"The Good Earth" by Pearl S. Buck: Wang Lung is a humble farmer in late 19th-Century China, struggling to work the land and care for his aging widowed father. Their existence is a daily grind for survival, entirely dependent on the whims of the Earth.
Needing assistance, Wang Lung decides to take a wife and negotiates the purchase of a slave girl from the House of Hwang. I know, it sounds like an adult bookstore, but the Hwangs are actually a rich and prosperous noble family. They sell Wang Lung their servant O-lan sight- unseen. While she's hardly a looker, O-lan is a selfless, disciplined woman, making her the ideal farmer's wife. Keep in mind, the ideal farmer's daughter would be something entirely different.
Wang Lung and O-lan wed, forming the typical passionless union of the day, but the marriage does prove fruitful, bearing three sons and two daughters. A series of prosperous harvests enable Wang Lung to save a little money, and he wisely invests in the earth, procuring tracts of land from the once great Hwangs, who have fallen upon hard times due to wasteful extravagance and moral decay.
Just when it seems Wang Lung is movin' on up, a drought ravages the countryside, triggering famine and forcing the family to relocate south to the city. No longer able to work the soil for their keep, Wang Lung pulls a rickshaw and the rest of the brood takes to begging, earning just enough to put rice and cabbage on what passes for a table in their makeshift shelter. But political revolution engulfs the urban landscape, with the poor and mistreated rising up to storm the walls of the rich. As an angry mob ransacks one such domicile, Wang Lung and O-lan snag money and jewels, providing the means for a return home.
The industrious farmer uses the misbegotten riches to procure more land, creating his own little empire. Bountiful harvests lead to unimaginable riches. Soon, Wang Lung just sits and grins, and the money rolls right in. But being rich ain't no boat ride, either. More money, more problems.
Born Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker in West Virginia in 1892, Pearl S. Buck moved to China when she was only three months old. Well, her parents, who were religious missionaries, actually moved there, Pearl kind of just tagged along. Children that age seldom relocate on their own. The young Sydenstricker was raised in Chinese culture, learning English as a second language. She did attend college in the United States, but she returned the moment she had her degree, marrying an American economist, John Lossing Buck.
"The Good Earth" was published in 1931. It was Buck's second novel and an unprecedented success, bringing her international fame and eventually a Nobel Prize. She used her celebrity to spearhead numerous humanitarian efforts, particularly benefitting children. Coincidentally, I hope to one day use my celebrity to help bartenders, waitresses, and naive young supermodels.
The strength of "The Good Earth" is Ms. Buck's taut, terse prose. No words are wasted in chronicling Wang Lung's miraculous journey, as he charges headlong from son to husband to father. All aspects of life are examined, every emotion explored. Family, marriage, parenthood, ambition, greed, jealousy, love, death; it's all on display. And Ms. Buck's enviable style never detracts from the importance of the material, the work's simplistic beauty marvelously rendering man's existential quest for meaning.
The book is structured in a circle, ending where it began, with a son's dreams of surpassing his father. Wang Lung's familial arch also mirrors the path of the Hwangs, history repeating itself over and over among the masses, from ashes to ashes and dust to dust.
Ms. Buck offers the earth as Wang Lung's salvation. Whenever things are most bleak, a return to the land rights all wrongs. It's an extension of Dostoevsky's blissful mantra, "Attain to God through work." If you need meaning in life, those five words provide the closest I've found. Granted, I often replace "work" with other words, like "blondes" and "brunettes," but it's all the same thing.
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