Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in When Will There Be Good News?, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Trauma, Survival, and Reckoning with the Past
Appearances vs. Reality
Lies and Deceptions
Family
Summary
Analysis
Joanna was nine years old when Martina died. She came home from school as Martina’s body was being carried out on a stretcher. In Martina’s room she found empty bottles and “something sickly in the air.” Martina had left a suicide note saying, “Too much” and something untranslated in Swedish. When Joanna found her father and showed him the note, he threw his bottle of whiskey at her.
The story picks up with Joanna’s reflections again. Next in the string of losses Joanna endured, her father’s girlfriend, Martina, who’d otherwise shown kindness to Joanna, committed suicide. Her father had a capacity for violence, so her childhood home never seems to have been a safe harbor for her.
Themes
Joanna had lived with her father for a while. Howard’s next wife, an artist from Hong Kong, had suggested that Joanna be sent to a boarding school in the Cotswolds. After her father moved to Los Angeles, she spent holidays with her “dreadful” Aunt Agnes and Uncle Oliver, whom she could never forgive “for not wrapping her in love.” She eventually saw an obituary in the newspaper telling her that her father had died in Brazil. However, Joanna thrived at boarding school, loving the order and structure of life there.
Joanna never finds the love and security she craves among her extended family, which shows why she works so hard to provide a perfectly safe and loving environment for her baby. The closest she ever got was a boarding school environment that suited her well. Because she resented her aunt so much, it seems unlikely that Joanna would have dropped everything at the last minute to tend to her “sick aunt.”
Themes
Joanna and the baby are sharing a lumpy mattress. As she nurses him early in the morning, she reflects on her belief that she carries the souls of her dead family within her. She’s an atheist, but that doesn’t mean a person “didn’t have to get through every day the best way you could. There were no rules.” The baby is the same age as Joseph when he died. She can’t imagine what her brother would have been like as an adult, but she sometimes imagines what Jessica and Gabrielle would be like now. They all “possess a reality that was stronger than anything alive, apart from the baby, of course.”
Joanna and the baby seem to be in hiding or captivity somewhere. Joanna’s “no rules” mantra shapes the way she copes with grief—even though it doesn’t fit her overall value system, she believes that their souls live on inside her. This further underscores Joanna’s determination to protect herself and her son at all costs. “The baby”—whom Joanna never calls by name—seems to embody her loved ones’ continued life, which is not surprising, as he’s probably the only living person with whom Joanna has shared a fully mutual love.
Themes
Joanna’s whole life is “an act of bereavement, longing for something she could no longer remember.” She sometimes dreams of a dog barking, and it awakens such a raw grief that she wants to kill both the baby and herself so that nothing bad can ever happen to him. She thinks about contingency plans in case she reaches a point where she can no longer run. But as long as she can, she’ll keep running. Just then she hears footsteps on the stairs—“the bad man was coming.”
Even though she projects such a strong sense of survival, Joanna is still grieving, often in a deeply painful, primal way. She’s so afraid of something terrible happening to the baby that she would sooner kill them both than let that happen. Until that time, she continues to obey her mother’s instinct to “run.” While the phrase “the bad man” suggests that Decker has returned, it’s not yet clear if it’s really him or not. However, someone is apparently holding the two of them captive.
Themes
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