A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories by Lucia Berlin

"Stories from a lost American classic "in the same arena as Alice Munro" (Lydia Davis) "In the field of short fiction, Lucia Berlin is one of America's best kept secrets. That's it. Flat out. No mitigating conditions." --Paul Metcalf A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With her trademark blend of humor and melancholy, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday--uncovering moments of grace in the cafeterias and Laundromats of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Northern California upper classes, and from the perspective of a cleaning woman alone in a hotel dining room in Mexico City. The women of Berlin's stories are lost, but they are also strong, clever, and extraordinarily real. They are hitchhikers, hard workers, bad Christians. With the wit of Lorrie Moore and the grit of Raymond Carver, they navigate a world of jockeys, doctors, and switchboard operators. They laugh, they mourn, they drink. Berlin, a highly influential writer despite having published little in her lifetime, conjures these women from California, Mexico, and beyond. Lovers of the short story will not want to miss this remarkable collection from a master of the form"--

A bit of a slog. It's long, often tedious, and is infused with pain: alcoholism, addiction, emotional and physical abuse. Loneliness. Our deep yearning for connection. It took me over a week to read, it wasn't a book I was eager to pick back up.

And yet... her writing, her sensibility; tenderness, compassion, wistfulness. Berlin had tremendous insight and awareness. Her writing is graceful, with a simple clarity kind of like a summer mid-morning: not diffuse but not harsh, just the kind of light that lets you take it all in, the good and bad with less of the judgment than our brain so regularly tries to slap onto everyone. I'm really struck by how complex her characters can be - even in the shortest of the stories we see lives rich with ambiguity and depth.

The stories themselves — and this may be a slight spoiler but I would've liked to have known it before reading — are in large part inspired by her experiences but not autobiographical nor even connected. They're stories, and they're independent. Kind of like one of those refrigerator magnet word kits, Berlin picks from a set of building blocks: alcoholism, abusive mother, sister with cancer, growing up in Chile, work experience as cleaning lady or medical aide, life in Oakland or Albuquerque or Boulder or New York. Put them in a bag, shake them up, pick a few tiles to start with, and build on those. And I know that sounds so dismissive, but I don't mean it that way, I just can't think of a better analogy. The stories begin to feel familiar, but they're inconsistent with each other, and that confused me until I realized that they're what-ifs, not a narrative.

Much as I'd like to rate it five stars, I can't: it really was too long for me, and a nontrivial number of the stories were meh or less. But please don't let that put you off: this is a beautiful voice that you will be glad to discover.

This was, of course, a book club pick as I almost never choose short stories on my own unless it's an author I'm already all-in on. If they're good, I want them to be longer, and if they're not good, they're not good. This collection, from a previously little-known author, Lucia Berlin, was very buzzy a few years back so I hoped it might be one of the better ones. Alas, for me it was not. These stories vary in length from just a few pages to about 25ish, averaging about 10-15, so at least it moves quickly. Virtually all of them feature a female protagonist whose life has very similar details to Berlin's own: four children, a few failed marriages, a peripatetic childhood, odd jobs to stay afloat, alcoholism. They're little slices of a life that dangles now closer, now farther from the margins. Berlin's prose is clear, true, with sudden and bright flashes of dark humor. But the effect, for me, of having these stories collected together was to make them feel samey. There were moments, here and there, of truth so straightforwardly rendered it was nearly breathtaking, but on the whole I just could not key into what the introduction and foreword took pains to tell me was the brilliance on display here. Two stories featured themes I found hard to deal with and wish I would have known about ahead of time so I'll note them here for other readers: “Dr. H.A. Moynihan” has tooth-pulling that will horrify the squeamish, and “Mijito” has infant abuse and death.

This is now my most-highlighted book of fiction. Usually I can pick a definite favourite out of a book of short stories, plus several runners-up. Here I ended up with this:

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Berlin's stories are largely autobiographical, though fictionalised to some degree (or exaggerated, as she herself admits), and there are several third-person stories in this collection that seem to be fully fictional. She's so much stronger in the former though; her own first-person voice creates a character who's a keen observer, kind in her judgement of others, often nostalgic, and always just so recognisably cool. Cooler than any of her contemporaries, which makes it so hard to grasp why it took so long for her to find her audience.

Another distinctive feature of Berlin is her lack of elitism: for most of her life she worked lower-middle-class and working-class jobs, and her strongest stories are set in emergency rooms, clinics and laundromats. It's a good reminder of the perspective that is lost to literature now that almost all published writers teach MFA degree courses.