The Good Earth

By Pearl S. Buck

Pulitzer Prize winning novel, 1932.

Pearl S. Buck can sure tell a good story.  It is the story of a farmer, Wang Lung, and his family. The setting is pre-World War I China. Wang Lung is a poor farmer who lives with his father and an ox. Wang Lung is a young man and tells his dad that it is time for him to be married. So the father goes and buys a female slave from the house of a wealthy family. The woman, O-Lan, it strong and plain and silent. But when she does speak, it pays to listen. She is a fount of quiet strength and wisdom. She bears her children silently and alone and after giving birth she is soon back out working the fields with her husband. Things start off well for them. Wang Lung is a shrewd farmer, storing his crop and waiting to sell until the market is favorable and O-Lan is a thrify and careful homemaker and unpaid field hand. Unfortunately, they live in a land of feast or famine. It is pretty much a sure bet that some years will be droughty and some will be soaked and the land flooded. A drought strikes and despite Wang Lung's care and forethought the family has to flee the area and find work in a southern city. Life is very hard there. Wang Lung works till he drops and yet he can't afford to buy his family food or a place to live. They live in a lean-to and if it weren't for the soup kitchen, they would starve. But desperate times mean desperate people and the people rise up and loot and pillage. Wang Lung follows the looters and gets his hands on enough silver to get his family back home and to buy seed to plant. Due to his wise management, his farm prospers and his wealth grows and he becomes a big man in his community, O-Lan at his side, silently doing her best for him and their kids. Wang Lung starts going to a tea house, a place he would have never frequented before. He falls for one of the women who work as prostitutes in the tea house. He decides he must have this woman, Lotus; he becomes obsessed. He even makes O-Lan give him the two pearls she has cherished in a little bag hung around her neck. It breaks her heart that he demands these jewels from her and it is even worse when she realizes he wanted the pearls for the whore. After this, she just fades away and eventually dies.
I kind of lost interest in the story after the death of O-Lan. It was her story that I cared about, not Wang Lung's. Wang Lung was a bit of a jerk, although probably pretty representative of the male attitude of his time and place. After she died, I didn't really care what happened to the rest of the brood. Wang Lung marries his whore and he moves his family into the big house in town where his father purchased O-Lan. But he never loses his connection to the land that nurtured him and provided him with the good life.

Review from Reading the Pulitzer Prize Winners for Fiction.