The story takes place in an early 20th-century farmer's community in southern France, where the inhabitants suffer from a mysterious disease, while a healer tries to save them by teaching the value of joy.

The title is taken from Johann Sebastian Bach's chorale Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring.

[2] Isabella W. Athey of The Saturday Review described Giono's novel as "an expression of his revolt against the effects of industrial materialism, more poetical and radical than any garden-city retreat from urban life.

Athey continued: "The term seems inexact as well as inadequate, for the only pagan world with which the average reader is familiar is that of Greek and Roman cultures, and the classical values, clear even at second and third hand of organic restraint, of rationalistic emphasis on cause and effect, have no bearing upon Giono's code which is, at bottom, a refusal to compromise.

It leads also to some of his weaknesses, carelessness in characterization, for instance, and disregard for motivation beyond his personal intuition.