Review: The Good Earth

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I had multiple, not-quite-sufficient-alone reasons for reading this. Above all, my student Alexis is doing very interesting work around the way Westerners imagine China, and this is a potentially crucial text in that argument. I’m also at least casually interested in those books that “mattered” at mid-century, the ones that may have been middlebrow but were also influential. And, it was on sale.

I mention that haphazard set of motives because I experienced the book in a strangely mismatched way.

I enjoyed the first several chapters very much when this seemed an unusual economic history. It’s compelling to read as Wang Lung slowly rises through his hard work and focus. Unlike his uncle and cousin, he guards his hard-won profits and turns them into additional land. The tiny copper coins he manages to save add up slowly to his path out of the peasantry.

I liked as well that he found such a partner in O-Lan, a woman clearly smarter than he is who is willing to work just as hard to overcome the indignity of slavery. Her generally impenetrable mien is powerful. We recognize the work Wang Lung puts into accruing not just wealth but dignity; we can only dimply sense the deeper and even more compelling incentive O-Lan has for rising from slavery to respect.

The general excellence of this continues through to the awful experience of famine that the family knows, but I confess it begins to work less well for me once they are in the city, away from the land. That may be to Buck’s credit – her thesis, after all, is that the land can give wealth and dignity to those who respect it – but it begins to feel like a different novel.

But then, [SPOILER:] I am troubled that the big leap forward comes not through the gradual accrual of wealth but through the happenstance of Wang-Lung and O-Lan each committing something like a crime. Each seizes property from the wealthy during an army attack and, suddenly, they have the money to return to the land and buy more. And eventually even more.

That change in focus from a careful economic rise to a sudden one troubles me, I think, because it glosses over the steady work the novel earlier praised. Wang-Lun is special originally only because his dream of rising is so focused. Later, he seems the beneficiary of a specific providence.

By the end, this feels much more conventional to me. It seems almost required that Wang-Lung will buy the estate where he was made to feel so diminished on the day he arrived to buy his slave wife from the mistress. (For what it’s worth Faulkner uses a similar trope a few years later in Absalom, Absalom! when he imagines Sutpen working his whole life to overcome the humiliation of being less than a slave when he visits a plantation as a child. No offense to Buck, but Faulkner wears it better.)

And [FINAL SPOILER:] with the concluding revelation that the sons intend to sell some of Wang-Lung’s hard-won land, we see what sounds like the beginning of the unraveling of the family fortune. (There are a pair of sequels, but I doubt I’ll read them.) The basic idea – the earth is good; you should trust it – seems simply overdone.

I look forward to talking with Alexis about ways this fits into her project, and I might care enough to read some summaries about the sequels. And I am glad finally to have read a book that still cast something of a shadow into the 1970s when I would see it on the shelves of many of the older relatives and friends I visited. But, as a novel that has a lot to teach us about how we experience the world today, I think this one is past its time.


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