Review by New York Times Review
SOME SHORT STORY writers - Chekhov, Alice Munro, William Trevor - sidle up and tap you gently on the shoulder: Come, they murmur, sit down, listen to what I have to say. Lucia Berlin spins you around, knocks you down and grinds your face into the dirt. You will listen to me if I have to force you, her stories growl. But why would you make me do that, darlin'? Berlin's stories are the kind a woman in a Tom Waits song might tell a man she's just met during a long humid night spent drinking in a parking lot. They take place in the ragged borderlands on the outermost fringes of American life: West Texas ("the Holy Land," one character calls it), inner-city Albuquerque, the slums of Oakland - all dust and buses and latenight laundromats. Their characters are friendless children, pregnant teenagers, unmarried women past middle age in search of connection or just a bottle of vodka. More often than not, they are alcoholics. Many of them might be the same person at different stages in her life. The stories in "A Manual for Cleaning Women" are all linked, in that they're connected by the sensibility of the person who tells them, who has lived them. Nearly all the stories are told in the first person; when third-person protagonists surface, they tend to be a version of the first-person narrator. Characters fade in and out. Sometimes they share the author's name, or a variation of it; sometimes they have different names or go unnamed. What they all have in common is their rawness, as in knuckles rubbed raw, exposed. In one story, a man in a nursing home, a double amputee, screams constantly of the pain in his legs. The nurse tells him to hush - it's only phantom pain. "Is it real?" the narrator asks the nurse, who shrugs. "All pain is real." All pain is real could be Berlin's mantra, the motto of this collection. It's no accident that one of her alter egos is named Dolores. The narrator is sometimes a cleaning woman (as in the title story) or an emergency-room nurse, two jobs that require constant contact with the messier aspects of being human: blood, vomit, colostomy bags, hemorrhoids. The agonizing moments relived here are often rooted in the physical. The time her grandfather, a dentist, took her into his office and told her to pull out all his teeth: "The sound was the sound of roots being ripped out, like trees being torn from winter ground." The trip across the Mexican border to an abortion clinic, where she couldn't go through with it but watched another girl hemorrhage on the hallway floor. Her arrest in middle age with her teenage boyfriend: After he is beaten by a policeman, she licks clean his eyes, fused shut with blood. "The best thing that could happen to you would be for you to be uncomfortable once in a while," a teenage narrator, during a rare moment of privilege, is told by her teacher. In the context of this collection, it sounds like a bitter joke. The emotions in "A Manual for Cleaning Women" are maximalist, but the language is sparse and unadorned. Sentences are fragmentary, sometimes just single words. They turn on the sudden flash of an image, not the elegance of the construction. The language is so precise that it paradoxically creates ambiguities. "The strange thing was that for a year or so we were always at Angel's at the same time. But not at the same times." "Everybody hated Grandpa but Mamie, and me, I guess." Sometimes the ugliness is tempered by a momentary lyricism, often in the form of an overheard sound. Before her grandfather makes her pull out his teeth, the girl in that story hears children next door playing jacks, the sound "magical...like brushes on a drum or like rain, when a gust of wind shimmers it against the windowpane." In "Temps Perdu," with its incongruously romantic title, a young girl asks a boy her age what sex is like. "He held his hand up to mine so our fingers were all touching, had me run my thumb and forefinger over our touching ones. You can't tell which is which. Must be something like that he said." With its unique power to transform, at least momentarily, sex in a Lucia Berlin story is a possible (if unreliable) antidote to life's pain. Relationships - flings that last one night or one week - happen between strangers who meet at random. Eloise, a middle-aged teacher mourning her husband's death, finds herself strangely at home in a cheap Mexican hotel frequented by scuba-diving fishermen, one of whom teaches her to dive. One day they embrace far beneath the surface. "She realized then that his penis was inside her; she twined her legs around him as they spun and undulated in the dark sea. When he left her his sperm drifted up between them like pale octopus ink." Is this realistic or even possible? It somehow doesn't matter. Berlin's stories make love itself seem so improbable that it is best viewed through the lens of magical realism. In "Melina," several men confess to the narrator that they were once madly in love with a woman who "wasn't like anyone in this world," her skin like white silk or milk glass. In an almost impossible coincidence, the narrator meets her and befriends her. One night, after dinner, she offers to read Melina's palm and tells her the story of her life. "You are a witch," Melina whispers, amazed. That label appears more than once in "A Manual for Cleaning Women," always regarding a character who knows everything there is to know about another person, or seems to. If that's the definition of a witch, then Berlin must have been one as well. (She died in 2004, on her 68th birthday.) In "Point of View," the closest she comes to writing about writing, the narrator explains that she hopes "to make this woman so believable you can't help but feel for her." That "can't help but feel" implies a certain defenselessness on the part of the reader, and a triumphant power for the narrator. It's an affirmation of the radical empathy any great fiction writer must embrace. It's also a spectacular claim to authority - perhaps an authority that can come only from lived experience. Indeed, these stories often feel more like stream-of-consciousness memories than like fiction. They are all beginnings and middles with no ends, which is to say that the end often comes the way it does in life, via a death or a departure rather than a well-turned phrase. In her foreword, Lydia Davis affirms that the stories conform in many of their details to the outlines of Berlin's life, which was "rich and full of incident," and describes her genre as similar to the French auto-fiction or "self-fiction": "the narration of one's own life, lifted almost unchanged from the reality, selected and judiciously, artfully told." One of Berlin's sons says something similar, but closer to the way she might have said it herself: "Ma wrote true stories, not necessarily autobiographical, but close enough for horseshoes." Though I'm an admirer of Davis's writing, I couldn't bring myself to read her foreword, or the book's introduction by Stephen Emerson, until I had finished the collection. Something about this book made me feel, as I picked it up for the first time, that it was important to encounter the stories on their own terms. Now I know a little more: that Berlin first began publishing her stories at age 24, in Saul Bellow's magazine The Noble Savage, and later with small presses like Turtle Island and Poltroon. Though her work was beloved by many writers and her volume "Homesick" won the American Book Award in 1991, she never found a large number of readers - perhaps because she resided on the margins of the literary world, or perhaps because of the uncompromising, unsanitized nature of her writing. Berlin's stories are full of second chances. Now readers have another chance to confront them: bites of life, chewed up and spat out like a wad of tobacco, bitter and rich. What these characters have in common is their rawness, as in knuckles rubbed raw, exposed. RUTH FRANKLIN, author of "A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction," is currently at work on a biography of Shirley Jackson.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 9, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Begin reading a Berlin short story and you know immediately that you are in the presence of a unique and searing literary force. Yet Berlin (1936-2004), published in the 1980s and 1990s by small presses, has heretofore been passionately appreciated by only a small, select audience. This revelatory volume now brings her forward to stand beside her peers, including Grace Paley, as writer and translator Lydia Davis (Can't and Won't, 2014) avers in her rousing foreword. Volume editor Stephen Emerson provides further biographical background, since Berlin's peripatetic life (Alaska, Albuquerque, Chile, the Bay Area), three marriages, four sons, and rising and falling income levels and wildly varied jobs provided her with fertile material for her tales of shattering perception, razor humor, and whiplash surprise. Berlin is exceptionally attuned to the randomness of life, its pains and pleasures, our vulnerability and resiliency. She portrays a young, grieving, acidly witty woman taking measure of the aberrations she witnesses as a cleaning woman; an abandoned, pregnant wife considering an abortion; a nurse cradling an injured jockey. As characters recur and settings and predicaments vary, Berlin unflinchingly strips bare casual and catastrophic cruelty and injustice, dramatizing, as one narrator puts it, times of intense technicolor happiness and times that were sordid and frightening. An essential collection of jazzy, jolting, incisive, wryly funny, and keenly compassionate, virtuoso tales.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Berlin, who may just be the best writer you've never heard of, has a gift for creating stories out of anything, often from events as apparently mundane as a trip to the laundromat. Imagine a less urban Grace Paley, with a similar talent for turning the net of resentments and affections among family members into stories that carry more weight than their casual, conversational tone might initially suggest. Many of the strongest stories here are autobiographical, featuring Berlin's stand-in (sometimes called Lucille, sometimes Carlotta) and her sons, husbands and lovers; a range of jobs, mostly pink collar, but occasionally, as in the title story, blue; a complicated backstory across two continents; and a problem with booze. Berlin's offbeat humor, get-on-with-it realism, and ability to layer details that echo across stories and decades give her book a tremendous staying power. The collection could be tighter (there are over 40 stories, some only minor) and could give readers a better sense of how they're sequenced, but this collection goes a long way toward putting Berlin, who died in 2004, back in the public eye. Agent: Katherine Fausset, Curtis Brown. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A posthumous collection of stories, almost uniformly narrated by hard-living women, that makes a case for the author as a major talent. From the 1960s through the '80s, Lucia Berlin (1936-2004) published brilliant stories for low-profile publicationsher six collections all appeared with reputable but small presses. One suspects she might have had a higher profile had her subject matter been less gloomy: she mined her history of alcoholism in stories like "Her First Detox" and "Unmanageable," which detail the turmoil of the DTs and lost potential, and her work in hospitals in stories like "Emergency Room Notebook, 1977," which establishes a milieu of "rich massive coronaries, matronly phenobarbital suicides, children in swimming pools." Yet the prevailing sensibility of this book, collecting 43 of the 76 stories Berlin published, is cleareyed and even comic in the face of life hitting the skids. The title story, for instance, balances wry commentary about housecleaning work ("never make friends with cats") and deadpan observation ("I clean their coke mirror with Windex") with a sad, thrumming back story. Similarly, "Sex Appeal" is narrated by a girl watching her older cousin primp for a date only to realize that she herself is the lecherous man's lust objecta discovery Berlin presents with both a sense of surprise and foreboding. Berlin's skill at controlling the temperature of a story is best displayed in her most emotionally demanding material. In "Tiger Bites," narrated by an El Paso woman who heads to Juarez for an illegal abortion, the pain of her experience and the pieties of her family at home collide. And "Mijito," which deserves to be widely anthologized, exposes how an immigrant woman's best intentions to care for her ailing son are easily derailed by circumstance and obligation. A testament to a writer whose explorations of society's rougher corners deserve wider attention. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
