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September 29, 2006
The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
Earlier this summer, I heard a snippet on NPR about Pearl S. Buck (I think it may have been the anniversary of her birthday). I was intrigued by her story--born to Presbyterian missionaries in China, first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature, founder of the first international, interracial adoption agency, Welcome House--and so I picked up her best-known novel, The Good Earth, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1932.
The Good Earth follows the peasant farmer Wang Lung from his marriage day through nearly fifty years of life. The story itself is not particularly suspenseful--no unexpected twists or dramatic turns here--rather it richly details the mundane ups and downs of a life full of joys and disappointments, ambitions, passions, successes and mistakes.
As the book opens, Wang Lung marries a selfless and hardworking but plain-looking woman, O-Lan, who had been a slave in the Great House of Hwang, the most prominent family in the nearby village. Over the next several years, Wang Lung and O-Lan care for Wang Lung's aging father and together work the land until they have enough silver to buy more (and better) land from the declining House of Hwang, fulfilling both Wang Lung's desire for the specific kind of respect that he believed came from wealth and O-Lan's desire to rise above or redeem her past as a slave in the Great House. Meanwhile, the family grows--children are born, Wang Lung's pesky ne'er-do-well uncle's family won't leave, Wang Lung takes a mistress, and, finally, daughters-in-law and grandchildren are added to the fold--and surviving even displacement and years of drought, Wang Lung eventually becomes a prosperous man, the most prosperous in the area, in fact.
Set in rural, pre-revolutionary China, the novel is necessarily filled with descriptions of unfamiliar customs, traditions, and beliefs, religious and otherwise (Buck wrote, "I can only write what I know, and I know nothing but China, having always lived there"). Still, the story is somehow universal and deeply compelling. On the surface, I have almost nothing in common with The Good Earth's protagonist--not even gender--but I found myself so invested in this Chinese farmer that I actually began to get irritable when the choices he began making were clearly taking him in the wrong direction (granted, I was also reading during long days of travel, which may have also contributed to my tetchiness).
Buck is not given to flowery descriptions or authorial interpretations. The events and happenings and the consequent feelings of the characters about them are presented plainly, without unnecessary analysis, and I appreciated the straightforward narrative and simplicity of the language (although I did read somewhere that the language is reminiscent of the King James version of the Bible; I didn't really see that). Although it sometimes tackles weighty subjects and complex human motivations and emotions, The Good Earth is not a heavy read. And while it doesn't necessarily have a fairytale ending, it is nonetheless quite heartening. Highly recommended.
(Lest you be tempted to take a shortcut and watch the movie version instead, I strongly advise you: don't. I was so enamored with the book that I Netflixed the film. I knew it was made in 1937 and therefore figured that the main actors would be white and not Asian, much less Chinese, but the actress who portrayed O-Lan won the Academy Award for her role and the cinematographer also took away the Oscar, so I hoped it wouldn't be that bad. Sadly, it was. The white actors did bother me more than I thought they would, but possibly even worse than that was the story, which was vaguely recognizable except for the fact everything that made it so good was stripped away. For example, one of the best sources of tension in the book, namely, whether Wang Lung would ever come to his senses and realize what a good wife he had in O-Lan, was completely flattened by the fact that the marriage was portrayed to be more or less a companionate one in which O-Lan actually had a voice in decisions [e.g., that Wang Lung take a second wife]--a gross misrepresentation of the book that, in my opinion, sucked all the life from the tale. And don't even get me started on the last line, which was full of bad, bad, bad, cheesy, cheesy symbolism. Ugh. Not for any reason.)
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