Berlin, Lucia. A Manual for Cleaning Women. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2015 (stories all published previously here selected posthumously) F;11/20.

This is a big collection (43 stories) of mostly linked and mostly autobiographical tales written by a sort of female Hemingway. Berlin lived a raucous life, at times wealthy at times destitute, much of it alcoholic, in Alaska, Albuquerque, El Paso, Mexico, Santiago, Oakland. She’d been married three times by the age of 34, and started writing in her 20s but published most of her stories when she was fiftyish. The stories are harsh, rub-your-nose-in-it slices of life that are straightout stated, never straying into affected simplicity. Lovely things and terrible things just happen.

The first story, Angel’s Laundromat, had my reverse-snobbery antenna vibrating: encounters with “a tall old Indian in faded Levi’s and a fine Zuni belt.” The next three stories deal with narrator’s swashbuckling dentist grandfather, a young girl’s non-conformism in a Catholic school, the titular cleaning woman taking buses. I wasn’t impressed.

But then came My Jockey, one of the shortest. An emergency room nurse carries an injured semicomatose jockey to the x-ray and her emotions were exactly what I’ve watched professional emergency room people experiencing. Routine routine routine, and then BOOM motherhood, astounding admiration, sex flying by, appreciation of perfection breaking through the perfunctory job, without that job and the poker face it requires changing in the least.

Point of View I think is the only one where the narrator is a writer. We are told

“I’m a single woman in her late 50s. I work in a doctor’s office. I ride home in the bus. Every Saturday I do my laundry and then I shop at Lucky’s and buy the Sunday Chronicle and go home.” You’d say, Give me a break.

… but that office assistant wiles her life away hopelessly in love with the doctor.

Her First Detox introduces Berlin’s alcoholism and there is no shadow of doubt she knows its hopelessness and shame, again with that matter-of-fact realism. In Tiger Bites narrator goes to Mexico for an abortion but decides against it and watches a very young girl in the clinic hemorrhage and nearly die. Her rich young relative treats the whole thing as just another 24 hours and back to partying.

I’ve worked in hospitals for years now and if there is one thing I’ve learned it’s that the sicker the patients are the less noise they make. That’s why I ignore the patient intercom

says a middle-aged hospital unit clerk. But the eyes of an elderly patient remind her of an old lover.

Unmanageable tracks the shame and desperation of an alcoholic single woman with teenage kids who know what’s going on with mum and are mundanely but unsuccessfully trying to protect her. In Dear Conchi a young girl corresponding with one of her friends at first feels out of place in university but eventually drifts into the bohemian life, enjoys literature and does some writing, is interested in various men but falls in love with a Mexican guy her parents strongly disapprove of. They all meet when the parents come to visit and she tells the Mexican who wants to get married that she isn’t ready yet. He angrily breaks off their relationship and tells her, “You won’t know for a long time what it is you’re throwing away.” and then “No, you’ll go on, have “relationships”, marry some asshole.”

Silence is a long story about a young girl who never seems to fit in in schools and continually gets in trouble. She makes a good friend of a Syrian girl next door, they steal things from stores and develop a small business but are taken advantage of by an older boy. His cheating them, once revealed, prompts the girls to agree that he’s an unconscionable bastard. But later the boy (who in spite of his dishonesty attracted both of the girls) convinces the narrator to let him drive her home in a fancy car, her friend sees them, and never speaks to her again.

There are too many stories to precis and comment on. I remember finding another long story collection by one of my favourite authors Vladimir Nabokov too much to finish and a few of the stories frankly not worth reading. But Berlin’s collection held my interest partly by continually shifting the gears of content without ever losing her stark transparency. At each beginning it feels like something is going to happen and usually it does.

This broad collection shows almost incompatible sides of this unique female writer’s impressive imagination. I hope you enjoy it enough to agree with my high recommendation.

9.5/9.1.