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.

Pearl buck the good earth