The Good Earth: A Chat
(Editor’s note: I’m late with this chat; we originally had it online while I was watching the Patriots lose a playoff game, thus Penny’s opening remark….)
Dreadful Penny: I’m fully prepared for this chat to be peppered with profanity unrelated to The Good Earth
Diablevert: Heh. This is painful to watch. Ooof. Dude. So anywho. I’m not as hepped up about The Good Earth as I was when I first read it. Did you read it when you were a kid?
DreadfulPenny: Had to read it freshman year of high school, and I hated it then.
Diablevert: so what did you think of it now?
DreadfulPenny: I liked it more this time around, but I was a little predisposed to think better of it, since I knew you were already into it. What a vicious circle!
Diablevert: Hah!
Dreadfulpenny: I think the writing is really solid, and it seems like a sensitive portrayal of the culture for the time, and from an outsider’s point of view, but I still didn’t care for the plot much.
Diablevert: I don’t think I would have liked it as a teenager either. I think it improved on me this time because I was expecting it to be sort of pious and glurgy – missionary’s daughter, wholesome, peasants—but it was actually more non-judgmental muddy 30s realism. On the other hand, though, it was a little pat, the plot. I mean, was it really possible for the average peasant to rise like that, in one generation? Felt a little forced.
DreadfulPenny: I never quite put my finger on that being suspect, but now that you mention it, it does seem unlikely.
Diablevert: What bugged you about the plot?
DreadfulPenny: It’s like the His Family of China. Protagonist that you’re supposed to sympathize with being a jackoff with ungrateful offspring stepping all over him. I hate hate HATE everything that happens after he meets Lotus and throws over O-lan. I bought it, but reading it was painful.
Diablevert: Ah. Yeah. In a way I appreciated that though…I was expecting his taking a concubine to bring him down. But it didn’t really; it cause some friction, but nothing that seriously disarranged his life, and eventually he grew tired of her just as he had of O-Lan. It felt much more like what would actually happen in a culture where taking a concubine was pretty normal and women were close to chattel. I appreciated that.
DreadfulPenny: Taking a concubine did seriously rearrange his life, though… if I remember correctly, it was the impetus to shift from saving everything he had to spending and spending and led to his loss of control over his money and his family. After that, Wang Lung lost track of all his earlier values and became prideful (and even more insufferable).
Diablevert: Yeah, I see that, but I suppose I was expecting him taking the second wife would be his downfall, and cause him to lose everything he had gained. Which it didn’t really; it was more of a mo’ money mo’ problems situation.
DreadfulPenny: I felt that his problems changed in nature after Lotus and Cuckoo moved in… before, the acquisitiveness seemed born out of self-preservation and after like the road to decadence. Also, everyone in the book besides O-lan and the steward who died struck me as a total asshat. Oh, and the little fool. I was cool with her too.
Diablevert: I was more mesa-mesa on Wang Lung. There were moments when I was like, “Oh, you douchebag,” and then there were other moments where he seemed quite sympathetic; when he arranges O-Lan’s burial, for instance.
DreadfulPenny: I often had sympathy for Wang Lung, that’s true. But, still, asshat.
Diablevert: I suppose I saw him more as flawed but sympathetic rather than pure asshat.
DreadfulPenny: What did you think of all the business with the extortionist uncle and bandit cousin?
Diablevert: It was interesting. Seemed pretty realistic. A tough situation to deal with, certainly. What was your take?
Dreadfulpenny: It was hard to imagine that Wang Lung was so isolated from his other neighbors and the rest of society that he had no other recourse than to put up with them. On the other hand, I know absolutely nothing about Chinese history, so I have no way to judge its accuracy.
Diablevert: Well, by that time he was one of the wealthiest people in the area; most everybody else wasn’t worth stealing from. And it doesn’t seem like there was much in the way of what we would conceive of as local police.
DreadfulPenny: You’re right… the governing family wouldn’t have cared when they were prosperous, and couldn’t do anything afterwards. I guess a big question for me was: when did Wang Lung’s desire for land/wealth turn into greed? And was it necessarily wrong for him to be greedy in that time and place?
Diablevert: It’s interesting, I don’t think the book forces the reader to any conclusions on that point….
DreadfulPenny: It felt like we were supposed to get the sense that Wang Lung’s reach had exceeded his grasp, and that he was suffering for it. I found the ending to be incredibly sad… the idea that the one pure thing he had held through his life–love of the land–was being erased by his sons.
Diablevert: It is totally sad. But the plot of the novel seems to reflect in miniature a larger cycle; the landed family in the beginning sells that first plot of land to Wang Lung because they need the money to support their lifestyles, and the sons live far away in the city and don’t care about the estate.
Dreadfulpenny: I suppose we’re not given many textual clues that the original landed family had held their position for generations… only Wang Lung’s utter subservience makes it seem as if they had held that position since the beginning of time.
Diablevert: I dunno, I definitely got the sense that they had been around quite a while; that’s what made it seem a little dubious, about this whole cycle begin repeated in one man’s lifetime. Like, the grandma figure who Wang Lung appears before when he goes to pick up O-Lan; this did not seem like a woman who had come up the hard way. She had been born into privilege.
DreadfulPenny: I agree… that’s what made me see it less as a cycle of growth-wealth-decadence-decline than a story protesting the nouveau riche. Oddly, the more I think about it, the more I think we’re gonna see some strong similarities in the writing style of Buck and Steinbeck when we get to The Grapes of Wrath, at least in the rapturous love of land passages.
Diablevert: So far almost all the 30s books have been more realistic.
DreadfulPenny: That’s fair, so far.
Diablevert: I appreciated that, in this instance. I was all stealing myself for something condescending and idealized, and I don’t think this was at all. For all Wang Lung loves the land and whatnot, the book does not portray being a Chinese peasant as anything but backbreaking.
Dreadfulpenny: I agree… you got a strong sense of their crushing poverty in the beginning, and how scary the city was to the poor. There are moments that stand out to me very strongly–Wang Lung’s love of the little fool, O-lan giving birth then immediately joining him in the fields, hiding the jewels in her clothes, the barmy old grandfather… Pearl S. Buck definitely has her moments. Oh, and lots and lots of starvation.
Diablevert: Yeah, I liked it. In a way what I particularly liked are the moments when he fucked up, when you knew he was going to make the wrong choice – those moments were very vivid, and they made sense, they were a progression of the character’s development. Like when he makes her give up the pearls.
DreadfulPenny: Or the first time he enters the brothel, and he’s so awkward, and you just know desire is going to club him over the head and make him stupid.
Diablevert: Exactly. And even that you can understand; this is a guy who has basically never experienced beauty or luxury in any form, and here it’s being dumped in his lap for the first time, with this beautiful woman who’s sweet to him, and charming, and classier than any other person he’s ever met…like, you can see how the fuck up is going to occur, but it all makes sense.
DreadfulPenny: Yeah, and the reader knows that she’s probably going to be shallow or difficult or awful in some other way, but you’re watching a slow-motion train wreck. Totally believable.
Diablevert: Right. So in that sense I like it. I also like that I felt Buck was pretty non-judgmental about the cultural differences she presents here.
DreadfulPenny: I’d agree with that. She seems very sympathetic to Wang Lung’s original way of life (meager, but close to the land) and VERY taken with its natural beauty.
Diablevert: Mmmm…but I wouldn’t say she glorifies it, really. The very first bit is him waking up and kicking the snow or whatever out of his three inch mud window and then his dad bitching him out for putting actual tea leaves in the hot water. The land, literally, is bountiful and miraculous; but everything else is grim grim grim. Which I why I think I would have hated the book when I was younger.
DreadfulPenny: I don’t think she glorifies it so much as she is able to record its grimness while granting it a certain dignity…. and I’m almost certain it’s why I hated it in high school. Oh, and I’m sure I hated everything about the way he treats O-lan… I mean, I still do, but I’m better able to contextualize historically and culturally and not become an absolute ball of seething rage over these things. I’ve come a long way, baby.
Diablevert: Aw, you grew a callous! I feel bad, like I’m not doing this book justice; I was all fired up about it when I first finished it, but I can’t remember it with the necessary specificity now to discuss its subtleties.
DreadfulPenny: I dunno… I wouldn’t feel too bad. I mean, it’s solidly written and parts are pretty good, but it’s still not Woolf or Nabokov or anything. I definitely enjoyed it more than the average Pulitzer, though.
Diablevert: Me too. Alright, then. Pearl S. Buck, I’m glad I gave you a chance.
DreadfulPenny: Awww. Pearl S. Buck, I hereby give you more props than my 14-year-old self did. But I still will probably never read another of your books, and certainly not this one again.
Diablevert: And so we end.
DreadfulPenny: Go Patriots?
Diablevert: Oh, they lost, dude. It was pretty terrible. Well, technically the game’s still going on, but there’s not enough time for them to come back.
Dreadfulpenny: Sorry, lady. That sucks.
Diablevert: Ah, well.
DreadfulPenny: At least you had a 1930s Pulitzer to keep you warm. (Not helping, huh?) One more thing….Have you noticed that the women writers seem to have held up better over time than the men? Wharton, Buck, Ferber, Julia Peterkin. (We’ll leave The Able McLaughlins out of this one.)
Diablevert: No, that hadn’t struck me. I think you’ve got a couple ringers in there. Lewis and Tarkington are still spoken of, but neither has the reputation that Wharton and Cather do.
DreadfulPenny: Cather! (Which I didn’t like so much, but you did.) Maybe it’s just a weird accident of history.
Diablevert: Your fave was Wilder, who was a dude.
DreadfulPenny: Thornton Wilder is the heaviest hitter so far on the men’s side. But Wharton was a pretty close second, for me.
Diablevert: I think it’s more of the luck of the draw. Talk to me in a couple decades.
DreadfulPenny: That’s fair, but I’m gonna end this one singing “Ladies First” anyway.
Diablevert: The Queen Latifah version?
DreadfulPenny: Long live the Queen! Have you obtained The Store by esteemed author T.S. Stribling yet? The title alone sends chills down my spine.
Diablevert: “The Store”?
DreadfulPenny: The internets could not contain the depth of my sarcasm on that one, I’m afraid. The title, not Queen Latifah. (Respect the Queen.)
Diablevert: Oh, phew. I thought you were stepping to Queen Latifah there for a minute.
DreadfulPenny: I’d never.
Diablevert: Damn straight.
January 24, 2012 at 3:18 am
As usual, reading your chat is the treat I give myself for finishing my review.
You both like this novel better than me—Diablevert a LOT better (as she’s mentioned on my blog) and Dreadful a bit better (though Dreadful, you and I are agree re: the asshattery of Wang Lung). I do think you make a good case for a more generous read of the novel than I was able to give it, and you’ve influenced me a bit. I’m still not sure the novel really gave me a good character to work with: I found Wang Lung much more flat and uninteresting than you did, and that combined with his being, well, a Chinese man of his day and age, makes it pretty hard to just suffer through the whole thing. I definitely think there’s something vivid about the society she portrays, but I think you may give her too much credit for “realism”.
Granted, I’m glad this wasn’t some rosy-glasses Scarlet Sister Mary version of Chinese peasant life. But I felt it pretty clearly was anti-China throughout: religion is insincere, men are greedy or lustful or snivelling or all three, women are fat gossips or thin sullen workhorses, the rich are lousy, so are the poor, etc., etc. There’s not a single person in the novel, with the possible exception of Wang Lung’s old servant (whose name I forget) who seems to be made really genuinely happy by anything for any stretch of time. I’m glad Buck wanted to be honest, and not make everything sunshine and daisies. But don’t you think her “honest” image of China is, in fact, a pretty clearly skewed view by a Western missionary’s daughter who can’t believe that anything about this society really works or has real value? And, if so, does that impact your reading of it (it did mine)? As is sometimes the case, maybe I just disagree (with respect!) with your collective opinion of the book.