Book review: A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories by Lucia Berlin

Lucia Berlin’s short stories, the best of which seem to draw on personal experiences, are astute observations from the sidelines.

There are so many widows, divorcees, single mothers, as though her – mostly female – narrators can tell their stories only when unencumbered by men, reflecting Berlin’s own life.

“Fear, poverty, alcoholism, loneliness are terminal illnesses. Emergencies in fact.” These are the subjects of Lucia Berlin’s newly collected short stories.

Set in a restless, borderland America at the crossroads of race and class, no one – from the diplomat’s daughters to the street-corner alcoholics – is quite sure where they stand in relation to one another. The stories take place in public, often in institutions, whether it’s at a school, or a laundromat, a hospital, a hotel or a rehab centre. They are stories about care and carelessness, but many of Berlin’s narrators remain lonely, disconnected.

There are so many widows, divorcees, single mothers, as though her – mostly female – narrators can tell their stories only when unencumbered by men, reflecting Berlin’s own life, which was shaped by the fallout from her relationships. Married three times, Berlin, who died in 2004, was the muse, the homemaker and the caretaker to male musicians and artists who perhaps never realised how much she was also a writer. Berlin eventually raised her four sons alone, working a variety of low-paying jobs before she was offered a teaching post at the University of Colorado in 1994. Her stories cast an unflinching eye on sidelined experience.

Perhaps the knowledge of their marginalisation accounts for her narrators' shyness. "Why do I hesitate to tell you this?" asks one. Who is she addressing? Berlin's reader is often the receiver of some kind of confession (some stories draw directly on Berlin's convent-school upbringing). But can we trust her to tell it all? "Now I have a really nice voice. I'm a strong woman, mean even, but everyone thinks I'm really gentle because of my voice," says the heroine of B F And Me. "Well," sighs another of her narrators, "I'm not going to talk any more."

Berlin’s stories are full of signs. Road signs and street signs, often unreadable, or impossible to understand – “all the letters have fallen from the sign NATIONAL PRODUCTS BY THE BLIND except for BLIND” is typical – as though words are an untrustworthy method of conveying experience.

There are two Berlins and they are almost always both present: one is the faithful conveyor of the textures of everyday life – "Snap snap of dealt cards, Mr Wacher's hmms. Two no trump. The sizzle of the surf, ice cubes in their glasses"– the other is alive to its ever-present absurdities, which sometimes rise entirely to the surface becoming surreal and exuberant, as in Tiger Bites. Here the events that occur as disasters in Berlin's other stories – unplanned pregnancy, alcoholism, financial failure, family estrangement – are swept aside by the "white trash" (Berlin's words) exhilaration of Bella Lynn's family Christmas.

Even here, there's ambiguity: "They were all dressed up, like for a funeral or a wedding, but they still looked like a bunch of sharecroppers." And the Tiger Bites of the title refers to the hard cheerfulness of cash: "I used to think if a big old tiger bit off my hand and I went running up to my mother she'd just slap some money on the stump. Or make a joke …".

Berlin’s characters will live or die for a joke, quipping their way through even her toughest scenarios. Dr H A Moynihan extracts all his own teeth, preferring a beautiful new false set made to his own specifications, along with their very own visual pun: “He had changed only one tooth, one in front that he had put a gold cap on. That’s what makes it art, he said.”

The gold cap is occasionally too evident: a few of the stories end pat, with a sudden reversal or revelation; a few, such as Grief, involve complicated devices that do little more than point out their artfulness (this story of two bereaved sisters is narrated via the observations of two older, married couples – a slightly intrusive frame that is abandoned halfway through). The best stories – such as H A Moynihan's new teeth – give the illusion of being closest to Berlin's own life, which she lived on both sides of addiction and poverty, as an alcoholic, as well as a nurse, as a privileged teenager, as a schoolteacher, and as the eponymous cleaning lady. Berlin's stories may not be straightforward reportage but, to quote one of her sons as Lydia Davis does in her foreword, they are "close enough for horseshoes."

At her best, Berlin is an unflinching teller of unpalatable truths: a medic who will tell you the truth in plain words, missing neither the joy nor the pain, and who will not look away.

This book is available on Amazon.

Joanna Walsh is the author of Vertigo which is out this month. She edits fiction at 3:AM magazine and runs @read_women.