A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin (2015)

A selection of brilliant short stories by the criminally underrated American author, Lucia Berlin (1936-2004).

Book Review:  A Manual for Cleaning Women is a book to let us know what we missed. To shine light on a genius of the short story who died before most of us met her. She belongs in, is essential to, any discussion of American writers, such as Raymond Carver, Thomas McGuane, Jim Harrison. Lucia Berlin writes ravenously of America. The down and out, the hanging on. Dust and dirt. Now I'm thinking John Fante, a scrap of Bukowski. This is the America of laundromats, emergency rooms, and what time the liquor store opens. Hard work and harder living. Then there are the more exotic stories, of Chile, Mexico, New York. Many stories of family, of living and dying. The stories in A Manual for Cleaning Women are built of layers, layers of onion skin, translucent, the reader can just see through to other layers: the top layer is interesting, another might catch your eye, but one of the layers underneath will make you cry. They're subtle, with depths that bear re-reading. Berlin rarely ventures from writing in the first person, characters reoccur, sometimes the names change, places change. Sometimes the stories seem as much memoir as fiction. As she says in one story: "I exaggerate a lot and I get fiction and reality mixed up, but I don't actually ever lie." Berlin lived a complicated and tumultuous life, she may have lived four or five lives, which provided the raw marble for these stories. She and her first person narrator are tough, school of hard knocks and all that. Four kids and no man. A PhD in Life.

Berlin has a skill that too few writers ever learn: when to stop writing. Most writers keep going long after the story has ended and finally just beat the poor thing to death. But Berlin chops off those last five unnecessary paragraphs, that superfluous last page. The stories are objective, impartial, honest, real. The reader is left with a thought, an image, a feeling, an intuition, but is never told what to think or how to feel. The stories are so direct and lucid as to seem effortless. They're of such uniform brilliance that it's difficult at first to detect Berlin's artistry. Of the 43 stories in this collection, all but one (maybe two) are faultless and fit her guidance to "write what you see, not what you want to see." That one, "Let Me See You Smile," is the exception that tests the rule, and by that shows the genius Lucia Berlin brought to the other stories. A Manual for Cleaning Women is a collection to be read slowly, to give it time to seep into your bones. Read Lucia.  [5★]