If Buck wants to do something with the importance of the land, I grant that there are threads to work from here. But Lung wasn’t any less cruel to his wife or his sons, he wasn’t any less selfish or myopic, when he was working the land every day. They were less decadent people, they quarreled less…I can see that. But it just doesn’t land for me, principally because it’s not at all clear that any of them were better people for being tied to the land. So we’re stuck inside a man who maybe does learn and grow a little, but in a fundamentally unsatisying way.Īnd towards the end, Buck really lays it on thick with her symbolic! phrases! about the goodness! of the earth! It’s clear to me that she thinks this is the real heart of the story-the relationship of Lung to “his” earth, and of his family to the earth, and how their detachment from their land ultimately works to their destruction (a cycle we saw, in part, in the fall of the house of Hwang early in the novel). There’s very little character development outside of Wang Lung-characters do change a bit as they age, but Buck seems uninterested in explaining or even trying to understand why or how they do. The combination of his banal personality with his casual complicity in a whole lot of sadness and suffering is depressing without feeling purposeful. He’s not even really a usefully pitiable villain (Tolkien’s Gollum, or Shakespeare’s Shylock). He’s not a charismatically fascinating villain (like Milton’s Satan, say, or Shakespeare’s Iago). I think Wang Lung’s a good counter-example-his unhappiness, his cruelty, his selfishness, is simply really boring.

It’s what’s inside there that limits the novel, in my opinion.Ĭhekhov famously suggested that happy families are boring, and that it’s unhappiness that makes for interesting art. And honestly, the more I think about it, the more I think her central character, Wang Lung, is pretty well described-we do get inside his head. There are some actions that “come full circle”, so to speak, and I feel she’s pretty successful with them. To cast things positively first, though, I think she ultimately does a nice job weaving together a lot of different elements to the story. Having sped through the last 1/4 of this novel, I think I can soften some of my criticisms of Buck’s work, but I’m still fundamentally dissatisfied by the reading experience I’ve been through.

The good earth pearl buck review