Fifty Books Project 2023

A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin

I mean if I just presented to you this woman I’m writing about now …

“I’m a single woman in her late fifties.  I work in a doctor’s office.  I ride home on 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 my story opens with “Every Saturday, after the laundromat and the grocery store, she bought the Sunday Chronicle.” You’ll listen to all the compulsive, obsessive boring little details of this woman’s, Henrietta’s, life only because it is written in the third person.  You’ll feel, hell if the narrator thinks there is something in this dreary creature worth writing about there must be.

I came across Lucia Berlin’s name just recently – a reference somewhere to her as a master of the short story in the vein of Raymond Carver – and I took note because I had not heard of her.  A Manual for Cleaning Women is a Selected Stories volume published some 11 years after she died.  It was pushed by various writers who knew her, including Lydia Davis, and it gave her the fame she had not achieved while alive.

The stories in it are wonderful – wry, dark, funny, and sad.  The comparison to Carver is apt – these stories generally deal with working class people who are struggling in small working towns, generally here in the south west.  They are openly autobiographical – in one a girl named Lucia is the child of a mining engineer, as was the author.  They tell of the struggles of raising children alone, of alcoholism, of the indignity of much work available to women.

The prose is simultaneously straightforward and experimental.   Berlin is wonderfully and efficiently descriptive – setting up a room or a character in clear decisive sentences with recognizable adjectives and the kind of small, ordinary words that would make Hemingway proud.  However, some of these stories are unusually structured.  The title story is a series of brief descriptions of women and households the narrator cleans for, laid out in such a way that we get to know the strength and weariness of the cleaning lady herself.   The story “Point of View” alternates between narrating the life of Henrietta and the narrator’s musings about how best to convey Henrietta’s life, with surprising turns as the narrator critiques her progress harshly.

Many of the stories are quite short and that brevity itself seems to become an experiment.  A world is created, a character’s conflict introduced, and then the whole thing is slammed shut, often in less than 1000 words.  While some of these very short stories still manage to come to a conventional conclusion, with the usual irony or sense of resolution, others seem to just stop, in some cases going out of their way to stop.  The reader is left slightly spinning, thinking carefully about the closing image, but not fully sure what has just ended.

While some of these struck me as more “slice of life” portraits than full blown narratives, I ended up enjoying these short pieces the most.  I wonder if they would be as successful at conveying an entire life if not embedded in a book.   In some cases I got a fuller portrait of the main character partially because I had been reading about someone just like her in a dozen other stories – these short snapshots become episodes in the life of a single character who finds and loses love, struggles with raising children (and maintaining relationships with adult children), works difficult jobs, drinks too much and spends a lot of time in laundromats.  The character becomes real as the stories pile up, the world is delivered to us with the urgency and detail of the real.  Some of the more abrupt endings require further thought, but mostly because I am convinced I am in the hands of a master.