Not to return to the “creative” writing classroom but I’ve been prompted to review the basics and ask myself how a writer overcomes the limitations of first-person perspective. To start with: Form, concept, plot, language.
The form of Weike Wang’s second novel Joan is Okay (2022) is the least exciting of them all: the non-form, the diaristic. Joan, a doctor, narrates mostly in the present but roams anywhere in time, whenever. There's no special concept, it's a novel principally about an ordinary individual in an ordinary setting, played straight. There’s not even a secret plot to uncover in these pages, unless one believes we’re always living one out by virtue of existing (…perhaps but the writer has to pull thread from skein, then). The novel never reaches medium temperature, all conflict resolved quietly, politely. The language is spare and at times decidedly bland: “Home could be many things. It could be both a comfort and a pain.” Joan admits that she isn’t “literary” and she has no peculiar speech of her own.
Comedy is another option. And Joan is Okay is a comic novel, I suppose. I hesitate because Wang’s success rate or efficiency, laughwise, is middling: “I hated this. Hated the sense that I got from Fang that there was some magical beanstalk I had to climb. Nothing good comes from climbing beanstalks, didn’t he know that? There are giants up there.” She puts her surrogate child, a robot vacuum, in timeout. She jokes weakly about the connection between “wellness” and “Loch Ness.” Joan claims she doesn’t watch sitcoms while starring in one. And that’s when the comedy, such as it is, doesn’t evaporate for passages of tepid drama or information.
(The
most frequently mentioned artistic medium, in fact, is television. One can
easily see this novel adapted and rendered obsolete by a series intended for
comfort viewing. The button for the show: A woman in scrubs and white coat,
with slightly tousled hair, eyes raised in mock frustration. Five or so people surround
her, hugging her, beaming for the camera.)
Initially
I compared it to a book published in English to acclaim not so long ago, Sayaka
Murata’s Convenience Store Woman: Another slim first-person comic novel
about a single woman whose life is work, told in spare language. But Murata’s
novel is high efficiency, has concentrated comedic force (mania for a
shit job) contrasted with and enhanced by the dark force of a character gradually
taken to the edge (mania for a shit job at the cost of one’s humanity). Joan’s
job, on the other hand, isn’t all that amusing and there’s no tension to it: she
excels at it, it moors and revitalizes her rather than burns her out, she
receives due recognition, she’s well paid and lives comfortably in New York, her colleagues
like her fine and the feeling is mutual, and few people would blame her for
losing herself in such a job. Her family guilt-trips her but she’s financially
independent, occupies one of the most respected positions in society (though she
notes the rise in anti-Asian violence), and clearly lives how she wants to, so
there’s never any threat that it could truly shake her. She has no interest in
the work of a doctor who philosophizes about death because she doesn’t see what
the big deal is in death.
The
last option is raw detail. So the reader is left with the outline of Joan’s
life: bilingual daughter of Chinese immigrants, an itinerant early life, an Ivy
League education, a successful, fulfilling career in medicine, solitude by
choice, a death in the family. This is the part of the novel with the most
potential but in the space of just over 200 pages, it can’t focus long on any
one thing. As a result, it’s scattered. And I don’t have anything against fiction
that’s ripped from the headlines. A memorable novel simply turns recent news into
history. Wang, however, isn’t so fully immersed in the present that external
events are integral to the novel. Her life on the frontline happens to
intersect with the spread of COVID-19.
I’ll
forgo the cheap gag and say instead that fiction like Joan is Okay has a
low ceiling.
