Usually, a fiction audiobook that is light on plot and heavy on reflective musings would not work very well for me. That describes Chemistry, and somehow it worked. The unnamed narrator (a literary pet-peeve of mine that didn't bother me here) is a chemistry PhD student whose boyfriend has just proposed to her. Instead of excitement, she feels only ambivalence: toward the proposal, her degree program and career path, and the overachieving life she's been pushed to chase by her Chinese parents.

What makes her brand of self-reflection so refreshing is its utter artlessness. There's no fluff here; she is a scientist, and her systematic ways of deconstructing life and the events around her are by turns charming, observant, and arresting. While I sometimes found my mind wandering, as her musings did, the sheer order of them was soothing and a pleasure to listen to.

Weike Wang writes characters with some of the most distinctive voices I’ve ever read; her previous novel Chemistry had a similar straightforward sparseness that felt both orderly and soothing. Joan is also a scientist, an attending physician at a Manhattan hospital. She relishes her job, her usefulness, and as such, the feeling of being a cog in the wheel. When her father dies, she takes only a weekend to fly to China for the funeral, though his loss permeates her life in the months that follow.

She is an enigma to her family, coworkers, and neighbors, all of whom try in different ways to forge connections and draw her from her work-focused ways. When the hospital makes her take off for bereavement, the newfound time forces her to examine her identity more closely than she has in ages–and it’s drawn into sharper focus when COVID hits and Asians become targets.

I loved being in Joan’s very literal head and her full acceptance of herself and her own life path.