The Good Earth: A Review

I read The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck when I was in 8th grade, and I remembered it being a great read. On a whim, I bought it on Amazon and decided to read it again. Lately I mostly consume non-fiction, and I have a nasty habit of starting books and leaving them for others then returning such that I have 10-12 books half-read at one time. This is the case currently. On the plus side, if I put my mind to it, I can finish several books in a few days, but it can get messy.

When I started reading The Good Earth again, it took me only a few days to get through all 357 pages. I just finished it ten minutes ago and was motivated to write a quick review.

For me personally, the signs of a good book are many. I will mention a few. First, how long it takes me to read it. That is, my inability to put it down. Check. Another is how many pages I dog ear in order to re-read the passages at a later date when I’m so inclined. Check (although not as much so as other works of fiction I’ve read recently.) Another is how I feel when I read the last line. Check.

I read the last line and literally said aloud, “God damn that’s a good fucking book! Nice job Pearl Buck!” Rigs was by my side and he stirred at my ejaculation, and I told him I wished he could read it himself. But alas, he is too dumb, and lacks opposable thumbs and lacks even the modicum of mental capacity required to understand a simple word such as “book”.

The Good Earth has been around for ages, having won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1932. The novel was instrumental in Pearl S. Buck’s being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. No doubt you’ve heard of it, and odds are you’ve read it as well. It’s a classic especially for high school English classes.

The book is not written in flowery prose (although it has its moments), but rather quite simply, in line with the simple characters of whom the author writes. She just tells a captivating story and it flows easily over many years. Now although the characters are mostly simple country folk in pre-revolutionary China, their emotions, their battles, and their relationships are as complex as those of any human, and that’s where she gets you.

The protagonist is Wang Lung, a simple farmer who goes from poor, living harvest to harvest and being at the mercy of the Earth gods, to a thriving rich man in his later years. This book is his story, including his sadly selfless wife, O-Lan, who garners the reader’s sympathy deeply as she is as pure a character as in any book ever written, his children, his family, and his concubines. He places a great emphasis on the earth itself, as it gives and receives life. He was born a farmer and even at his richest he never forgot about the land, which was his lifeblood, his heritage, and as its crops nourished him into and through adulthood and old age, so would it receive him after his death and he would become one with it again. Buck beautifully describes the passage of time and how we experience it as humans. How past experiences in our lives can seem so far past and in such different circumstances that it seems impossible that they were of the same life.

While the prose is generally not flowery, there is great commentary into the depth of human emotion and the human experience, even across the abyss that separates the culture with which we are familiar and that of Wang Lung in China of old.

The earth lay rich and dark, and fell apart lightly under the points of their hoes. Sometimes they turned up a bit of brick, a splinter of wood. It was nothing. Some time, in some age, bodies of men and women had been buried there, houses had stood there, had fallen, and gone back into the earth. So would also their house, some time, return into the earth, their bodies also. Each had his turn at this earth.

I smiled, I felt happiness and pride well up in my chest, and I shed tears while I read. I felt the sadness, the despair, the desperation, and the pride that Wang Lung experienced. I was often angry with him for his flaws, and although what I’m abut to say sounds like something a skinny jeans, flannel-wearing emo hipster would say, I will say it anyway: Wang Lung is intensely human. Buck really outdid herself in that regard, and I’m very interested in reading more of her works.

As I try to put words together coherently here on dingtwist.com, and as the better I get, the seemingly more difficult it becomes, I have an increasing amount of respect for people like Buck who, out of their imaginations and through their hard, persistent work, put together works of art like this which transcend generations and eras and speak deeply to all who will read.

It was interesting for me to re-read a book so many years apart to notice how differently it affects me now than it did then. Fitting, too: in line with a major theme of the novel, the passage of time and aging –  my life experience when I first read this book was so different from my life experience now that it seems almost impossible it was of the same life. And I know I will feel the same when I re-read The Good Earth in fifteen years, my head full of grays, perhaps some little dreamkillers (kids) running around, old stresses long extinct, new ones abounding. I take comfort in that.

What lives we live!