A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin is a compact nearly four hundred page collection of Berlin’s stories, published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
Do you really need to read almost four hundred pages of Berlin stories? Of course, that’s overkill in the case of most writers. And you would probably do very well for yourself if you read half a dozen Berlin stories instead. That would give you a good idea of her work.
But art and the luxury of art, which amount to the same thing, can encourage us to make irrational choices. It’s my role in this review to demonstrate why you might want to be irrational in the case of Berlin’s stories and read them cover to cover.
There are many, many middling writers who could come up with a story or two or maybe even a couple of novels that you wouldn’t mind reading and enjoying. But pursuing their work after that point would be an exercise in redundancy. Like the second season of some streaming dramas; it might be more of the same recombined and mixed up in a slightly different way.
But stories that sustain a longer interest than that have a deep structure of character and originality. It’s like the difference between your local savings bank, which may go under someday, and the Federal Reserve. Lucia Berlin is like a member of the board whose chairmanship is held by Raymond Carver.
Her real life jobs as a cleaning woman or doctor’s assistant turned into stories about those jobs. Her alcoholism turned into intense stories about living life as a drunk, or fighting to get clear of it. There’s a set of stories that represent a family history. Those stories seem to half-assemble themselves into a novel but then abort. They remain luminous fragments with recurring characters.
There’s one acidic story about an alcoholic mother who tries to get to an early morning liquor store for a fix and return to her apartment to get her kids ready for school before they are any the wiser. She’s shaking and can barely move her legs. She’s worried that she’ll have a seizure before reaching the liquor store. So she counts the cracks on the pavement to get a grip on herself as she drags her ass to the store.
One story describes an older woman alone of an evening in her apartment. She watches 60 Minutes, even though she is not interested in current affairs, because she likes the people. Then she watches Murder She Wrote, even though she doesn’t like the show, because there’s nothing else on. Those shows were on consecutively in the ‘80’s on Sunday nights.
Then she takes a treat of a bath, a small indulgence. Finally from her bed she leans…keens…towards her bedroom window at some bare traffic and minor street life: her “contact” with the world for the evening.
In the same innovative story, Pirandello-like, Berlin openly discusses whether the story should be in first or third person. Berlin sticks to the traditional third person narration…until the end…where she uncannily and without warning slips into first. But is it Berlin talking to us directly or is it her character? The veil between the writer and her character is rent. She is the character. She is the writer. Both.
There are stories of growing up hardscrabble. What it’s like to be illiterate not only in the foreign language of English but also in the native language of Spanish. What it’s like to have to take the bus and hardly ever be in a car. Is this your first time in an elevator? Now find a job under those conditions. Speaking of which, in our times, stories about Mexicans and gringos, about Mexican lives and El Paso lives.
There’s a story about a young girl who has to help her crazy grandfather dentist pull out his own teeth. There are prison and substance abuse stories, a story about a posh Laundromat and a poor one. One of my favorite stories is probably the longest, about a straight-laced lawyer who is loosened up by a teenaged hippie couple who have some remarkable problems with the police.
Lucia Berlin’s stories, when she and her readers have had the courage to face up to them, contain unshielded razors. In Berlin, even happiness bleeds and you may find yourself laughing shortly before you start crying. Reading through the stories once, I’d like to read them again.
I bought my copy at Rizzoli Bookstore. Just to plug a nice store. I like to look at the book spines for the Farrar imprint and then consider buying those.
Dennis Haritou is the managing editor of Litbreak Magazine
