Is Joan really okay? To me, it seems like she’s doing just fine given the circumstances. More on those later. But this book is more than okay. This book is fantastic.
I had never read Weike Wang before picking Joan is Okay up after seeing it made NPR’s “Books We Love” list for last year and also really digging the cover. It focuses on Joan, an ICU doctor whose life revolves around work. Not just because it’s the nature of the gig. Joan relies on her job to give her life both structure and meaning, and it’s clear that she genuinely loves being a doctor.
It kicks off with her learning about the death of her father, who lives in China. Joan is in New York City. Her parents came to the U.S. from China to raise her and her brother and then moved back once they started college. Joan flies to China over a weekend for the funeral and is back at work on Monday. This behavior is so puzzling to Joan’s colleagues that it actually leads to an HR investigation.
What’s remarkable about this book is that, beyond the death of Joan’s father, there are no particularly life-altering plot points. The COVID-19 pandemic begins about two-thirds of the way through the book, but the book ends suddenly without delving too deeply into how the pandemic has impacted Joan’s life. She does contract the virus at one point, but that part of the book is over just as quickly as it starts, and shortly after the book is over for good.
I finished the book thinking that its entire purpose is to make the reader think about one question over and over again. And it’s not “Is Joan okay?” I believe the question at the core of this book is “Is Joan doing anything wrong?”
She works and sleeps, without doing much in between. She rarely takes time off. She has no aspirations of having children. Is that wrong?
Other people in her life certainly think so. Her brother, a wealthy financial executive, wants her to leave her “dangerous” neighborhood in Manhattan and move to the wealthy suburb of Greenwich, Connecticut to be closer to him and his family. He wants her to attend more of the elaborate parties he and his wife throw.
Her new neighbor across the hall, who is cringy and annoying, thinks that Joan doesn’t socialize enough either. He throws a party for her without telling her. He doesn’t think she has enough furniture. Enough books. And how could she possibly live without a television?
Joan’s employer, while also giving her a raise earlier in the book for being a top-notch doctor, disapproves of some of her decisions so much that the hospital literally forces her to take a month of bereavement leave.
She takes the bereavement leave, but, by the end of the novel, doesn’t seem that much different than she was to begin with.
I find it perfectly acceptable that this novel is hyper-focused on that one question. It’s a quick read, a little more than 200 pages, and Wang doesn’t include anything that doesn’t need to be in it. She is a brilliant writer and a master of precision and brevity.
Personally, I don’t think Joan is doing anything wrong. Her entire mindset can be summed up by a framework that opens the entire novel: Calculating how much space a person takes up versus how much use that person provides. Joan simply wants to keep her ratio low, and, to me, that’s a good thing. Leave Joan alone! She can take her bereavement leave if she wants to! She’s an adult!
But this book doesn’t really care about my opinion. Or yours. It ends without answering the question “Is Joan doing anything wrong?” because only Joan has the right to answer it. And while I would guess that her answer would be “no,” she also has the right to change her mind.
The central question also has a subquestion. If the space you take up outweighs the use you provide, is that wrong? Is the opposite inherently right? Wang’s novel seems to suggest that no two people have quite the same answer.
Joan is Okay: 96/100.
Key: 85-100, Outstanding; 70-84, Good; 50-69, Okay; 0-49, Unsatisfactory
