RaveBookslut...Berlin describes all this with an inextricable naturalness born out of great labor and technical accomplishment. Her stories jump through time with the seamless ease of a daydream. The prose moves in fluent, luxurious sentences, then picks up the pace, transforming into fragments, turns-of-phrase, exclamations, and quickly noted detail. And she has a wry, loving kind of humor ... It's worth saying here that Berlin's work ought be celebrated not only for its technical accomplishment, but as a testament to a unique period in the history of women's (particularly white women's) lives in North America. Her stories stand next to those of Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant, and the novels of Mary McCarthy and Joan Chase among others, as a record of the radically different ambitions and life experiences held between generations of women during the twentieth century. But then, Lucia Berlin writes about cultures of class and work in the United States (and in Mexico and Chile), with a precision and breadth all her own. I can think of no one else who does so with the same compassion or expansive vision.
