Good Earth, The - Pearl S. Buck [145]
(6) The Nation, 1931
Such a novel as The Good Earth calls at once for comparison with other novels of the same general design---novels of the soil on the one hand and novels concerning Oriental life on the other. Any such comparison brings out the fact that despite Mrs. Buck's very good narrative style, despite her familiarity with her material, her work has a certain flatness of emotional tone that is not characteristic of Knut Hamsun's studies of the toiler in the earth, nor again of the autobiographical narrative of a Korean childhood and boyhood, The Grass Roof. Both Hamsun and Younghill Kang have much more than an accurate observation and objective analysis of their characters and scenes to present; both of them are able intuitively to penetrate into the emotions of their characters. This ability derives from their own traditional knowledge and racial inheritance. The result is that they write books which are more convincing and more exciting. Mrs. Buck is undoubtedly one of the best Occidental writers to treat of Chinese life, but The Good Earth lacks the imaginative intensity, the lyrical quality, which someone who had actually farmed Chinese soil might have been able to give it.
(7) The New Statesman and Nation, 1931
....Except for one book dealing with a more specialized field of Chinese affairs, I can recall no novel that frees the ordinary, flesh-and-blood, everyday Chinaman so satisfyingly from those screens and veils and mirrors of artistic and poetic convention which nearly always make him, to the Western reader's eye, a flat and unsubstantial figure of a pale-coloured ballet... the result is that one really believes in this China.
Mrs. Buck does not compel one's interest by any particular dexterity in prose of inventiveness, but simply by the clarity and honesty of her narrative... the book closes with Wang Lung not only a grandsire, well-endowed with descendants, but standing also in a way as a symbol of a passing China.... Altogether, The Good Earth is not a book to be passed over. Only once, I felt, did the author force her note too strongly (with Pear Blossom): for the rest, it is stripped of undue sentiment and left taut with real feeling.
(8) The Christian Century, 1931
About once a year I stumble on a book that really stirs my emotions. It becomes a living thing to me; I answer to its words, its moods, its unvoiced whisperings as one answers to the companionship of a friend. When I have finished reading it I cannot be satisfied until I have brought others within the circle of its magic.... I have found another of the same sort, The Good Earth....
I have read one or two reviews of Mrs. Buck's book which spoke of it as transcending national and racial boundaries. There is a sense in which that is true. In that sense Wang Lung is not a Chinese, but a farmer, a man of the soil, whose lot happens to be cast in China....
But there is another sense in which this is emphatically a Chinese tale. There have been a good many novels whose locale was laid in China, but never one which looked more deeply and understandingly into actual Chinese life.
(9) Younghill Kang, The New Republic, 1931
It ought to be very moving, to a Western reader. There is only one difficulty. Romantic love is a false center of psychology to ascribe to the typical Oriental man or woman, reared in the traditional bondage to quite different ideals. Although romantic love is second nature to the Western woman, trained to it by the traditions of a thousand years, it would not even be understood by an old-fashioned Chinese wife. By placing the emphasis on romantic love, all Confucian society is reduced to a laughable pandemonium. We have the picture of a man taking an ugly wife so she will be a virgin, finding his own son a rival in his concubine's chamber, placating his uncle's son, who attempts to violate one of the daughters of the house before the father's eyes, and finally introducing the youngest slave of his own household