Books: The Distaff Drudge

THE TIME IS NOON by Pearl Buck. 383 pages. John Day. $6.95.

Pearl Buck, 74, is the most durable of a class of doughty women writers—also including Edna Ferber and Faith Baldwin—who flourished in the '20s and '30s, weathered the '40s, and have been losing much of their audience ever since. They appealed to women who had got the vote and, later, the household appliances that set them free to ponder Womanhood. What they wanted to hear was how tough it all had been, and no one told them more relentlessly than Author Buck, who, in her 32 novels and obsessive memoir writing, has ennobled the distaff drudge while painting a bleak picture of men and marriage.

Pearl Buck's outlook owes more to experience than art. The eldest daughter of missionaries in China, she watched her "God-drunk" father ignore his wife and deprive his children in the name of the Lord, and worse, saw her mother's love for her father turn to silent hatred. In her autobiographical novel The Time Is Noon, written over 25 years ago but unpublished until now, it is business as usual in the hard-labor camp by the hearth. The setting is not the Anhwei of The Good Earth but a village in Pennsylvania. The young heroine drags from crisis to crisis: her mother's long slow death from cancer, brother's bastard child, sister's orphaned infants, her own hopelessly retarded baby. Men appear in the story only long enough to leave trouble at the door.

The story is told with honesty, steady narrative drive and, occasionally, staggering naiveté. Undertakings like The Time Is Noon are mostly therapy for their author, to exorcise a painful past.