SOURCE: Krist, Gary. “Schemers and Schemas.” Hudson Review 49, no. 4 (winter 1997): 687-94.

In the following essay, Krist evaluates several works of recent fiction, including Jen's Mona in the Promised Land, about the working poor. Krist asserts that Mona's prose style is one of its greatest strengths, but comments that the narrative tends to be annoyingly cute in some passages.

There was a time when the working classes were an endlessly fertile subject for writers in this country. Honorable lives played out in dreary, poverty-straitened circumstances seemed to contain enough color and passion to fill any number of novels, short stories, and plays. Writers like John Steinbeck, Henry Roth, John Dos Passos, and Clifford Odets even based a movement on this conviction—the “proletarian literature” movement—characterized by an earnest belief in the dramatic potential of the common man. Nowadays, though, we seem a little more cynical about the...