Of course your house cleaner steals things, she says, but never what you’d expect. The protagonist has a lot to say, on micro and macro levels, about her job.
One young narrator asks: “Were we a nice family? I didn’t know.” Berlin’s stories, reminding me of something Kingsley Amis said: “The rewards for being sane may not be very many, but knowing what’s funny is one of them.” What if Christ had been electrocuted? Instead of crosses on chains, everybody’d be running around wearing chairs around their necks.”Ĭomplicated humanity mixes with sanity in Ms. Berlin is funny I mean that her sentences, when she wants them to be, are toast instead of mere warm bread.Ĭasual observations pass by your mental window, and you back up to gawk further: “Our mother wondered what chairs would look like if our knees bent the other way. Yet deep shafts of sunlight penetrate this work.
You can wallow in these stories, in the way that you can in a perfect Gillian Welch song. The trajectories are downward white-collar existences have gone blue clear minds are sunk in unclear circumstances. We’ve purchased a ticket for Raymond Carver territory here. One speaks for many when she looks at her emerging age spots and thinks, “I could see children and men and gardens in my hands.” 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. There’s a radical kind of transparency to her work. Berlin’s careworn, haunted, messily alluring and yet casually droll stories. Berlin, I often found myself penciling curses of appreciation in the margins.) It stands out because it says a good deal about Ms. This passage stands out not because it’s particularly good, though it is. God damn! Look at that old semen go! Diets would improve.” The implications for selfies are magical and horrible to contemplate. Joggers would jog even harder, blood pumping away. This leads her to think: “What if our bodies were transparent, like a washing machine window? How wondrous to watch ourselves. People are fascinated by them, she comments. There’s a fine crude moment in “A Manual for Cleaning Women,” an overdue collection of stories by Lucia Berlin (1936-2004), when one of her narrators, a nurse, pauses to consider the nature of clear colostomy bags.
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