreign entities is an implicit nod to the U.S.’s fierce competition with and concerns about China in AI development, China is also the No. 1 source of foreign AI talent in the U.S. In 2019, 27 percent of top-tier U.S.-based AI researchers received their undergraduate education in China, compared with 31 percent who were educated in the U.S, according to a study from Macro Polo, a Chicago-based think tank that studies China’s economy. The document, in other words, suggests actions against foreign agents developing AI while underscoring the importance of international workers to the development of AI in the U.S.

[Read: The new AI panic]

The order’s international focus is no accident; it is being delivered right before a major U.K. AI Safety Summit this week, where Vice President Kamala Harris will be delivering a speech on the administration’s vision for AI. Unlike the U.S.’s broad approach, or that of the EU’s AI Act, the U.K. has been almost entirely focused on those frontier models—“a fairly narrow lane,” Nelson told us. In contrast, the U.S. executive order considers a full range of AI and automated decision-making technologies, and seeks to balance national security, equity, and innovation. The U.S. is trying to model a different approach to the world, she said.

The Biden administration is likely also using the order to make a final push on its AI-policy positions before the 2024 election consumes Washington and a new administration potentially comes in, Paul Triolo, an associate partner for China and a technology-policy lead at the consulting firm Albright Stonebridge, told us. The document expects most agencies to complete their tasks before the end of this term. The resulting reports and regulatory positions could shape any AI legislation brewing in Congress, which will likely take much longer to pass, and preempt a potential Trump administration that, if the past is any indication, may focus its AI policy almost exclusively on America’s global competitiveness.

Still, given that only 11 months have passed since the release of ChatGPT, and its upgrade to GPT-4 came less than five months after that, many of those tasks and timelines appear somewhat vague and distant. The order gives 180 days for the secretaries of defense and homeland security to complete a cybersecurity pilot project, 270 days for the secretary of commerce to launch an initiative to create guidance in another area, 365 days for the attorney general to submit a report on something else. The senior administration official told reporters that a newly formed AI Council among the agency heads, chaired by Bruce Reed, a White House deputy chief of staff, would ensure that each agency makes progress at a steady clip. Once the final deadline passes, perhaps the federal government’s position on AI will have crystallized.

But perhaps its stance and policies cannot, or even should not, settle. Like the internet itself, artificial intelligence is a capacious technology that could be developed, and deployed, in a dizzying combination of ways; Congress is still trying to figure out how copyright and privacy laws, as well as the First Amendment, apply to the decades-old web, and every few years the terms of those regulatory conversations seem to shift again.

A year ago, few people could have imagined how chatbots and image generators would change the basic way we think about the internet’s effects on elections, education, labor, or work; only months ago, the deployment of AI in search engines seemed like a fever dream. All of that, and much more in the nascent AI revolution, has begun in earnest. The executive order’s internal conflict over, and openness to, different values and approaches to AI may have been inevitable, then—the result of an attempt to chart a path for a technology when nobody has a reliable map of where it’s going.

The booming US economy, which grew at a 4.9% annualized rate in the third quarter of this year, can be credited to Barbenheimer, Taylor Swift, a land new houses—but not cash flowing to the defense sector as the US seeks to arm allies like Ukraine and Israel.

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The Jewish cemetery in Ferrara, Italy, is a melancholy place nestled against the walls that encircle the medieval city. Its 800 gravestones are bunched in clusters amid overgrown grass, fallen leaves, and brooding trees. The impressive expanse is evidence of what had been, before the Second World War, a large, vibrant Jewish community, now reduced to a few dozen souls. An occasional visitor comes to photograph the jarringly modernist gravestone of Giorgio Bassani, the author of the novel The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, which opens with a description of the Finzi-Contini family’s mausoleum here. Others come to see the memorials to some of the 150 Jews of Ferrara who were deported to Nazi death camps.

While walking through the cemetery one day last year—I was in Ferrara for the launch of the Italian edition of my book The Pope at War, about Italy and the Vatican during the Second World War—I came across a group of gravestones bearing the name Calabresi. One in particular caught my eye. I stopped to look more closely at the pockmarked granite slab, which lay surrounded by a sea of dandelions. It was the gravestone of a man named Massimo Calabresi. Unlike many of the others in the cemetery, it displayed no Hebrew, only Italian. It gave Massimo’s place of birth (in 1903) as Ferrara and the place of death (in 1988), curiously, as New Haven, Connecticut. The gravestone had another unusual feature. At the bottom, under the inscription for Massimo, were the words, in Italian:

in memory of his wife
Bianca Maria Finzi Contini
buried in New Haven CT USA

For some reason, Bianca’s remains had not joined Massimo’s in Ferrara.  

The name Calabresi got my attention: It brought to mind the prominent American jurist Guido Calabresi. I had never met him, but I knew that he had served as dean at Yale Law School before being appointed to the federal bench by his former student President Bill Clinton. I also knew that he came from an Italian Jewish family and had emigrated to America when he was a child, as Italy imposed anti-Semitic “racial” laws and war engulfed Europe. And I had heard something else: that despite his Jewish ancestry, he was a devout Roman Catholic.

Given the surname and the New Haven reference, the gravestone in Ferrara seemed likely to hold a connection to the American professor and judge. And it made me wonder: How had the family managed to find their way out of Italy? And why had only Massimo made his way back?

By coincidence, shortly after my visit to the Jewish Cemetery, a friend emailed me to report that he had mentioned The Pope at War to an old law-school professor of his—Guido Calabresi, then 90 and still living near New Haven. I decided to take a deeper look at the Vatican’s records to see if they had any information about the Calabresi family. And they did.

[David I. Kertzer: What the Vatican’s secret archives are about to reveal]

I was one of the first scholars to gain access to the Vatican archives for the papacy of Pius XII, the controversial wartime pope, when they were finally opened in 2020. Among the mountain of documents made available for the first time was what Vatican archivists call the “Jews Series”—tens of thousands of pages detailing the desperate attempts of Jews in Italy to escape persecution by appealing to the pope or the Vatican secretary of state for help of some kind. Most of the appeals came from Jews who had converted to Catholicism—many of them very recently—and hoped that the Holy See might exert some leverage on their behalf.

Delving into the Jews Series in the Vatican archives is a haunting and taxing experience; following every trail would be an endeavor without end. I focused first on the Calabresi family because of a connection—seeing the gravestone; recognizing the name—but their story is just one of many. The Vatican archives hold folders from immediately before and during the war on more than 2,700 Jewish families. The stories differ greatly, but they are united by a common thread: While doors around them closed, all of the families sought Vatican help—in many cases to no avail.

In the summer of 1938, the Fascist government had announced its new racial policy, identifying Italy’s overwhelming Catholic majority as Aryan and the country’s tiny Jewish minority as members of a separate race. The announcement came as a profound shock to Italy’s Jews. It was followed by a series of draconian anti-Jewish measures: Jewish students could no longer attend public schools and universities. Jewish teachers and professors were fired. Jews lost their jobs in large swaths of the economy, leaving most of the Jewish population impoverished and desperate. The Fascist regime’s glossy magazine, La Difesa della Razza (“The Defense of the Race”), cited the pronouncements of popes, saints, and Church councils as precedent for the anti-Jewish laws. One article, typical of the time, featured the 16th-century pope who first confined the Jews to ghettos, praising his “legislative work” as “fundamental for the protection of civilization against the Jewish menace.”

Many of Italy’s Jews cast about for an escape from conditions that they feared would only worsen. Some sought to flee the country. Others found a glimmer of hope in a legal loophole: If they could show that they were not really Jewish but in fact Catholic, they could effectively switch races.

The new race laws defined who was to be considered a Jew and who was not. Those who had one Jewish parent and one non-Jewish parent could be considered members of the Aryan race if, as of October 1, 1938, they had “belonged to a religion different from the Hebraic.” Further instructions added the caveat that, to be considered Aryan, the offspring of such mixed marriages could not have shown any sign of attachment to Judaism following their baptism; for instance, by marrying a Jew.

The October 1 deadline—announced only in November, after it had passed—prompted a frantic search for cooperative priests who might provide backdated baptisms. The Vatican soon found itself coping with an avalanche of requests from recently converted Jews, many appealing to the pope himself, seeking help to vouch for their Catholic credentials. This paperwork, including hundreds of baptismal certificates, makes up a major part of the Jews Series.

Both of Judge Calabresi’s parents came from prominent and wealthy Italian Jewish families. Guido’s father, Massimo, was born in Ferrara at a time when the Jewish community in the city numbered about 1,300. He was a distinguished physician with a specialty in cardiology. Massimo’s father, Ettore, had been a major industrialist and a fervent anti-fascist, and Massimo, too, was an active anti-fascist. Guido’s mother, Bianca Finzi-Contini, was born in Milan; at the time of her marriage, her father, Armando, was among the wealthiest citizens in Bologna. After Bianca married Massimo in 1929, the couple moved to a fashionable neighborhood in Milan, where Massimo secured a faculty post at the university as well as a position at one of the city’s major hospitals. Guido was born in Milan in 1932, two years after his brother, Paolo.

Neither the Calabresi family nor the Finzi-Contini family had been very religious, but they both were proud of their Italian Jewish heritage and closely tied to a family network that was almost entirely Jewish. After the promulgation of the racial laws, Massimo was dismissed from his faculty and hospital positions.

As Benito Mussolini prepared the way for his racial campaign, he ordered a census of Italy’s Jews. In August 1938, Massimo Calabresi had completed an official form dutifully listing himself, his wife, and his two sons as Jews. But as the consequences of the new laws became clear, Massimo began to explore his options. For one thing, he decided to look for work outside of Italy so that, if the situation became intolerable, he might try to leave the country with his family. To that end, he applied for a fellowship at Yale School of Medicine. But that was just a first step. Even if he got the fellowship, he would need the Fascist government’s approval to leave Italy.

In the Vatican’s Jews Series, I came across a letter written on Massimo’s behalf by Agostino Gemelli, a Franciscan friar and the founder and rector of the Catholic University of Milan. It was addressed to an influential cardinal at the Vatican, who had passed it on to the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Luigi Maglione. Gemelli described Massimo as “a distinguished scholar of medical pathology.” He made reference to a previous communication pertaining to Calabresi’s need for permission to emigrate. Gemelli attached a detailed supplementary letter written on Calabresi’s behalf by the head of his medical department in Milan, as well as a long CV for Calabresi.

Agostino Gemelli was not some unknown correspondent. He was one of the most prominent churchmen in Italy at the time. The Gemelli Hospital, in Rome, where popes receive medical treatment to this day, was named for him. Gemelli was vocal in his support of both the Fascist regime and the racial laws. The same day that Gemelli wrote his letter on behalf of Calabresi, Italy’s newspapers prominently carried the story of his speech the previous day praising the racial laws and recalling, in Gemelli’s words, God’s “terrible sentence that the deicide people brought on themselves.” With the words “deicide people,” Gemelli was referring to the long-held contention, repudiated by the Roman Catholic Church only in the 1960s, that Jews were collectively responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. Yet incongruously, Gemelli would, over the course of the next years, regularly send letters to the Vatican on behalf of Jews—primarily academics—asking for Church assistance as they faced the harsh consequences of Italy’s anti-Semitic campaign.

Gemelli was far from an exception. High prelates who publicly praised the Fascist regime and embraced the need to limit the influence of Jews also worked behind the scenes in favor of individual Jews they knew who sought their support. The web of influence in Fascist Italy involved a trading of favors among an elite that wove together government bigwigs, aristocrats, captains of industry, and high Church officials.

In many of the cases recommended by Gemelli, the Vatican followed up by appealing directly to Fascist officials. If officials did so for the Calabresi family, none of the relevant documents has survived in the Vatican folder. What we can say for sure is that Calabresi was awarded a medical fellowship by Yale and, in the end, somehow secured permission to leave Italy with his family.

On September 8, 1939—one week after Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the start of the Second World War in Europe—the Calabresis boarded the SS Rex in Genoa. They arrived in New York City eight days later.

[David I. Kertzer: The Pope, the Jews, and the secrets in the archives]

Left: Star of David from the entranceway to the Jewish Cemetery in Ferrara; baptismal attestation for Guido Calabresi, 1938; and, inset, the SS Rex, which transported the Calabresi family from Genoa to New York. Right: Pope Pius XII. (Photo-illustration by Blake Cale for The Atlantic.*)

I wrote to Guido Calabresi after finding this first tranche of Vatican documents about his family, thinking he might be interested, and offered to send him copies. He was, and I did. Although I would be in Italy for a few more months, we made plans to meet for lunch in New Haven in February, when I would return.

Judge Calabresi chose the Union League Cafe, a favorite of his, across the street from the Yale University Art Gallery. Right on time, he strode in, shorter than I imagined but remarkably vigorous. He wore a black beret and a modest brown jacket that seemed unequal to the frigid temperature outside. When he removed his beret, I saw that strands of gray hair thinly covered his head. He asked me to call him Guido.

“I am a practicing Catholic,” he told me, before adding, with a smile that turned slightly mischievous, “and I am a proud Jew.” His knowledge of his extended Italian Jewish family and how they had faced persecution in Italy was impressive; many of his recollections can be found in the recently published two-volume Outside In: An Oral History of Guido Calabresi. But as I would discover in this meeting and a later one, there was much family history that Guido was unaware of. We spoke for three hours about what he knew and what he thought he knew. He began by talking about his mother and what he had long believed about how and when she became a Catholic. Bianca had been a strong-minded, highly intelligent woman, Guido said. Shortly after his birth, he told me, his mother experienced a deep spiritual yearning that led her to look toward Catholicism. Additionally, she was very independent and put off by the constricted role of women in the Orthodox practices of Italy’s observant Jewish communities. And so, he said, she had decided to be baptized. She became a Catholic, and began regularly attending Mass, sometimes bringing her two little sons with her. Guido added that his father, though not religiously observant, was unhappy about this.

I told Guido that I found it unusual that his mother would have been baptized in the early 1930s, given that her husband and children remained Jewish. Moreover, although Jewish women in Italy found themselves in a religious tradition dominated by men, and were consigned to the balcony in Italy’s synagogues, the situation in the Catholic Church seemed not so different to me. Guido insisted that his mother’s conversion had long predated the racial laws. We left the matter there.

The letter of intervention from Gemelli that I had discovered in the Vatican archives had clearly taken Guido by surprise. He knew that the departure of his family from Italy had been dramatic, the result of months of struggle with the authorities. He believed that high officials in the government had held his father’s anti-fascism against him. Ultimately, the application to leave had been approved. Guido did not know how or why.

But he was firm in one conviction: His father never would have asked for help from the Vatican. Guido remembered that his father always looked askance at those Italian Jews who had converted in the hopes of escaping persecution. By way of making his point, Guido told the story of how, shortly after his father arrived penniless in New York with his wife and children in September 1939, with no income until his fellowship at Yale began in January, the family moved into a modest residential hotel on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. One day, said Guido, his father got a message that a package of books had been received for him at the offices of the Archdiocese of New York. He refused to set foot there, discovering only later that it had all been part of a plan by his sister in Italy to surreptitiously channel a significant amount of cash to him. (He never received it.)

I couldn’t help remembering that this same Massimo Calabresi had, as Guido himself had related, gone to the Vatican to minister to a gravely ill pope in 1938. And the letter from Gemelli, however one might interpret it, was there in the archives.

When our meal was cleared, Guido asked for an espresso. We talked some more. He told me that he continued to teach and write, and to hear some cases as a judge. At 90, he seemed to have no thoughts of retirement, nor could I see any reason why he should.

I walked him to the passenger door of a car that had arrived to take him home. Before turning to step into the car he embraced me, kissing me, Italian style, on both cheeks.

The conversation with Guido had raised many questions, and I resolved to see what else I could discover about the Calabresi family in the 1930s, whether in the Vatican archives or in Italy’s state archives for the Fascist years. With the help of my colleague Roberto Benedetti, I was able to learn a lot more.  

In the spring of 1939, according to a document found in the central state archives, in Rome, Bianca’s two brothers and her sister applied to change their racial status. Bianca’s brother, Bruno Finzi-Contini, a physicist, had, like Massimo, been on the faculty of the University of Milan. He, too, had been fired. Bruno now claimed to have been baptized at the age of eight months, in 1905, and he produced documents showing that his three children had all been baptized in the 1930s. Bruno also maintained that his father, Armando Finzi-Contini, had been baptized 10 days after his birth, in 1871. As a result, Bruno won reinstatement to his faculty position in Milan. Both of Bianca’s brothers also sent applications to the government to change their Jewish-sounding surnames.

Archival documents reveal that the Vatican got behind Bruno’s efforts to have his Jewish name expunged. Cardinal Maglione, the secretary of state, sent supportive instructions to his Jesuit go-between with the Fascist government. The Jesuit in turn wrote to one of the Fascist regime’s highest-ranking members, who oversaw the racial laws. “Dr. Bruno Finzi Contini,” the Vatican emissary’s letter began, “does not belong to the Jewish race … he has asked that his surname Finzi be substituted with the other one, Contini, the name Finzi being frequent among the Jews with whom he has nothing in common.”

Ultimately, Bruno’s efforts to claim Catholic ancestry, and save his job, were for naught. The Special Commission on Race expressed doubt about whether Armando had truly been baptized back in 1871. Even if he had been, the commission concluded, that wasn’t good enough: “He married a Jew, and so engaged in manifestations of Judaism and must be considered as belonging to the Jewish race. The children are born, therefore, from parents who are both Jews.” The commission rejected Bruno’s plea. He was once again dismissed from his faculty position in Milan.

At around the same time that members of Bianca’s family were applying for Aryan racial status, Massimo was doing the same for his wife and two sons. In March 1939, Massimo wrote an appeal to the Special Commission on Race, in Rome, on behalf of his wife and children. “The undersigned” asks that his wife and sons “not be considered to be of the Jewish race.” As a matter of principle, according to Guido, his father himself would never have agreed to be baptized to escape the racial laws. But it is also true that Bianca had a claim to having a Catholic parent, and so had a potential escape route under the terms of the racial laws not available to Massimo. Among the documents Massimo sent the Fascist authorities to support his petition were three attestations of baptism by a parish priest in Bologna, stating that he had baptized Bianca, Paolo, and Guido on September 27, 1938—just three days before the legal deadline.

In April 1939, Massimo wrote to Milan’s statistical office asking that his wife be removed from the Jewish census files that had been compiled the previous August. He based his request not only on the contention that she herself had been baptized, but also on the claim that her father, Armando Finzi-Contini, had himself been born of a Catholic mother and baptized in infancy.

A month after that, in May, Massimo transferred the family home and other nearby property to his wife. This legal maneuver came in response to a new law that threatened the seizure of “excess” real estate owned by Jews.

[David I. Kertzer: The Pope’s secret back channel to Hitler]

Spring had arrived by the time Guido and I met again in New Haven. He was dressed more formally this time, wearing a blue sweater vest over a dress shirt and a dark tie—he had a memorial service to attend. He had had an eventful week, traveling to Washington for a small dinner in his honor at his son’s house. The guests had included his former student Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Dr. Anthony Fauci.

In advance of our meeting, I had sent Guido a summary of the new discoveries and copies of the key documents. We began by focusing on what I had learned about his mother’s family—the appeals that she and her three siblings had made to have their Jewish racial classification changed to Aryan, and the appeals of her two brothers to have their Jewish-sounding name changed. Much, I told him, seemed suspicious about their claims, and Guido agreed. For instance, the baptismal certificate produced to support the contention that Armando Finzi-Contini was a Catholic had come from the diocese of Terni, a town in southern Umbria that today is three and a half hours by car from Bologna, where Armando was born. It would obviously have taken much longer to get there in 1871. Something was off about this scenario. Nor did Guido find credible his uncle Bruno’s claim to have been baptized when he was eight months old, even though Bruno had presented the Fascist authorities with an attestation to that fact from a parish priest.

Where Guido balked was in accepting what I had learned about the timing of his mother’s baptism, which he had so firmly insisted had had nothing to do with the promulgation of Italy’s racial laws. Not only had she been baptized in 1938, but on the same day and in the same church as he and his brother were. The date of the baptism, September 27, only days before the October 1 cutoff, would likely have raised eyebrows among the Fascist authorities. The fact, too, that the baptism took place in Bologna and not in Milan, where the Calabresi family lived, had aroused suspicions among the government officials who judged the family’s claim. The Finzi-Continis were one of Bologna’s most distinguished families. They had powerful friends. They might well have been able to find a priest willing to backdate their baptisms.

I could appreciate that Guido might find it difficult to accept that the story he had long heard, and had often repeated, about his mother’s conversion was in fact untrue. Yet he now had in his hands a copy of the official request, bearing his father’s signature, for the change in racial status of his mother, and with it the baptismal certificates for her and the children. He clearly remembered, he said, going to church as a child with his mother. He remembered, too, being told of a sardonic comment by his father about his mother’s baptism: “Now that it seems she has found another God, perhaps she’ll want to find another husband.” Guido said she must have begun going to church while still a Jew, and only formalized her new religious identity years later. He remained convinced that his mother’s baptism was not to be viewed in the same way as that of the large number of Italian Jews who rushed to the baptismal font in a desperate effort to escape persecution. It was a part of his image of his mother that he could not put in question. So attached was Guido to this narrative that I began to question my own assumptions, which were based on reading so many seemingly similar cases of conversions by Italian Jews during this time of persecution. Perhaps Bianca had begun attending church with her children shortly after Guido’s birth, even while remaining a Jew and in the face of her Jewish husband’s disapproval. But, I also wondered, could the trauma suffered by the family and the whiplash of their changing identity have affected memories? I still could not say.

The Jews Series in the Vatican archives encompasses the stories of thousands of families. Each family’s circumstances are different, and so are the ways the stories work themselves out.

Among the many dramatic family stories told in those newly available Vatican files are some that the pope himself took a personal interest in. Such was the case of the pope’s dentist, a Jewish immigrant who, under the racial laws, was ordered to leave the country in 1939. Over the next three years, Pope Pius XII repeatedly met with his advisers to orchestrate help, sending his emissaries to meet many times with top Fascist government officials. Along the way, the dentist, his wife, and his daughter all got baptized by the pope’s Jesuit emissary to the Fascist authorities, and on the pope’s orders the Vatican worked to have the government recategorize the dentist as a member of the Aryan race.  

The application immediately aroused the suspicions of the Fascist officials, based as it was on a surprising discovery. The dentist claimed that, although he had previously thought that both of his parents were Jewish, he had recently learned that his real father was not the Jew from Vienna married to his Austrian Jewish mother, but an Italian Catholic man with whom his mother had had an adulterous affair. Hence, his application to the Fascist government argued not only that he should be considered a member of the Aryan race, but that he should enjoy Italian citizenship as well. The newly opened Vatican Jews Series offers an unending supply of such cases.

As for the Calabresi family, Guido remains a devout Catholic. Although he spoke of going to Mass with his mother as a child, he told me that he had become a practicing Catholic only as a graduate student in England, while studying there on a Rhodes Scholarship. He noted that several members of the generation after his had, as he put it, “reconverted” to Judaism. His older daughter, Bianca Finzi-Contini Calabresi, named for Guido’s mother, was one of them. Guido recalled with pleasure attending his granddaughter’s bat mitzvah. He went on to list others among the Calabresi and Finzi-Contini families who had rediscovered a Jewish identity.

Years ago, Guido and his brother, Paolo, purchased plots for their parents in the Grove Street Cemetery, in New Haven, the city where they had spent their lives as refugees in America. Guido could see the cemetery from his Yale University office. When his mother died, in 1982, she was buried there. But Massimo believed that his own proper resting place should be alongside his family in Ferrara’s Jewish cemetery. When he died, six years after his wife, his ashes were divided. Half were interred alongside Bianca. Guido and his brother brought the other half to Ferrara.

Guido and his brother united their parents in Ferrara the only way they could: They added the inscription about Bianca that caught my eye on that gray slab among the dandelions.

Special thanks to Rabbi Amedeo Spagnoletto for his help in Ferrara’s Jewish cemetery.

*Photo-illustration sources: Calabresi family; De Agostini Picture Library; Tupungato / Adobe; Italian state archives

In the year leading up to the invasion of Iraq, technocrats in Washington deployed their laptops and prepared for war. Their plans for the governing structures that would replace Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship filled bulging white papers, organizational flowcharts that spilled across thick binders, and dense memoranda for managing esoteric ministries.  

Israel is on the brink of testing a far different approach to regime change. Its leaders have announced a desire to dismantle the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip. Rather than entering battle with a carefully constructed blueprint for what might follow victory, though, they are winging it, improvising in the dazed aftermath of a devastating massacre that left its military and political leadership in a state of shame and confusion. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government announced its war aims before it had fully sketched out how it might effectively realize them.

But the Israeli operation faces the same question that ultimately vexed the American project in Iraq: What comes next? Removing murderous Islamists from power solves one problem, but it creates another. Who will govern Gaza after Hamas?

Thus far, the Israelis have answered the question only in the negative. Although some of the ultranationalists in the Netanyahu government openly fantasize about reoccupying Gaza, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has said that his government won’t pursue that path, which would come at a financial, military, and moral cost that Israel apparently doesn’t want to bear. But the alternative to a postwar occupation of some sort is lawlessness, which would permit Hamas’s return, thus undermining the very purpose of the war.

[Graeme Wood: A record of pure, predatory sadism]

To understand how Israel might better approach the day after, I spoke with veterans of Israel’s security establishment, including a former prime minister, a former national security adviser, and a former head of Mossad, as well as longtime diplomats and analysts in Washington. I asked them to imagine a plausible endgame for Gaza. What I found was both a surprising degree of consensus on a plan for life after Hamas, and a lack of faith in the current Israeli government’s ability to execute it.

There’s a counterfactual history of Gaza that contains a vision for a way forward. In late 2008, at the very end of his time in office, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced his plans to leave his post, to head into the political wilderness. At that moment of transition, Hamas, which had only recently won control of Gaza, launched a fusillade of rocket attacks against targets in southern Israel.

Olmert considered his options. His preferred course of action was regime change, a military campaign that would have eliminated Hamas’s leadership once and for all. But his defense minister and the military’s chief of staff rejected the plan, and let the press know of their opposition. “They already started to leak that Olmert wants to carry on the war in order to prolong, to cancel, his formal retirement and carry on,” Olmert told me. Worried that overruling the objections would look self-serving, he backed away from his plans.

Instead of ejecting Hamas from power, the Israelis bombed Gaza for 22 days, what the military referred to as Operation Cast Lead. But in the course of considering regime change in Gaza, Olmert began to discuss what might come next. “I started to talk with the Americans and the Europeans to bring to Gaza, at the end of the military operation of Israel, an international force to be a caretaker for a period of a few months. To clean it up completely, to stabilize it, and to prepare it for the incoming of the Palestinian Authority security forces.”

In some ways, this vision is more plausible today than when Olmert first imagined it in 2008. Israel has spent the past decade deepening its relations with Arab states in the Gulf, which have been unnerved by Iran’s rise and eager to collaborate with Israel’s tech sector. These countries share Israel’s abiding animosity toward the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement of which Hamas is a part, and consider it a profound threat to their own regimes.

Under the aegis of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Dennis Ross, the veteran diplomat, has co-written a proposal to have the U.S. enlist the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Morocco, and Jordan to serve as Gaza’s temporary stewards, bankrolling its reconstruction and providing a security force that supplies a semblance of order. According to Ross, the goal is to turn Gaza “into a place where development and modernization is the aim, not resistance.”

It sounds fanciful, but Brian Katulis, the vice president of the Middle East Institute, who possesses a large network of contacts in governments across the region, described to me a pitch that the Israelis might use to effectively induce their participation: “‘Look, we’re gonna go after these extremists who are a threat to you. But at the end of all of this, there will be some form of a very qualified two-state solution for the Palestinians. We want you to get behind it.’ And you’d paint a vision of the Middle East that wasn’t naive and Pollyannaish, but something that matches up with where they were going already, which is regional integration.”

There are practical reasons for these countries to join. Egypt, for instance, wants its own firms to win massive construction contracts. And Olmert, who has talked with officials from these countries, believes they would be happy to be seen as Gaza’s savior. “The Israeli operation will cause outrage, so that will be an excuse for them to come in, to really start to rehabilitate Gaza,” he told me.

Still, reconstructing Gaza promises to be an enormous, thankless, expensive task, given the likelihood that it will consist of large stretches of rubble and that pockets of armed Hamas fighters will remain. “There’s a risk of terrorists coming back and overthrowing civilians,” Eyal Hulata, who served as Israel’s national security adviser during the premierships of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, told me.

The precondition of Arab states’ participation is that it would be time-limited and that it would culminate in handing over Gaza to the leadership of the Palestinian Authority, based in the West Bank. The Israeli public is justifiably skeptical of the PA, hardly a bastion of effective governance—and lacking in legitimacy. When I mentioned the possibility of the PA playing a constructive role to Hulata, he joked, “Maybe when there’s a new president and reform and God comes down from heaven and there’s a messiah …” But then he conceded that there’s no viable alternative.

Whatever its many faults, the PA has a security force, some 31,000 members strong, trained and funded by the U.S. military. Israel does not fully trust the PA, but at least the country has a relationship with its leadership and some faith in its ability to perform basic functions. This force would need to double in size during Gaza’s period of Arab stewardship to have sufficient manpower to secure Gaza. “It’s a difficult task, but not an impossible one, given that the United States has overseen this type of force in the West Bank now for 15 years,” Michael Kopolow, of the Israeli Policy Forum, told me.

But the viability of a plan like Ross’s depends on the execution of the war. Although Arab countries might be theoretically attracted to playing the part of Gaza’s savior, their willingness to participate might erode during a brutal war that infuriates their own publics.  

And there’s a danger that Israel’s attack on Gaza will destroy the basic infrastructure of governance, complicating any postwar occupation. An Arab coalition could supply money and soldiers, but it would need to rely on Gaza’s technocratic class of civil administrators. This group has been part of the existing Hamas regime, and many are Islamists, but they aren’t gun-touting militants. Qatar, with the assent of the Israelis, has partially paid their salary. They have the competence to distribute aid, pick up trash, and run hospitals—to supply Gaza with a modicum of postwar order. These civil administrators could lend the occupying force some legitimacy in the short term.

This plan isn’t that far removed from what Gallant, the defense minister, has described as the Israeli plan—which has the army leaving Gaza at the end of the war. But Netanyahu would never be able to implement it. His government has long sought to cast aside the PA to appease the settlers and religious zealots in his coalition, who regard it as a primary obstacle to their biblical vision of Greater Israel.

The problem for Netanyahu is that the PA would never want to assume power in Gaza without substantially bolstering its position in the West Bank. It would almost certainly demand stringent constraints on settlement expansion and promises of greater autonomy, measures that Netanhyahu and coalition partners abhor. Gidi Grinstein, who runs the Reut Group, a think tank in Tel Aviv, told me that Netanyahu is once again his own worst enemy. “With his policies on the one hand in the West Bank, Netanyahu is destroying policies on the other hand in Gaza.”

Given that Israel doesn’t want to occupy Gaza—and that its current government would reject its transfer to Palestinians—the question is, does Netanyahu truly want a total victory? In the most plausible (and most familiar) scenario that I heard described, the Netanyahu government prematurely ends its invasion, under pressure from the Biden administration, to restore stability in the region and in the global economy.

Israel could leave Gaza, claiming a partial victory. It could point to evidence that it decimated Hamas leadership, dismantled bunkers, and destroyed its enemy’s arsenal. The Israelis might not achieve their stated goal of regime change, but they will have demonstrated their power and restored a measure of deterrence.

Forced to contend with the continued reality of Hamas, Israel would scramble to erect a raft of pragmatic security measures to further insulate the nation. There’s talk among Israeli officials of surrounding Gaza with a thick buffer of bulldozed territory, perhaps a mile wide. One former official suggested to me that it might be a kill zone, where any Palestinian who set foot would be shot on sight. Such insulation would be accompanied by the implementation of long-standing plans to upgrade security at the Rafah border crossing into Egypt. This would include investment in state-of-the-art technology to screen vehicles headed into Gaza. Israel might demand that international inspectors, preferably Americans, oversee the inspection of incoming traffic.

[Read: Israel is walking into a trap]

Other Israelis suggested that the campaign to destroy Hamas wouldn’t end with the ground invasion. Israel would continue to kill Hamas leadership with the dedication depicted in the movie Munich. “No matter if they are in Gaza or if they are in Alaska, okay, they have to be eliminated,” Olmert said. Zohar Polti, who ran the Ministry of Defense’s bureau of planning, described how Israeli might keep dispatching special forces into Gaza to act on intelligence to foil attacks on Israel. “That’s very similar to what we’re doing in the cities of the Palestinians, after we see that the Palestinian security services are dealing with, let’s say, a loss of control.”

But Efraim Halevy, a legendary head of Mossad, vented his anxieties about any failure to achieve Israel’s stated aims. Although he abhors the Netanyahu government—and doubts the wisdom of its strategy and the competence of the officials charged with executing it—he told me that failure would likely further demoralize the public, which was severely fractured before Hamas’s invasion. Failure to eradicate Hamas would make it nearly impossible to reassure refugees from the townlets and kibbutzim in the south—200,000 of them, by one count—to return and rebuild. In the recriminations that would inevitably follow the war, the political anger provoked by Netanyahu’s judicial reform might return, only this time stoked by a sense of total despair.

Many Israelis told me that they were haunted by a photo of the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, taken after the end of Operation Guardian of the Walls in 2021. After 11 days of Israeli bombing, Sinwar emerged into the daylight, sat in a plush armchair surrounded by rubble, and posed for the camera with a defiant smile. “If you fail in this, it could well mean that what you have intended to achieve, you achieve the opposite,” Halevy told me. “You will be the one who ends up with no cohesion and no will to fight.”

In the midst of such gloom, I also thought I detected muffled hints of hope. Israelis almost universally invoked the unexpected aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the other cataclysmic lapse in the history of the nation’s defense, so searing that it scrambled the politics of both Israel and its neighbors. Some of the Jewish state’s old enemies finally accepted its existence. Fervent hawks in Israel became ambitious peacemakers. No Israeli was willing to stake their reputation on the rise of a new alignment, but they all wanted to believe in its imminence, beyond the carnage.  

When Avichai Brodutch began a solo vigil outside the Ministry of Defense, others began to join him.

As Israel and Hamas sink deeper into conflict, Doha finds itself in a delicate position. As a long-standing backer of the Muslim Brotherhood, Qatar has huge influence over the movement’s Palestinian affiliate, Hamas. That offers a significant opportunity in the short run. Doha’s deep connections with the Gaza-based Islamist group make Qatar a central player in the current diplomatic game. But for exactly the same reason, Doha faces the looming risk of being called to account over its record of support for such radical Islamist groups, and especially for Hamas.

Doha has a long history of serving as a broker, and in the past, this has often worked well for the Gulf state. By allowing the Taliban to establish a Doha office, Qatar provided the U.S. with a channel for negotiations with the group. Doha thus facilitated the agreement to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan concluded under the Trump administration and carried out by President Joe Biden in 2021.

Qatar hopes to play a similar role now. Doha has provided a home for much of Hamas’s exiled political bureau, including its de facto leader, Ismail Haniyeh. Qatar has also been a major underwriter of Gaza’s economy ever since Hamas seized control of the area, in 2007. With the consent of Hamas’s adversaries—including the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, the United States, and even Israel—Qatar has contributed hundreds of millions of dollars each year to the enclave. Among other things, that cash covered the payroll for government employees, which put food on the table for a crucial number of Gazan families despite a virtual blockade by Israel and Egypt.

[Read: Israel is walking into a trap]

At the same time, Qatar has long been a key U.S. partner in the Middle East. And before the Abraham Accords, which normalized Israel’s relations with some of Qatar’s Gulf Arab neighbors, the main Israeli diplomatic presence in the region was a trade office in Doha that operated for several years in the late 1990s. In the present crisis, neither Egypt nor Turkey has displayed enthusiasm for acting as a go-between with Hamas. So Qatar is trying to maintain its privileged position of being a useful interlocutor to both sides.

But that diplomatic advantage may prove short-lived. After the hostage situation concludes—whether it ends in tragedy or with negotiated releases involving possible prisoner swaps—Qatar is likely to face severe pressure and criticism. Because of the brutality of its attack on southern Israel, Hamas has forfeited even the pragmatic acceptance it formerly had among Western countries, which now widely view the group as an extreme terrorist organization akin to al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Qatar’s dalliance with Islamist groups has long been the primary means for Doha to project influence in the Arab world, particularly through state support for Al Jazeera Arabic. After 2011, Qatar came to believe, and Al Jazeera Arabic confidently predicted, that a wave of Islamist governance would sweep in with new Arab democracies. Instead, the elected Brotherhood government in Egypt proved even more unpopular than the Hosni Mubarak dictatorship. Islamists lost elections in Libya and Tunisia. In Syria, the Brotherhood was reduced to the margins.

[Listen: What’s next in Gaza]

With the Brotherhood’s decline in prestige and power, Qatar’s bet has yielded precious few returns. And now Hamas’s disastrous rebranding in Western eyes could well force a reckoning with Doha’s irresponsible strategy. The Qataris may be forced to choose between their precious ties to Washington and their long investment in Hamas. American pressure could even push Qatar to expel the Hamas leaders and cadres living in Doha.

But Qatar still holds one trump card: its connection to the Pentagon. During the regional dispute that began in 2017 and resulted in a three-year boycott of Qatar by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt, President Donald Trump initially accused Doha of financing terrorism. But the Department of Defense saw things very differently: Qatar’s Al Udeid Air Base, which is home to the forward headquarters of U.S. Central Command, was the hub for the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Eventually, the Pentagon’s perspective prevailed, and the U.S. pressed for an end to the boycott.

Qatar’s leverage is straightforward. The country financed the building of, and largely funds the maintenance of, the base at Al Udeid, yet it agreed to allow the U.S. to operate the facility under de facto extraterritorial jurisdiction—as if Al Udeid were sovereign American territory and not Qatari. Small wonder, then, that the Defense Department regards this as an irreplaceable asset, strategically vital for U.S. interests.

[Read: How the Palestinian Authority failed its people]

In the probable reckoning, Doha will again rely on this indispensability to avoid accountability. But after Hamas’s horrifying killing spree in southern Israel, even that may not be enough. And it will not help Qatar’s case that its official statement after the October 7 attack on Israel put the whole blame for the bloodshed on Israel and did not criticize Hamas. This was in stark contrast to almost all of the other Gulf Arab countries.

Ultimately, Qatar could actually benefit from being compelled to abandon a failed regional policy of backing religious and populist radicals that, like Hamas, have proved to be reckless allies willing to embrace political violence. Other regional powers—notably Turkey and Iran—have made highly effective use of foreign proxies, but they have done so by exerting far more direct control than Qatar has attempted or could exercise over the Brotherhood-aligned movements. For too long, Doha has danced between its Islamist allies and its Western and Arab partners. The music just stopped.

We live in an overwhelmed age when attention spans are short, distractions are many, and a lot of people, even dedicated book lovers, find their entertainment and occasional enlightenment in the latest TV series, whether it be Succession or The White Lotus. It takes grit and a certain amount of single-mindedness on the part of a novelist to write against this tide and treat literature as a potent category unto itself, apart from the demands of the marketplace or the restless spirit of potential readers.

I have been thinking about this lately because of my own experience with a decade-long book group mostly composed of writers and editors, types who are ostensibly receptive to the demands and complexities—and length!—of ambitious novels. And yet, they are all fiercely resistant to reading fiction that is more than, say, 350 pages, citing a lack of time as the main reason. I have no argument with this feeling; I spend far too many hours clicking around the internet checking out expensive clothes on sale. Still, even while navigating breathlessly busy routines, and with scant leisure time, people in Victorian times found the interior space to read capacious novels such as those by Charles Dickens and George Eliot—novels that went on and on, creating numerous pivotal events and fashioning idiosyncratic characters, bringing news of the larger universe as well as alternative modes of being. It may well be that such expansive works of fiction, in this time of information overload and incessant podcasts, no longer have the primacy they once had and no longer fill our need to hear about other people and places the way they once did. What we get instead are recursive autofiction and slivers of novels that aim not to encompass as much as possible, but to explore small tracts of interior landscape.

That Nathan Hill comes charging onto this depleted fictional scene with Wellness, a behemoth of a novel (624 pages, or nearly 19 hours of audio, if that is your pleasure), is all the more noteworthy as a result. The book swarms with characters, ideas, and sociological evocations, taking place over several decades: At one level, it is the straightforward up-and-down-and-up-again story of a relationship between two lonely souls, Jack Baker and Elizabeth Augustine, but it detours to reflect on the art market, real estate, interior design, parenting, sex, and many other topics. Hill, whose 2016 debut novel, The Nix, was as epic in scope as Wellness, is more reminiscent of the aforementioned Victorian novelists, with their energy and range, than he is of contemporary ones.

Hill’s ambition put me in mind of two other 20th-century novelists, Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, but Hill is less gnomic than the former and more humane than the latter. Wallace has always struck me as a show-off about what he knows, delighting in the arcane for its own sake. And Pynchon is a bit like a brainy scoutmaster, taking his readers along all of the highways and byways he’s discovered, initiating them into his vision of the universe. Hill brings more humility to his enterprise, a sense that there are things that he will never succeed in tracking down despite his diligent sleuthing. And his book makes a better case than I’ve come across in a long time for the uniquely transporting experience of reading a long, digressive novel bursting with ideas and observations.

Hill keeps his lofty intentions under his hat; only after one is well into the novel does one begin to realize that there are tales within tales, such as Elizabeth’s amoral robber-baron family legacy, that keep popping up ingeniously around the main narrative, gradually imbuing it with ever greater complexity. Wellness begins with a rom-com-like love story set in 1993, in Chicago. We are introduced to Jack, who is studying photography at the School of the Art Institute, and Elizabeth, a bookworm and polymath (with five majors under her belt) at DePaul University; they watch each other, unobserved, through apartment windows across an alley. They both idealize the other, projecting glamorous images from the bits and pieces of each other’s life they pick up on, as well as from their deflated sense of themselves. Elizabeth views Jack as “a man so defiant and passionate [that he] would never be interested in a girl as conventional, as conformist, as dull and bourgeois as her.” Jack, meanwhile, is busy creating his own scenario of rejection: “She’s exactly the kind of person—cultured, worldly—that he came to this frightening big city to find. The obvious flaw in the plan, he realizes now, is that a woman so cultured and worldly would never be interested in a guy as uncultured, as provincial, as backward and coarse as him.”  

The couple finally meet at a local venue known for alt-rock music, where Jack approaches Elizabeth despite the fact that she’s on a date with a classmate who has spent the night lecturing her about esoteric bands and his collection of “sacred records that almost nobody else had heard of or properly appreciated.” Hill is excellent on the look and feel of such places, describing a lead singer who wears “thick plastic sunglasses and what looks to be a ruffled baby-blue tuxedo shirt from the seventies—conspicuously uncool, which of course makes it really cool,” and who “says ‘Thank you, Chicago!’ as if he’s talking to a sold-out Soldier Field and not a dozen people in a dive bar hiding from the cold.” Jack and Elizabeth fall easily into step with each other, sharing secrets, a love of deep-fried Twinkies, and an overriding wish to escape the shadows of their pasts—“their families, their mislaid childhoods, their whole ugly evolution. They are in Chicago to become orphans.”

[Read: What to read when you’re feeling ambitious]

From this rather standard opening, the novel swoops around, driven by the author’s adrenaline and curiosity about seemingly everything. It moves backwards—to Jack and Elizabeth’s very different but equally traumatic family histories—and forward, to their life together as a more and more incompatible married couple, circa 2008, with a young son named Toby, whom Elizabeth anxiously hovers over, far from her “fantasy of quality parenting.” Hill frequently stops to offer up sociological nuggets, describing a picture-perfect kitchen that Elizabeth covets, “where all the dishes matched, where there were no greasy streaks on any surfaces…. It was a kitchen that seemed designed more for reflection and meditation than actual food prep.” Or he provides chunks of information, diving into the history of condensed milk (interesting) or, as it may be, algorithms and websites (less interesting).

Elizabeth works at a very meta-sounding lab called Wellness started by a psychology professor at DePaul, which studies clients’ responses to placebos and simulated experience. Jack, meanwhile, teaches photography and continues to take desolate photos of landscapes that, we will learn, emanate from his experience growing up in an emotionally sterile family in Kansas, where a prairie fire set by his father accidently killed his sister. Elizabeth becomes more and more alienated from him, sleeping in a separate bedroom, where she takes up with a vibrator, and suggesting that they try polyamory; she has decided that their meet-cute story is “just another highly embellished placebo, just a fiction they both believed because of how good and special it made them feel.” Jack tries ever more desperately to please her, to no avail, only to come up against her resistance to being lumped together with him even in the most basic of locutions: “It was one of her pet peeves, that thing that happens to couples when they stop saying ‘I’ in favor of ‘We,’ as if they’d developed a shared couple-brain, a consciousness that was not quite either one of them but somehow abstractly both of them. Their togetherself.”

Because of Hill’s desire to hold up all of contemporary culture, including farmers’ markets, book groups, and neural networks, to the light of his edifying and witty perspective, Wellness intermittently slides into too-muchness, with the longueurs this inevitably entails. (The novel concludes with an eight-page bibliography, as if Hill felt the need to document his facts—a touch that one can find charming or irritating or both.) There are moments when even the most appreciative reader, like myself, will find herself stuck in the hyper-articulateness of the novel (in my case, it was page 463) and wish it would just move on. And it is indeed possible that this extraordinary book might have been improved if someone had edited it down a bit and lost, say, 100 or so pages. But in the end, this is just a quibble.

It can be a bit disconcerting, even disorienting, to go from short, undemanding novels to Hill’s take on as much of the world as possible, and to his desire to link incongruous details and events in inventive ways. The fine details of Jack’s childhood, for instance, dovetail unexpectedly with his view of the purpose of art, which is to evoke an absence rather than a presence, and his investment in remaining part of the family he has brought into being, even when it seems no longer to hold together. From the first paragraphs on, it is clear that we are in the hands of a gifted stylist and an original thinker on whom, as Henry James had it, nothing is lost. This is Hill’s conjuring of Jack as Elizabeth initially sees him: “His hair is a few years past clean-cut and now falls in oily ropes over his eyes and down to his chin. His fashions are fully apocalyptic: threadbare black shirts and black combat boots and dark jeans in urgent need of patching. She’s seen no evidence that he owns a single necktie.”

Although there are whole sections of Wellness in which the thread that pulls along the romance at the heart of the novel seems to fray almost to the point of disappearing, Jack and Elizabeth’s relationship survives many detours as well as many setbacks and disappointments, emerging intact if imperfect, having evolved into a complex and poignant comment upon the always-fragile creation of intimacy: “Behind curtains, this, he thinks, is what lovers do—they are alchemists and architects; pioneers and fabulists; they make one thing another; they invent the world around them. So he says, ‘Yes I believe you,’ and she smiles. She stretches. She touches his face, and makes it splendid.” All of which is to say that I read Hill’s novel with excitement and close to a sense of disbelief that there is still a writer out there who is intrigued by amplitude and by what fiction can do if pushed far enough. You just have to find the hours to read it in, which might mean skipping a new TV series or two.