Townsman

The Townsman is a solid, workmanlike family saga with inadequate emotional underpinning and a fairy tale ending, except for this bleak portrait of a woman pushed to the limits of endurance, camping out in winter in a mud dugout on the prairie with an absent husband, a restive teenage son, a refractory toddler, and a sickly newborn baby.

PEARL BUCK IN CHINA Hilary Spurling 2010

The Townsman is a solid, workmanlike family saga with inadequate emotional underpinning and a fairy tale ending, except for this bleak portrait of a woman pushed to the limits of endurance, camping out in winter in a mud dugout on the prairie with an absent husband, a restive teenage son, a refractory toddler, and a sickly newborn baby.

PEARL BUCK IN CHINA Hilary Spurling 2010

But the details—whether taken in at the time or picked up from what others said afterward—lodged deep in her memory, surfacing half a century later in a novel called The Townsman, set on the rolling prairie of the American West at the time of the Gold Rush.

PEARL BUCK IN CHINA Hilary Spurling 2010

But the details—whether taken in at the time or picked up from what others said afterward—lodged deep in her memory, surfacing half a century later in a novel called The Townsman, set on the rolling prairie of the American West at the time of the Gold Rush.

PEARL BUCK IN CHINA Hilary Spurling 2010

Like Carie, Mary Goodliffe in The Townsman gives birth without doctor or midwife to her sixth child not counting the first, who plays no part in the story and seems indeed to have been largely forgotten by the author.

PEARL BUCK IN CHINA Hilary Spurling 2010

A quick look at the menus today -- still reassuringly published in the Andover Townsman -- tells me that times have changed.

Karen Kelly: Speak, Memory: School Lunch, an Embarrassment of Richness Karen Kelly 2010

A quick look at the menus today -- still reassuringly published in the Andover Townsman -- tells me that times have changed.

Karen Kelly: Speak, Memory: School Lunch, an Embarrassment of Richness Karen Kelly 2010

A quick look at the menus today -- still reassuringly published in the Andover Townsman -- tells me that times have changed.

Karen Kelly: Speak, Memory: School Lunch, an Embarrassment of Richness Karen Kelly 2010

The only equivalent given her by Richard was The Townsman, a relatively conventional saga of prairie pioneers set in his home state of Kansas.

PEARL BUCK IN CHINA Hilary Spurling 2010

The Townsman was published under the name “John Sedges.”

PEARL BUCK IN CHINA Hilary Spurling 2010