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 ... 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.
Loneliness and shame creep through stories set in hospitals, detox clinics, old people’s homes and prisons, but despite the frequently bleak territory Berlin’s writing is characterised by an enormous appetite for life, for humour and for love ... Berlin’s style is direct, reaching out from the page to the reader. You might be fooled into thinking you’re reading letters from a friend when she drops in lines such as 'I know, I romanticise everything', or 'I exaggerate a lot and I get fiction and reality mixed up, but I don’t actually ever lie.' But this almost chatty style is undercut by brutal one-liners and swift reversals that, along with skilful narrative shaping, remind you that these are painstakingly crafted stories.
Rather than dwelling on the difficulties faced, or chasing after illusory solutions, Berlin’s characters sit with their challenges, move quietly toward their difficulties and find a way to keep standing on their slick and tilted floors ... Through measured use of sentence fragments, unexpected word choices and fascinating juxtapositions, Berlin’s stories embody rather than merely describe the challenges faced by her marginalized narrators and protagonists ... Unlike the chiseled tales of her contemporary Raymond Carver, to whom she has been compared, Berlin’s beautiful, rangy prose builds into unpredictable shapes that speak of the sprawling rural and urban western and South American landscapes that fueled her imagination.
There’s a radical kind of transparency to her work. Ms. Berlin has a gift for describing the intimate lives of her characters, many of them harried and divorced single mothers who have been, or are, addicted to strong drink or far worse ... She was unusually perceptive about working life, a subject that still gets short shrift in American letters. The title story, a near masterpiece, is told from the perspective of a woman who cleans houses, including those of her friends, to survive after her husband has died ... This book should have been better. The foreword by Lydia Davis and the introduction by its editor, Stephen Emerson, maddeningly overlap. Each says the same thing many times (basically, 'Look how talented my friend Lucia Berlin was') while skimping on what you really want, which is context and biographical detail ... This book would have been twice as good at a bit more than half the length. Ms. Berlin is a writer you want in your back pocket; this volume’s tombstone heft turns her into homework. Stories could have been omitted. In some she went in for twist endings you see coming a block away. She could veer toward melodrama.
This fiction isn’t quiet or composed; there’s plenty of pain, but there’s rarely pathos. Berlin’s tales of addiction and violence, formally unpredictable and drolly grotesque, defy our expectations for working-class fiction ... Unlike Carver, Berlin didn’t generalize or ironize working-class experience; she instead presented her neighbors in all their compelling specificity ... What this writing affirms is the beautiful, broken human body as well as Berlin’s rightful place in the canon of American short fiction.
This is, unfortunately, not a terrific title—too arch, and a puzzling prompt for a reader unfamiliar with the style and delights of Berlin’s tough, joyous, and slantwise sensibilities. Lydia Davis, in her excellent foreword, speaks of the 'buzz and crackle' of Berlin’s stories, her companionable and engaging voice, her clarity and unpredictability. Davis finds her writing 'exhilarating.' And it is. It’s swift and real. She is never mannered, never false or corrupt. She serves up perfect slices of life’s pie on clean cracked plates.
Zestfully written, seemingly artless, drawn from eight previously published collections, the forty-three stories in the posthumous A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin seek to persuade us of their authenticity by this quick, deft, unerring selection of 'intricate detail' while making no claim at all for 'impartiality' ... Berlin’s protagonists are unflinching in self-castigation, which is not to be confused with self-loathing; as the narrator forgives others, with a readiness that may surprise the reader at times, so she forgives herself for her chronic bad behavior ... Those unfamiliar with Berlin’s fiction are advised to read A Manual for Cleaning Women at least twice, for essentially this is a memoir of the author’s life related in installments and fragments that fit together upon a second reading and generate a considerable emotional power. It is an achievement greater than the sum of its heterogeneous parts.
Having all these Berlin stories assembled together really gives a sense of their breadth: Berlin (and her fictional narrators) have seen it all — from the rich girls' schools in Chile, to the trailer parks and laundromats where folks live who routinely bum bus fare and beer money ... If you want consolation or uplift from your short stories, look elsewhere. Berlin had been around the block a few too many times to sugarcoat things. But her hard-earned, one-of-a-kind voice and vision make these stories well worth the pain.
[Berlin's stories] alternate between light and dark so seamlessly and suddenly that a certain emotion barely fades before you feel something abruptly different. The bleakness of some of her subjects — alcoholism, suicide, sickness — belies her wonderful gift for coaxing humor from the most improbable material. The comic moments, in turn, shade into deep poignancy. The result is a fictional world of wide-ranging impact, a powerful chiaroscuro that manages to encompass the full spectrum of human experience ... Berlin is not usually placed in the pantheon of short-story writers but deserves to be ranked alongside Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, and Anton Chekhov. She excels at pacing, structure, dialogue, characterization, description, and every other aspect of the form.
Berlin's terrific posthumous collection, A Manual for Cleaning Women, makes the case that syntax is a way of noticing things, as sentence after sentence spins out in an unexpected but, it turns out, exactly right direction ... Berlin's characters are the scraped-raw, scraping-by types who populate every medium of American art, but they don't feel familiar. The mythos that drags down Denis Johnson's or Charles Bukowski's stories is sublimated here, turned back on itself. If there's something beautiful or romantic about Berlin's laundromats and crosstown buses, it's a surplus that no one in them can collect, and yet the stories are funny, warm, light-footed even when they break your heart ... As a writer, she's like the genius in the movies who stares at a huge blackboard crisscrossed with equations, scrawls a few characters, corrects a subscript, and solves the big problem that's stumped the best minds in the field.
These 43 stories, mostly published from the 1960s to the ’80s, illuminate a gritty world where pink-collar workers seek illegal abortions, endure unwanted caresses from strange men and scavenge for pennies to nurse their addictions ... While Berlin’s tales are of a particular time—one character tells her 11-year-old cousin that crooked stocking seams have sex appeal—hindsight hones their relevance. In the decade since Berlin’s death, the economic chasm between the haves and have-nots has widened, especially among women. Berlin’s stories feel like nudges to a feminist movement that in its eagerness to evolve has left some of the less fortunate behind.
Berlin’s language is succinct and tightly focused, its effects on the reader immediate, saturating, and her imagery is crystalline in its formation on the page and in the reader’s mind. Yes, she must be read ... The brilliance of Berlin’s stories lies in a combination of her precise, incisive language and expert narrative-making. There are stories in this collection whose events will cause the rapid beating, and subsequent crushing, of your heart ... In reading Berlin, you will forget where you are sitting, who else is in the house, what you have to do later this afternoon. You will be entranced. With Berlin, the story, above all else, is the thing.
...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.
Lucia Berlin's electrifying posthumous collection A Manual for Cleaning Women is a miracle of storytelling economy, showcasing this largely unheard-of writer's genius for streetwise erudition and sudden, soul-baring epiphanies. Set in the American Southwest, California, Mexico, Chile, and New York City, these darkling narratives—about women struggling with addiction, low-wage and blue-collar jobs, romantic entanglements, and single motherhood; or youngsters coming of age amid family chaos and dislocation—mirror Berlin's own life.
Life (and a long battle with alcohol) prevented her from publishing regularly, but it’s all here in 43 autobiographical stories that read like one long, fascinating conversation full of switchbacks and revelations. Every detox ward, dingy Laundromat, and sunbaked Mexican palapa spills across the page in sentences so bright and fierce and full of wild color that you’ll want to turn each one over just to see how she does it. And then go back and read them all again.
The vivacity, humor, sorrow, pragmatism and sheer literary star power that fill the 43 stories collected in A Manual For Cleaning Women hit with such immediacy and vigor that it seems unbelievable that their author, Lucia Berlin, died in 2004, at the age of 68, before most of us ever knew about her ... Anyone who loves the stories of Grace Paley and Lorrie Moore will find another master of the form here -- and will feel immense gratitude to the supporters who brought us this collection, selected from earlier small-press editions of her work.
Yes, Lucia Berlin is female and writes with dry wit, but where Moore is self-consciously clever, Berlin is a bit more understated. She is not concerned with punch lines. She has a Dybekian obsession with grace in tough places that is anything but clever, or—god forbid—quirky. When I read these stories, I was reminded of Joy Williams and Barry Hannah, but even more so, of authors like Beth Nugent, Stephanie Vaughn, Amanda Davis—three more tragically underappreciated women whose short stories were spiky before it was cool. But Lucia Berlin isn’t truly similar to anything I’ve read before ... Granted, not every story in the collection is a masterpiece. A few do end abruptly, leaving the reader feeling unfulfilled. Some stories become melodramatic or contain twists and turns that feel forced. But that’s a small handful out of forty-three. And even in that handful are moments of linguistic delight, phrases so finely turned you copy them into a notebook.
Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women is sure to be lauded as a model of short-story writing. Berlin’s skill in telling these witty, grease- and blood-smudged tales means they are great reads—quick moments of suffering and weird shared joy. They draw attention to the dark corners and rusted-out cars where real life happens in its ugly glory ... This posthumous collection, 43 of her previously published short stories, is the world’s chance to see beauty in rusted ruins. A Manual for Cleaning Women reflects a masterful view of the world, a celebration of art in the ordinary.
