Michael Finocchiaro's Reviews > The Good Earth

Pearl S Buck lived in China on several occasions and thus her story of Wang Lung feels real. The book is a sort of bildungsroman in which we see the life of Wang Lung from his mariage to the young slave O-Lan to his success and passing on of his legacy to his snickering sons. There is plenty of drama here and there are times that you want to slap Wang Lung for being an ass, but the story is very entertaining and one can easily see the talent of Buck in her writing. I wonder if the other two books in The Good Earth Trilogy following this one are as poignant (and occasionally frustrating). The one thing is that there is no real spiritual development of the characters - they remain pretty much the same and making the same errors time and time again. Perhaps that is what makes them so human. Nevertheless, I would have liked to see at least a smidgeon of growth or learning from them. The language used does have a sort of biblical lyricism and, again, I don't know if this is typical of all of Buck's work or just this novel.