Woman's World

PAVILION OF WOMEN (316 pp.)--Pearl S. Buck--John Day ($3.50).

Pearl Buck has probably done more than anyone except the Japanese Army to bring China's problems home to the U.S. public. Her new novel has none of the impressively rugged, panoramic qualities of The Good Earth, but it is nevertheless a problem novel, centered upon a rich, traditionally minded Chinese family in the year preceding the Japanese invasion.

The wealthy Wus dwell on the same spot, in the same way as 20 previous generations of Wus. They grow only in the sense that as the decades pass there are new betrothals, new pregnancies, new fields added to the swollen estate. Sixty souls are virtually imprisoned in this private village--grandams, prolific couples, washerwomen, ladies'-maids. Into their harmonious midst, Mrs. Wu, matriarchal ruler of the establishment, suddenly introduces an astounding innovation--a concubine for her own husband.

Matter-of-fact Mrs. Wu introduces the concubine for the simplest of reasons: she is forty years old and she has never loved her husband. Through the long years she has strictly fulfilled her duties to the house of Wu. Now she wants to retire from her responsibilities and indulge her secret ambition, the pursuit of learning.

Pavilion of Women is the story of what Mrs. Wu learns. But the learning comes not through her studies of astronomy and religious philosophy, but through the upheaval caused by her withdrawal as a wife. Poor Mr. Wu doesn't like his concubine one bit, and goes dashing off to brothels instead. The concubine attempts suicide. The younger Wus flee to Nanking and the U.S. It all comes right in the end--but the new Wu family can never be the same.

The hero of Pavilion of Women is an idealized Italian priest, long excommunicated from his own church because he insists on holding heretical views; e.g., Mrs. Wu is taught by him that all honest faiths are qualitatively equal. It is also Brother Andre who gently convinces Mrs. Wu that the devotion to duty on which she so prided herself was largely a veiled form of ruthless dictatorship, and that it is the act of a despot to purchase another woman "like a pound of pork."

Pavilion is likely to be a popular novel, especially with women, but its popularity will be due not to its literary or philosophical qualities but to its precise and colorful descriptions of women's lives and customs at the other end of the world.

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