The Good Earth

 I'm reading Pearl S Buck's story about a poor farmer in China, Wang Lung, who buys a wife/slave, O-Lan, and treats her like crap even as he slowly accumulates wealth and respect thanks in no small measure to her. He manages to keep his land despite famine and flood, she bears him three sons and two daughters and builds him a stable home, including taking care of his elderly father, and his repayment of her service is to buy a pretty girl named Lotus and install her in the same house so he can sleep with her. He's a real shit...and a typical man thinking only about himself.

I'd seen the 1937 movie version, where Paul Muni played Wang Lung and Luise Ranier played O-Lan, and it's interesting to find how massively they changed the story from the book. It's basically the same plotline, but the thrilling moments in the movie are all but tossed off in the book. Like the plague of locusts. Takes up 1 1/2 pages while in the movie it's a breathtaking scene. And in the book Wang Lung never loves O-Lan but is consistently wondering at her plain features and silence.

But what's most interesting about this is...I actually prefer the movie, because the book seems to have an...I don't know...a layer of reserve to it, even as it's talking about Wang Lung lusting after Lotus and O-Lan dying a slow and agonizing death.

I brought the book with me to read on the plane and in the evenings because packing jobs make me weary and I never like what I write if I make myself sit down at the laptop at the end of the day. And it is engrossing. Pearl S Buck has a disarming style that glides along and keeps its telling on the level of Wang Lung's ability to understand. He's illiterate but crafty and very much a man of his time caught in superstitions and awareness of social strata as well as how to handle selling his crops for a better price. It reminded me of Harper Lee's style, in many ways.

I'm almost done with it, and I'm finding that old adage is true -- in order to become a better writer, you need to read. It's given me hints on how to better tell Brendan's story, even if his is in first person instead of third.

I'd gotten away from that because several of the modern books I'd read just weren't up to speed, for me. The last time I truly enjoyed a contemporary writer was Jay McInerny's Story of my Life, and that was a few decades ago, when I still lived in Houston.

Damn...time is disappearing around me.