[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 possibility of tragic dimensions among the working poor. Jane Smiley aside, we don't have too many grass- or oil-stained Lears in current fiction (I note this with a certain amount of relief). American writers today seem far more interested in the rich, and when they do turn their attentions to the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder, they tend to focus either on the quieter, smaller-souled tribulations of normal Joes and Janes or else on the sensationalistic doings of drug addicts, crooks, serial killers, and other extreme types.

The situation has always seemed different in Britain, where novelists have shown a more consistent preoccupation with unglamorous but self-respecting lives. Pat Barker (particularly in her early books) and many others have taken up the argument advanced by Thomas Hardy a hundred years ago—namely, that full-sized emotions can thrive in the most unheroic of settings. And now, with the publication of Last Orders, Graham Swift does his part to extend that argument, focusing on the class of tradesmen and shopkeepers.¹ This remarkable novel, the author's sixth, traces the day-long journey of a group of male friends to dispose of their dead companion's ashes. In the process, it evokes a full range of hopes, jealousies, resentments, disappointments, and yes, tragic passions, all within the scope of a half-dozen severely circumscribed lives.

The book is structured loosely but cleverly. The skeleton of the story consists of a series of present-tense chapters recounting the day's drive from Bermondsey in the London suburbs to the seaside at Margate, where Jack Dodds, a butcher from a family of butchers, has asked that his ashes be scattered. Four men from the neighborhood have agreed to fulfill this last wish—Ray, Lenny, Vic, and Vince—and each one contributes to the evolving picture with reflective first-person monologues of his own, interwoven into the current action. This mosaic-technique, while certainly not unique in contemporary fiction, is unusually effective here, mainly because Swift is able to distinguish each perspective from the rest with an amazing subtlety of voice and perception. And while the transitions of thought and memory, like the detours in the physical journey, occasionally seem a little forced and self-conscious—motivated more by the will of the author than by the natural development of the story—the richness of the voices carries us through:

It ain't like your regular sort of day.

Bernie pulls me a pint and puts it in front of me. He looks at me, puzzled, with his loose, doggy face but he can tell I don't want no chit-chat. That's why I'm here, five minutes after opening, for a little silent pow-wow with a pint glass. He can see the black tie, though it's four days since the funeral.

The story unfolds indirectly, by the accretion of this kind of casually-conveyed detail. As the four men proceed from London to Rochester, to Chatham, to Canterbury (a significant way station, given the resemblance of this book to a latter-day Canterbury Tales), they gradually reveal more and more about how their lives intersected, for better or worse. Each stop on the journey becomes a station of the cross, accompanied by ritualized bouts of contemplation from each character. And by the time this carload of mourners reaches the Pier in Margate, they've summoned up a surprisingly profound and textured world—a world limited in variety of experience, maybe, but not in variety of emotion. Like the old proletarian novelists, Swift elevates some humble doings to a high emotional plane. He turns the story of “four blokes on a special delivery” into something as moving and grand in scale as a classical tragedy.

In his fifth novel, The Last of the Savages, Jay McInerney also reaches for tragic scale, though he's a lot less successful in the attempt than Swift is.² This highly schematic book tells the story of a friendship between two tidily-contrasted young men. As the action begins, Patrick Keane, the narrator, is a scholarship boy at a tony New England prep school. As deeply conventional as he is socially insecure, Patrick is eager to forget his common mill-town upbringing and launch himself into a preppie world of lacrosse tournaments, loose-moraled debutantes, and summer vacations at the family estates of his better-heeled classmates. He quickly falls under the spell of his roommate, Will Savage, who—though the scion of an old Southern family—has nonetheless rejected the very upper-class trappings that Patrick aches for. Having grown up in privilege, Will directs his romantic yearnings down the social register rather than up. He's obsessed by blues culture, and wants to spend his life discovering and promoting black Southern singers and musicians.

The book follows these two boys—one a self-styled rebel, the other an admitted “slave to convention”—as their friendship develops over decades. Patrick maintains his even keel, sailing straight from prep school to Yale to Harvard Law to a partnership in a New York law firm; Will, meanwhile, bounces more dramatically from triumph to disaster, getting into trouble with the law, alienating his family, and doing a pretty good imitation of a counterculture prince, with enough money behind him to keep a whole entourage in drugs, extravagant living quarters, and redneck weaponry. Meanwhile, the opposing characteristics of the two young men continue to divide neatly into McInerney's grand schema, with concepts like danger, vision, wildness, freedom, and defiance falling under the Will category, and safety, expedience, steadiness, bondage, and obedience lining up under the Patrick column. It begins to seem like writing-by-the-numbers.

Compounding this overarching problem of artificiality is the fact that everything in the book has a slightly generic quality. The story seems to draw less from real life than from other fiction—The Great Gatsby, A Separate Peace, the stories of Richard Yates. Every element in it carries the scent of a literary source, from the classic Tennessee Williams-style Savage family (two sons tragically killed, an ethereal, distant mother, etc.) to the prep school episode in which one roommate takes the rap for his weaker friend's violation of dorm rules (reminiscent of an early Tobias Wolff story). Even Patrick's sudden epiphanies seem borrowed:

I was tired of being alone again on New Year's Eve, that most melancholy of holidays. I had a terrible premonition of a solitary life, of dinners on TV trays and odd-smelling, transient rooms. Something was wrong with me; I was afflicted with a terrible self-consciousness which seemed to set me apart, doomed forever to be a spectator at the ball, watching the dancers from the sidelines.

Despite all this secondhand prose, however, I have to admit that The Last of the Savages is a surprisingly enjoyable read. Though Patrick's voice is often too stilted for comfort, his observations are always cleverly and deftly expressed. And one has to respect the fact that this narrator makes no attempt to deceive himself about his naked academic and social aspirations (during the campus unrest after Kent State, Patrick's main concern is that grading modifications at Yale might affect his applications to law school). He's ruthlessly honest with himself about most things—I won't reveal the one exception—and is eventually clear-sighted enough to recognize that his friendship with Will is his only saving grace, “the single daring and unpredictable choice I allowed myself along the way.” This final realization, moreover, makes for a fairly effective ending, even with the appearance on the last page of some overreaching water imagery lifted from The Great Gatsby's “boats against the current” conclusion. Although Savages is a disappointment after McInerney's very strong fourth novel, Brightness Falls, it's the work of a writer who at least has read a lot of great books.

We're presented with more overly-schematic plotting in Steven Millhauser's Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer.³ In this atmospheric novel, Millhauser puts his own idiosyncratic spin on a classic Horatio Alger story, filling the outlines of a rags-to-riches potboiler with a parable about the steep price of imagination. The book tracks the rising fortunes of its title character, a bright young lad in the 1890s who advances from hotel bellboy to cigar stand proprietor, restauranteur, hotelier, and finally real estate developer of a very special kind. Even as a teenager, Martin is a boy with plans: “[H]is passion was for working things out, bring things together, arranging the unarrangeable, making combinations.” He possesses that distinctly American mixture of grand vision and entrepreneurial energy, along with a permanent sense of dissatisfaction that pushes him on to greater and greater feats of capitalistic fervor. As each of Martin's dreams becomes a reality, a new and wilder dream is born, which he proceeds to pursue with a single-mindedness that borders on megalomania.

Anyone familiar with Millhauser's recent work can guess what form these dreams take. As in his story collection The Barnum Museum, Millhauser is obsessed here with elaborate, fantasy-like structures—independent clockwork worlds furnished with elaborate museum-like displays, all of which can be described, at great length, in exact, fussily-detailed prose. For instance, we hear much about the attractions in one of Martin's early hotels:

Thus there was a circular theater in which a panorama of the entire Manhattan shoreline continually unwound; a room containing a wigwam, a wax squaw gathering sticks, a young brave hacking a rock with a sharpened stone tool, and a seated chief smoking a long pipe, set against a painted background depicting a riverbank; and a hall called the Pageant of Industry and Invention, which contained working scale models of an Otis elevator, a steam train on an Elevated track, a Broadway cable car. …

And so on and so on. These buildings—“environments” might be a better word—are clearly intended by Millhauser as metaphors, and as Martin conceives of and subsequently builds his ever more elaborate “fever-dreams of stone,” he surrenders himself more completely to the dream-world of imagination they represent, distancing himself from the real world around him. Each new successful restaurant, hotel, or residence gives him the impetus (and capital) he needs to dream deeper, bigger, more outlandish dreams. Finally, he risks everything to build his magnum opus—the Grand Cosmo. More than a place in the city, the Cosmo is a replacement for the city, complete with artificial parks and ponds and gardens, a proto-Disney World where one could live for months without venturing out into the world of sunshine and air. In fact, that is exactly what Martin does. He moves into the Grand Cosmo and, like an artist unhealthily possessed by his vision, doesn't come out for a very long time.

Paralleling the trajectory of Martin's professional achievements is that of his erotic conquests. Here, too, the dichotomy of dream and reality is deeply rooted. In his relationships with the opposite sex, Martin finds himself attracted alternately to the earthy and the ethereal: a matronly hotel guest many years his senior, a ghostly ten-year-old girl, a broad and buxom chambermaid, and finally, the pair of sisters from whom he must choose a wife. Caroline is the dream-sister: remote, distracted, cold, and otherworldly; Emmeline is practical, smart, witty, and warm. Martin chooses the dream-sister as a wife (no surprise here), and lives to regret it. The marriage proves to be a failure, as does the Grand Cosmo, leaving Martin stranded with the rest of us on the prosaic shores of ordinary life.

Ultimately, then, the book can be read as a meditation on the ravages of uncompromising vision, and as such it's a fairly revealing portrait of the artist. Millhauser, too, has his odd and impractical vision that he's been realizing in book after book. But in this novel, as in his recent short stories, I find that vision disconcertingly limited. Millhauser's dreamworld, like Martin's, is closed, claustrophobic, and artificial—a diorama of life rather than the thing itself. So while Martin Dressler may be an interesting novel, it's never a powerful one.

After the slightly pretentious tone of both the McInerney and the Millhauser books, it was a relief to pick up Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land.⁴ This second novel has few high and noble aspirations; it's just a good old coming-of-age story, distinguished by the fact that it's a Chinese-American girl who's coming of age. And although the protagonist's ethnicity doesn't lend it all that much novelty in these days of Asian literary renaissance, it does give Jen some interesting specifics to work with, especially since Mona Chang, the Chinese-American in question, converts to Judaism halfway through the book. “Changowitz” is the name she wants to be known by, and it's a measure of the novel's loopiness that some people actually oblige her in this.

Mona is a first-generation kid, the daughter of Chinese-born parents who naturally approach life with very different attitudes than she does. To the extent that this book is about anything serious, it is about this generational clash. Mona's parents have worked hard in their adopted country to achieve a certain lifestyle—a nice house in the mostly Jewish Westchester suburb of Scarshill (read Scarsdale, wink, wink)—which Mona takes for granted. Whereas the goal of Mr. and Mrs. Chang is to attain the proper socioeconomic station in life, Mona's is to attain a more fuzzily-conceived state of self-realization. Thus the classic parent-child conflict develops: child believes parents are rigid, shallow, and intolerant, thinking only of money and getting ahead; parents believe child is spoiled, ungrateful, rebellious, thinking only of … well, God knows what that girl is thinking of. All the Changs can say for sure is that Mona is not the pliant and respectful Chinese girl they want her to be.

One of the book's greatest strengths is its prose, which nicely duplicates the eye-rolling sardonicism of a typical smart adolescent who pays attention in school:

[Naomi] is tall, and loose-limbed, almost hipless, and of completely average shelf size. Her facial addenda have a kind of mythic circularity—round glasses, hoop earrings, basketball Afro; if she were an archaeological ruin, you would surmise circles to be of central significance to her culture.

But this same prose can often veer toward the precious, as it does in the following excerpt, when Mona and her best friend Barbara Gugelstein celebrate the arrival of Barbara's period (and the end of their worried speculation that she might be pregnant):

Hooray! She and Mona celebrate with a ritual egg smash. O ovum, dear ovum, they intone. Be thou ever chary!

“Chary, or wary?” says Barbara. Mona isn't sure. Still they spend their hot line shift composing an ode with the rhyme scheme chary/scary/marry. They are finagling a way to work in hari-kari, when, lo and behold, guess who calls?

This cuteness becomes especially trying toward the end of the book, when telephones start “ding-ling”-ing instead of just ringing.

But the novel displays a good bit of verbal ingenuity even when it's going over the edge like this, and it captures better than anything else I've read the cultural hodgepodge that now exists in many suburban areas in this country, where all the waiters in the kosher deli are Chinese and the owner of the Italian restaurant hails from Bombay. This may represent another kind of adolescence—one that we're going through as a country, and in which the major question is “What does it mean to be an American?” rather than “What does it mean to be an adult?” Gish Jen provides no profound answers to either of these questions, but she clearly has some great fun posing them.

Another book that plays with the uneasy cultural juxtapositions of life in contemporary America is Cheaters, a first collection of stories by Dean Albarelli.⁵ As regular readers of The Hudson Review know (three of the stories in the collection originally appeared in these pages), Albarelli is something of a rarity—a Generation X-er who has managed to sidestep his contemporaries' overly ironic view of the world. In other words, he's not afraid to write about things that matter. I've been waiting for this book ever since I read my first Albarelli story back in the 1980s, and now that it has arrived I can happily report that I'm not disappointed.

One of the most heartening aspects of Albarelli's work is the fact that his characters, though almost exclusively white, don't all belong to some bland, undifferentiated category of middle-class Americans. He's grasped the fact that many people in this country are still shaped by their religious and ethnic backgrounds, even when that influence is submerged under several generations of homogenized modern life. His work, therefore, is populated by recognizable Catholics (both the Irish and Italian kind), Jews, and Protestants, all of whom carry the legacy of their heritage with them, without being narrowly defined by it. Maybe that's why these stories, though not always as pointed or dramatic as I'd like, nonetheless leave me with an impression of weight.

A recurring element in the collection is the young male protagonist involved with more than one woman (the “cheaters” of the title, I suppose). In “Passengers,” a married ferry captain starts an affair with his orthopedic nurse; a visiting professor in “Infatuated” takes up with one of his students while his longtime partner remains at home; the protagonist of the title story, a private investigator, is hired to tail a client's wife who is having an affair with his own former mistress; there's even a priest in “Flames” who's cheating on God, so to speak, by succumbing to the temptations of an old girlfriend.

The basic predicament of these characters, however, turns out to involve more significant emotions than a simple guilt over their duplicity and uncontrolled libidos. Albarelli finds in their situation a more universal expression of the confused, half-committed, morally-compromised state of being that seems to be a basic condition of life in the amorphous 1990s. And many of the best stories end with a hope of redemption—a hope that ties in with the persistent but unobtrusive presence of religion in Albarelli's fiction. The last story, appropriately titled “Grace,” makes this connection explicit. As the story closes, a straying husband (who was sleeping with another woman on the night that his wife Bitsy was brutally raped) finds himself yearning to confess:

I used to pray a lot when I was in Nam, more out of loneliness than being afraid most times, but this was the thing: … my prayers would always be spoken to Bitsy. Never to God, not dear Jesus or any of that crap, though I know it's not just crap for some. You can laugh, but it was like Bitsy, she was my God. Like everything was in her hands, or she could sort of oversee it all, anyway. Not everyone has someone like that, but like I said, Bitsy and I have been together since tenth grade, and I think maybe if you've got that kind of person, they can do for you what the nuns used to call Grace. There's just this one person who can tell you what you've done is okay, or whose forgiveness is the only thing that matters if it wasn't.

But for me the most accomplished piece in the collection is “The Orthodox Brother.” This beautifully modulated story opens with Laura Miller, a young unmarried woman who isn't particularly proud or demonstrative of her Jewish heritage, starting a new job and temporarily moving in with her older brother Adam. Having married an Orthodox woman, Adam now presides over a strictly traditional household, right down to the separate dishware for meat and dairy. In fact, the complexity of religious observance in the house is such that Laura finds herself constantly transgressing rules—taking the train and receiving phone calls on the Sabbath, for instance, or admitting in front of Adam's child that she had a BLT for lunch. But the central conflict in “The Orthodox Brother,” unlike that in some of the other fiction covered here, doesn't reduce down to an obvious schema, with Adam as the proud, religious Jew and Laura as the practical, self-denying one (Laura, for example, surprises herself at a party by vigorously defending the character of the Jews in an argument with a Holocaust revisionist). Instead, Albarelli treats us to a more sophisticated kind of storytelling—one that is fair to everyone but easy on no one, and that leaves us with a richer, more ambiguous sense of the issues and allegiances involved. Here and elsewhere in this adept collection, he writes with a mature appreciation for emotional subtleties, never tying his fictional world into a straitjacket of simplistic categories and contrasts.