Good Earth, The - Pearl S. Buck [144]
Saturday Review of Literature, 1931
A beautiful, beautiful book. At last we read, in the pages of a novel, of the real people of China... the China of fantasy so often exploited is absent from its pages. Instead we have the honest peasant, and his faithful wife; the pampered singing girl, and her unscrupulous attendant; the rich earth, and a farmer's mud house; we have flowers, too, and the many courts of great houses, but it is all real---so real.... [FOOTNOTE]: Mrs. Buck's novel is so moving and so "actual" that I must note one or two points which seem to me slightly out of key. From my own experience, and from information given me, I doubt whether Wang Lung, the farmer, could have fetched his bride from the great house and have taken her without ceremony to his home. The responsibility felt by the heads of rich families towards their underlings was very great, and responsibilities in China are generally lived up to. It is difficult to imagine that at least a minimum of ceremony so vital for a woman's future status should not have been required by the head of the great house before consent to a marriage was given.
It is difficult, too, to imagine the Old Mistress smoking opium before any outsider, and quite impossible to imagine that she did it sitting. Opium smokers inevitably lie on their sides.
In the matter of child-bearing, the emphasis laid by Mrs. Buck on a child a year for every married woman seems to me too great. Exceptions there probably are, but in a country where the poorer women suckle their children for three years or more a child a year is not the rule. Among the rich, one of the reasons given for concubinage is that excessive child-bearing is too hard for a woman to endure---and children there must be. But what is a slight matter of overemphasis? It is ungrateful to mention it!
(3) Boston Evening Transcript, 1931
China, its lure, its customs, and experience which link Chinese with all humanity, forms the exotic background for this outstanding character novel.... The point and meaning of the story do not lie on the surface for anyone to pick up idly. It is a beautiful and impressive tale made all the richer because of the opportunity it gives readers to study characters. It is a fine conception excellently worked out.
(4) The London Times Literary Supplement, 1931
The epic of Wang Lung, as told by Mrs. Pearl S. Buck in The Good Earth, must have had a stormy background, of which the hero was but intermittently aware.... Wang Lung's story... is rich in detail and characterization, and the first half... is told with a verve and simplicity that permits us to enter with understanding into the alien mental life of this simple, fundamentally good-hearted Chinese farmer. In the latter half there is a change of literary style, the second manner being obviously influenced by that of the English Bible. The matter becomes more dramatic, and at the same time more familiar. Mrs. Buck's conception of Wang Lung does not waver, but she leaves the impression that she could do no more with him as a simple figure of pastoral life, and had been driven into romance in order to extend the interest. She has not the peculiar gift of insight that distinguishes Miss Stella Benson's portrayal of life in Korea, but The Good Earth never fails to hold the attention, and conveys a convincing effect of presenting a true picture of Chinese life.
(5) The Spectator, 1931
...It is a familiar story; there is no startling psychological observation, though it is complete and whole. We are satisfied of its essential truth; confident, interested, never ruffled: it is a universal story, very well told, honestly, sympathetically, without any self-consciousness whatever. Its peculiar interest, however, is that it is about Chinese peasants. We would realise that Mrs. Buck knows her subject thoroughly, even if we were not told that Chinese is her second language, and that the country is that of her upbringing. But although we hear enough of Chinese ways of thought and life, these are never made to seem peculiar; nothing strikes one as