A novel chronicling the fortunes of a Chinese family inevitably invites comparison with Pearl Buck's The Good Earth (1931); and to the extent that Lord's novel deals with generational conflict and relationships, the two books are similar. They differ in that Buck's characters are peasants whose troubles are mainly brought on by natural catastrophes, whereas Lord depicts aristocrats displaced by social cataclysm.

There are echoes also of Chinese writer Pa Chin who, in the 1930s, wrote of the demise of the patriarchal Chinese family system along with the Confucian ideals on which that system had been built. Unlike Pa Chin, however, whose chronicles of the end of an era reveal a deep-rooted disapproval of the old ways, Lord is more ambivalent in her sympathetic portrayal of the two ways of life, and of the very human characters caught in the conflict. Underlying Spring Moon is an unvoiced...