The Good Earth is a novel about pre-revolutionary China, written by a white woman who grew up in China. Let me say straight out that I have no problem with the idea of a white person writing about Chinese people, although this is the most frequently criticized thing about this novel. I know more about Asian-American history than my Asian-American husband simply because I took some classes in college. I don't think I should feel bad about writing about Asian-American history simply because I don't belong to the "correct" ethnic group, as long as I don't try to pretend to be something I'm not (my last name is Lu, after all... I could get away with it). If you know what you're talking about, then you have my seal of approval to write about it.
That being said, Pearl S. Buck wrote this novel in a style that reads like bad translation. This must have been a stylistic choice, and I just can't understand it. The novel is not written from the first person, so this isn't a dialect issue. It seems that she just wrote the book so it would sound like people expected a Chinese novel to sound. The phrasing is awkward and forced. The wife of the main character is often referred to as "the woman." This would make sense if Wang Lung, the main character, were thinking this - maybe this is how a rural Chinese man in the 1920s would think of his wife. But it's not his thought - it's the author's!
I think I might be particularly set against this book because of my fondness for another book, published in the same year: Family by Ba Chin (sometimes also written as Pa Chin). The two books are different in that the protagonist in The Good Earth is rural and in Family, the protagonists are well educated city-dwellers. However, they deal with the same issues of generational strife and the changes wrought by modernity. Ultimately, Family just reads so much better... and it actually IS translated from Chinese.
Overall I know this novel is a product of its time - it was published at a time when many Westerners were trying to drum up support for China in their countries in order to push back against Japanese incursions. The Good Earth was instrumental in this... it presented a "positive" picture of the Chinese. It's not exactly positive from our modern perspective - the novel is dripping in misogyny and questionable parenting practices, but it presented a picture of the Chinese that westerners at the time were comfortable with (aka not threatened by). It's easy to see how the hard working Wang Lung and his dutiful wife O'Lan could be compared favorably to the evil yellow hoarde coming from Japan. I wrote my honors thesis on this stuff, guys, so I could go on all day.
Any way, bottom line, I'm not going to finish it. I can respect the novel as unique and important in its time, but that doesn't mean I have to want to read it now. Anyone who has tried to read The Good Earth and had similar problems - check out Family.
I'll give this one a 3 out of 10. I won't rate it any lower because I think it does have real value... I just didn't like it.
Next book: #61 The Bone Woman. I'm excited about this one - I love non-fiction with a medical bent.
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