Sino-Japanese Romance

THE PATRIOT -- Pearl S. Buck -- John Day ($2.50).

One consequence of winning the Nobel Prize for Literature is that the prizewinner's next books come in for much severer criticism. If any Nobel Prizewinner stands to escape such hardening of the public heart, it is Pearl Buck. With her usual unpretentious candor, she was the first to admit that the Nobel Prize award honored her beyond her deserts. "That's ridiculous," she said when she heard the news. "It should have gone to Dreiser."

But, as critics realized on second thought, the Nobel Prize went to Pearl Buck only partly for The Good Earth. The democratic-minded Swedish Academy was also giving an accolade to Pearl Buck's sympathy for the Chinese common people, and to her telling attacks, in her magazine articles, on the dictators. The influence of her writing far transcends its importance as literature.

By such standards, The Patriot ranks with her best work. Aiming at twice the scope of The Good Earth, Pearl Buck this time pays tribute to the common people of Japan as well as China.

The patriot is Iwan, idealistic favorite son of a powerful Shanghai banker. Drawn into a secret group of revolutionary students, he organizes an armed corps among the Shanghai silkworkers, narrowly escapes Chiang Kai-shek's blood purge of the Communists in 1927. His father saves his life by exiling him to Japan.

In Japan, where half the book is laid, Iwan is soon soothed by the exquisitely regimented life of the Muraki family, surmounts exquisitely ruthless objections to marry their beautiful daughter Tama. They have two sons, live a happy life--until news of the war in China leaks through the almost impenetrable censorship. When the Japanese begin bombing Shanghai, Iwan goes home to fight. But before he does so, he and Tama have made their private peace. Stoically heartbroken Tama vows to keep his photograph surrounded with flowers, not to let their sons forget him.

Now solidly repatriated after 35 years in China, Pearl Buck lives with her second husband and publisher, Richard John Walsh, on a 130-acre farm in Bucks County, Pa. She divides her great energies between tending nine children (one of her own, her husband's three, their adopted five) and writing the "books I want to write." Never waiting for moods --"you'd never get anything done if you did"--she writes about four hours a day, in terms of episodes, never halting in the emotional crises, but never going into one just before lunch. Declaring she would rather be an "American writer than anything else," she is gradually unlearning the habit of thinking in Chinese idiom. Her next book (finished in fact before The Patriot) will be a sequel to her weakest novel, This Proud Heart, her first with a U. S. setting. She says she will never again live in China, may visit it when she knows for certain "what shape it will assume."

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