by Linda Rodriguez
Pearl
Buck is one of those once-great and now-forgotten authors who’s
getting a new lease on life through the influence of Oprah Winfrey.
In late 2004, Winfrey selected Buck’s The
Good Earth for
Oprah’s Book Club. Simon & Schuster's Washington Square Press
printed 750,000 copies of a new trade paperback version of the book.
Most of Buck’s novels had fallen out of favor with critics and
fallen out of print. The discussion that ensued around this Oprah’s
Book Club Selection brought several of Buck’s finest books back
into print once more.
I
know it’s fashionable in literary circles to criticize Oprah, but I
believe she provides America, in general, and literary culture, in
particular, a real service in encouraging reading and in bringing
recognition to forgotten or overlooked works. Look at what happened
to Buck. Even though Buck was the first American woman to receive the
Nobel Prize for Literature, her bestselling and award-winning books,
such as The
Good Earth,
Sons,
A
House Divided,
Other
Gods,
China
Sky,
Dragon
Seed,
Pavilion
of Women,
Peony,
The
Big Wave,
and Imperial
Woman,
had mostly been out of print. The gatekeepers of American literature,
professors and critics, had pretty much consigned her books to the
ash heap as “not literary enough” and “too popular” until
Oprah pointed a spotlight back on her Pulitzer Prize-winning
masterpiece, The
Good Earth.
This
is a recurring problem with modern American literary criticism, which
is primarily based in academia. When writers originally considered
literary and praised for their work become too popular or—heaven
forbid!—make too much money from their books, they are soon scorned
and relegated to the cultural ash heap of “not literary enough”
and “too popular.” If they start out popular and sell well, those
works may never even be considered literary—because how can they be
if they’re so popular, right? In large part, this derives from a
literary culture which has moved mostly to the university and where
established writers and critics have their bills paid by other means
than their writing. Another whole blog post right there! And in that
category of another blog post to come, why is that male novelists can
write one or two strong books and be forgiven for weak, meandering
work after that for the sake of those powerful books, but too often
women writers can write a number of strong books, yet if they should
have even one weaker, less well-crafted book, all their work must
then be dismissed?
Buck
was a remarkable writer and remarkable person, who as a missionary’s
child in China found in her backyard the mutilated remains of infant
daughters abandoned to die and made them graves, as a teen
volunteered to teach ex-brothel workers and sex slaves, as an adult
novelist was accused in the U.S. of being a Communist while Maoist
China accused her of being an imperialist. She thought, even as an
adult in America, in Chinese first. English was always her second
language. Even in her writing, she thought in Chinese and translated
onto the page into simple, lucid, and powerful English. She worked
tirelessly to improve the lot of minorities, women, and children,
especially those with disabilities, in America and China. And wrote
many books and shorter pieces, some weak and some extremely powerful.
At the end of her long life, a frail elder in thrall to a con man,
she degenerated in a sad way from the person she had been for most of
her life.
Buck
always had the reader in mind when she wrote rather than the critics,
so it may be a given that the critics would turn their backs on her.
I love what Buck said in her Nobel acceptance speech. She pointed out
that, in China, "the novelist did not have the task of creating
art but of speaking to the people." “Like the Chinese
novelist,” she said, "I have been taught to want to write for
these people. If they are reading their magazines by the million,
then I want my stories there rather than in magazines read only by a
few.” Perhaps this is why her stories of people’s lives,
especially women’s, are so enthralling. I know they have helped me
through times of great physical and emotional pain.
Do
you have authors whom you have loved and who have meant a lot to you
who have fallen into disrepute or completely disappeared?
Linda Rodriguez's Plotting the
Character-Driven Novel, based on her popular workshop, and The
World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East,
an anthology she co-edited, are her newest books. Every Family
Doubt, her fourth mystery novel featuring Cherokee campus police
chief, Skeet Bannion, will appear January 17, 2018. Her three earlier
Skeet novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust,
and Every Last Secret—and
her books of poetry—Skin Hunger
and Heart's Migration—have
received critical recognition and awards, such as St. Martin's
Press/Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International
Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices
& Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and
Ragdale and Macondo fellowships. Her short story, “The Good
Neighbor,” published in the anthology, Kansas City Noir, has
been optioned for film.
Rodriguez is past chair of the AWP
Indigenous Writer’s Caucus, past president of Border Crimes chapter
of Sisters in Crime, founding board member of Latino Writers
Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of International
Thriller Writers, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and
Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community. Visit her at
http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com
