I’ve read two of Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker Buck’s novels before: The Good Earth and Imperial Woman. Like most people I know, I picked up the former, a novel of pre-Communist China, because I was moving to Korea, and figured it was close enough. There are some differences between Chinese and Korean culture, it turns out. Regardless. The novel was excellent, and a year later I read Imperial Woman, because I was interested in the life of Cixi, Empress of China, and this coincided with Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker Buck having written a book about her. It too was excellent. I then began to concoct a theory: that this winner of the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes was a pretty good novelist.
She grew up in China and wrote most of her books about China. The Angry Wife, sent by my cousin for our biannual book exchange, surprised me by not being about China. Indeed, it is about America!
Synopsis: Pierce Delaney returns from the war to his sprawling Virginian estate, ready to sow peace and prosperity around him. All is not well, though, as his brother falls for a beautiful mulatto (or “quadroon”, if you want to be PC) nurse. Racial tensions ensue!
Except Wife adroitly avoids falling into plain-vanilla moralizing. In fact, the plot of Pierce’s brother is shoved to the sidelines, as is the titular angry wife herself. Most of the book follows Pierce’s own journey through middle age; his contact with his brother’s life, and, later, with union strikers, forces him to widen his own perspectives. Inevitably he grows apart from his dear wife, a creature incapable of or unwilling to change, and he must consider the merits of his path in life. It’s more riveting than it sounds!
I admire people capable of change in middle age. By twenty-five, they say, all of our patterns are set. Modern psychology reminds us of the importance of upbringing and its ability to mold a person for the next seven or eight decades. Certainly the establishment of middle age encourages conservativism, adherence to the status quo. You have much more to lose by political or social change - and progress is change - once you have kids and a house.
So Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker Buck’s treatment of a character undergoing just this change is fascinating. They live in a period of utmost turmoil. The War is over, the South is in ruins, labor is organizing, and what will they do with all these newly liberated black folk? The protagonist is exquisitely developed, and his reactions to these social upheavals are believable and satisfying.
This book differs from Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker Buck’s China books in terms of style. The characters are much more finely drawn, the action more clearly delineated. Her China books (the two I’ve read, anyway) tend to have broader characters, and the years flow by. Perhaps this is an intentionally Eastern approach to narrative; it creates a fable-esque quality. That is absent from Wife, where she writes just like an American. (It is notable, however, that she originally published this under the wholesome All-American pseudonym of “John Sedges”.)
Next: Barrayar, the second (chronological) book of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan series. These writers and their names!
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